There are two ways of interpreting Sidney Lumet's Serpico. The first one, invariably the more mainstream one, would tell you that Frank Serpico is an honest policeman attempting to expose corruption within the New York Police Department. He is isolated, persecuted, and nearly executed for refusing to participate in a rotten system.
Snoozefest! Don't bore with your morality play. Corruption is one of mankind's oldest and wisest institutions. We discovered fire, invented the wheel, created art, and shortly thereafter handed berries to the caveman with the stick so he would look the other way. Civilization itself is built on corruption, and anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something.
So, the first interpretation is boring. Fortunately, another, less correct interpretation of the film exists. For this view to even become a possibility, one must spend endless nights misunderstanding Hermeticism, alchemy, Gnosticism. Only then, after paying your dues, the truth about the film becomes apparent.
And the truth is this: Serpico, c'est moi.
As the real Frank Serpico exposes corruption in the NYPD, I expose the Hermetic tradition beneath the story. You're right to think it: yes, we are both whistleblowers in our own way. I will focus on three particular moments that showcase the Hermetic nature of Serpico's character, and how I see myself reflected in them.
The first one comes when Serpico meets his neighbour Laurie. She commends him on his garden, and Serpico responds:
https://youtube.com/shorts/jUV9IUtH2Vk?si=QhUUgmUkBt3XC97Q
You know what they say, don't you? If you love a man's garden, you gotta love the man!
It's a strange line indeed, and the mystery only grows because of how Pacino delivers it. Both flirtatious and obscure, it perfectly mimics the panicking synapse misfire of a man who thinks his chance to get laid is walking away from him.
Yet when examined under proper hermeneutical conditions, its significance becomes obvious. The uninitiated viewer sees a crime drama where I see a film pullulating with Hermetic thought. A Corpus Serpicum of sorts. This line is an allusion to the hortus conclusus. Latin for "enclosed garden," this metaphor has been used countless times in esoteric and religious writing since millennia to discuss hidden knowledge. The garden as the enclosed mystery, as the cultivated soul, as the microcosm.
As always, Henri Laster explained it best in his seminal study The Green Mystery: Botanical Initiation for the Hermetic Green Thumb. The late Laster explains how the garden was first mentioned in this sense by the so-called Pseudo-Serpico of Halicarnassus. More than a nice arrangement of plants and flowers, the garden is a miniature cosmos cultivated in imitation of divine creation, or a symbolic reflection of higher realities.
As above, so below.
And there's also an invitation of a sexual nature. Why would Serpico demand that Laurie love the gardener before entering the garden? Show me yours, I'll show you mine. If you love the garden, you must love the gardener. That is, if you desire knowledge, you must love the one who possesses it. The relationship between teacher and student has always occupied a central role in esoteric traditions. Lysmander Wren explored this dynamic extensively in her controversial monograph Cum and the Corpus Hermeticum.
Again, as above, so below. The clear link between intellect and sexual pleasure. As the brain palpitates with ideas, so does blood flow down into the reproductive regions of the body. In the end, both swell and aspire to belch out in elation.
After Laurie has fallen in love with Serpico's garden, they open up to each other about their lives. Pacino delivers an immaculate little scene:
All my life I wanted to be a cop, you know. It's like I can remember nothing else. I remember this one time--there was, eh, somethin' happened. A domestic argument or somethin'. Somebody stabbed somebody or somethin'. And - there was this crowd around this tenement. I must have been nine, ten years old. I was this big. I went over to see what was going on. I noticed the red light--goin' around and around, all these people, and I couldn't see. And I kept saying, "Do you know what's goin' on? Do you know?" Nobody knew. It was like a big mystery behind that--that crowd there. All of a sudden, the crowd just parted. Like the Red Sea, you see? And there were these guys in blue, and I said, "They know." What do they know? What do they know?
Indeed, Mr. Serpico, what do they know?
All. The Tetragrammaton. The Faces of God. The Prima Materia. The Philosohper's Stone. The Nous. The Hieros Gamos. But who really knows what they know? One thing I do know, Serpico, is your pain.
All my life I wanted to know. Especially that which I shouldn't, that which is hidden. The one truth every follower of Hermes Trismegistus finds sooner or later is that the world is divided into those who know and those who don't know. And there is a rare third group, those in docta ignorantia. The ones who know they do not know. Serpico is here, and sometimes I am as well.
The entire film can be understood as a spiritual allegory in these lines. Serpico moves from precinct to precinct, forever convinced that the final revelation that will bring about justice and ultimate knowledge is just around the corner. Literally me.
Finally, I want to highlight a small exchange that happens early in the movie. Serpico's girlfriend invites him to a party full of artists. At one point, a man there says to him:
MAN: Leslie is a mindfucker.
SERPICO: You gotta be kidding. I didn't know that. What's a mindfucker?
MAN: Well, it's a chick who digs intellectual types and super bright guys.
This scene has absolutely nothing to do with Hermeticism. However, most of my sexual fantasies involve being propositioned not for my good looks or my boyish charm, but because of my intellect. "I wish I could have sex with your ideas" is not a phrase anyone has ever said to me, but I hope against hope to hear it one day.
Alas, my mind's not as sharp as it was. Years of reading, drinking, writing, and reading about writing have left me afflicted with a condition I describe as intellectile dysfunction. A whiskey dick of the mind, if you will, implies the inability to maintain sustained philosophical arousal.
If Sophia, divine wisdom herself, were to appear before me and ask me to mind-copulate, I would jump at the opportunity only to later meekly excuse myself, "Sorry, this has never happened to me before", knowing that it has indeed happened many times before. In that sense, Serpico, you have proven to be a better man.
AS ABOVE...
... SO BELOW
Esoteric gardeners, cops, critics, mindfuckers, and whistleblowers. Each and all haunted by the fact that someone out there knows something we can only ever glimpse at. What do they know?
Serpico is the microcosm. I am the macrocosm.
And Yet It Moves.
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