Four or so months ago, I read in the Hollywood Reporter that South Korea had chosen the movie The Throne as its submission for the Oscar’s best Foreign Film of 2015. The summary greatly intrigued me because it focused on a tale I read a long time ago.

The Historical Prince Sado

The historical records are relatively slim. The basic gist is that Crown Prince Sado was the favored prince of a long-reigning Korean king. Much like the Roman Emperor Caligula, he apparently started out intelligent and charming, but over time displayed deviant and sadistic behaviors. It was said that he was mentally ill, causing him to go into psychotic benders where he would murder many of the palace’s staff. Eventually the King could not tolerate these behaviors and realized that Sado had to be removed. However, a King executing his own son would scandalize and potentially destabilize the deeply Confucian country - communal punishment is a common policy. The King decided on an unusual punishment - he had Sado put into a rice crate with the lid nailed shut. The box was then left outside. Over the span of 7 days, Sado died from exposure.

The historical records are rather slim - and do not go much into the details, but it allowed the movie much creative license as long as the main plot beats are met. The result is an amazing movie that touched me deeply. The movie took a lightly documented but infamous historical event and discovered a stunning tale about three generations of men. Such a story lets us see and feel for the living, breathing Crown Prince. But like a train on the tracks to its final destination, it is sad to know how this story will end before it even begins.

The story has a twisting time structure but it does not take long to figure out. It starts in media res with the sequence leading up to the major historical event - the Crown Prince, deeply troubled, emerges with a sword and marches into the King’s chambers - his father. How this is resolved it is not immediately shown, it cuts to the next morning in the palace Courtyard when the King orders the Crown Prince to commit suicide for the crime of attempting to murder the King. The Prince’s minders rush to his support and demand what is essentially a fair trial for the King’s attempted murder. The King waives these off and when it becomes clear that Sado will not commit suicide he is put into a large rice crate and left there in the palace courtyard.

Father and Son

It is then that Sado’s son - the movie refers to him as the Sason - begs for his grandfather’s mercy on the behalf of Sado. He gets on his knees crying, promising that “whatever [his] father cannot do, [he] can do”. If “[Sado] cannot read books then [he] will read books”. The significance of this was made clear later. But the King is unmoved and as he hammers in the first nails, the movie cuts to a flashback. This structure repeats many times over the movie, with each face being the transition that moves backwards or forwards in time like as if it were being recounted by the character in question.

Sado as a young child is mischievous but obviously talented. His love for his father and desire to please him is clear. The King is at first pleased with his son but as time goes by notices that the Crown Prince is increasingly uninterested in his studies. The Prince falls asleep during Confucian tests (which consist of reciting memorized passages from books) and does not do well.

As I was watching this, to me it seemed pretty clear that the Prince is a boy who doesn’t have a nose for books. He really wants to but he is more of an outside kind of kid. This creates tension between him and his father, who deeply believes in the adherence of Confucian principles when it comes to running the country. The King often proclaims that if the principles are violated then the country would collapse.

The Father and Son Clash

The generational tension between the father who is disappointed in his son’s progress and the struggling son who feels that he is not given a fair chance is very clear. The two have very different perspectives on what it takes to be successful in life - and we as the audience are made sympathetic to those perspectives. The King came to power under contested circumstances - his brother died suspiciously - and believed that his success as a King came only through his moral adherence to the Confucian laws. He never really wanted to be a King and years later is all too aware of just how difficult it is. The next King had to meet his own exacting standards, and Sado could not keep up. As Sado enters his late teens and early twenties, the King declares his abdication (something he would do at least twice in the movie) but is convinced otherwise. Instead a middle agreement is worked out - Sado makes the general decisions and the King takes a step back but is in charge. What follows is a stunning scene where a few administrative missteps (bad beginner’s luck I would say) from Sado leads to an angered disavowal from the King, who started the scene placid, eyes closed, and patting his son’s arm lovingly and ended up in a fury. The country’s future is at stake and the job is hard, it is easy to understand why the King would fly off the collar.

The King’s perspective is pretty good work by the movie but Sado’s is nothing short of stunning. The man makes a bad first impression in the movie, coming off as petulant, violent and slightly unstable - you kind of want to put him into the box. But in the movie’s flashbacks you see a man who deeply loves his father. I don’t think the movie ever portrays as him as being anything other than loyal to his father. He works unstintingly to earn his father’s approval and it says something about how good the actor is when you cannot sense a single iota of dishonesty in his deep prostrations before his father. When the King declares his will to abdicate the throne to Sado, the person most fervently asking for a nullification of the abdication is Sado. Sado does not appear to be very book smart, but his dedication is endearing. He stands prostrate before his father’s palace day and night, hoping that his father would change his mind.

When the demons must as dictated by history must appear (he murders a palace official and spends days on end locked up in his room) you feel sympathetic for his plight. Or at least I did. Looking back on my own upbringing, I never felt like I had the devotion to earn my own father’s approval - which makes me especially weak for people who so desperately wanted it. For myself, I felt like I had always had it - my father loved me unconditionally - but at the same time I did well at school and was book smart. Perhaps if my father had been a football coach and wanted me to be good at football or some other sport (for which I still have two left feet), I would have felt differently. Did not wanting this from him make me a worser son, an undeserving son who has had too easy?

The Point of Study

Something additional that I didn’t really see at the time as plainly until later but the movie made pointedly clear was the modern day criticism of Confucian principles as a way of education. Education is a big topic today and Korea (like other Asian countries) is famous for its brutally grinding, memory-based curriculum. Korean work culture is famous for literally working people to death doing tasks that really have no point. Education today is famous for teaching you things that you don’t really need to know today - things that a quick Google search can solve for you in seconds. The movie goes out of its way to take some very strong jabs at this.

It is the irony of ironies (dramatic irony at least) that the Sason - Sado’s son and the King’s grandson - turns out to be everything in a son that the King wanted. The Sason even at a young age (just 10 when his father is killed) is fantastic at memorizing passages and understands the Confucian classics better than Sado ever can.

But it is that understanding of the classics that leads to one of the most insightful passages in the movie. Midway through the movie, Sado is in one of his psychotic breaks and conducts a revered ritual for his biological mother. The problem is that this ritual is reserved only for the reigning Queen, of which his biological mother is not. He does the bows in front of his mother and turns to see the Sason. He demands his son to do the bow too. The Sason knows that this is illegal but after consideration does the bow. Later on, the King asks the Sason why. It was against the literal letter of the Confucian law. The Sason replies that he did the bow because he realized that it was not about the letter of the law, but the human intention behind it - that Sado loves his mother very much and sees her as deserving the honors of a reigning queen. The King is stunned.

The grandson who did the demanded work the best ironically enough knows just how pointless it all is. The Sason learned at 10 what I did not start to learn until I was 25. It is the words of the movie speaking at us, and it follows on what I believe in and what I felt like I learned way later than I should have.

Who Was The Better Father?

In a wonderful sequence, the King quizzes his grandson on Confucianism in a scene that mirrors an earlier one in which he does the same for Sado. Sado fails miserably - skipping a passage - but the Sason passes with flying colors. In the next cut, Sado is speaking with his son, firing arrows at a range. Sado is incredulous, asking if he “really does like reading all that much”. You can see how Sado feels left out - his own father and son are essentially the same people and he is out there unwanted. Yet at the same time, Sado cannot dislike his child the same way the King dislikes him. I loved this scene - just the puzzlement in Sado’s eyes mixed in with the envy for his own son mixed in with a hint of fatherly pride and love.

At the end of the movie, Sado is dead and the King is elderly. He sits with the grown up Sason (now known as King Jeongjo) and asks that Sado be forever forgotten. Such a memory only brings pain to the country. After the King’s death, the Sason becomes king himself and the first that comes to mind is his father locked in a crate, unable to respond to his desperate cries to come out. He immediately goes to pay his respects at his father’s grave, breaking his grandfather’s wishes.

Thinking about this scene still brings tears to my eyes. The King might have been a great, long-reigning King - Wikipedia still has a rather favorable opinion of him - but to me Sado for all his failings and mental illness turned out to be the better father. He was a better father to his son because he gave his son something that the King could not give him, love and acceptance.

As I type these words today, I am 28 years old - the same age at which my father had me. I don’t have children right now. Most of my friends presume that I won’t ever, but the truth is that I have never really thought about it. Sometimes I think about the sucky parts - being in a plane with one really helps bring that into focus. But sometimes a movie like this makes me think about the good parts.

For all his temper and impatience, my father is an amazing father to me - selflessly generous, unusually accepting (for a Chinese dad at least), and endlessly loving. He taught me to become successful, and then paradoxically at the same time taught me to give away my success to the people I care for. And as I begin my fourth decade on this planet, it is starting to bother me to think that I could possibly live the rest of them out without really being able to be all that for a child of my own.