Rainforest Panacea: Natural Cures and Indigenous Knowledge in Film from Medicine Man to Embrace of the Serpent

• In Event: Adventurous Nature: Environmental Heroes and Villains on Screen

Abstract

For over a century, film heroes have fought their way through tangled vines of tropical forests (both real and reconstructed) in formulaic jungle adventures. When action-film director John McTiernan released Medicine Man (1992), audiences expected such familiarity but were greeted instead with an anti-hero failing on several fronts, nature that healed more than it harmed, and an indigenous shaman whose botanical knowledge surpassed that of scientists. In the background, bulldozers crept towards the village, allying scientific researchers and indigenous people against a logging company’s deforestation that threatened not only the lives of villagers but those around the world who could be cured by the cancer-eradicating plant they sought. At its premiere, Medicine Man raised funds for conservation organizations, connecting the film’s moral with real-world initiatives to save the rainforest. The film’s fictional search for panaceas promoted a value in the extraction of certain resources while vilifying others. It also created a web of complex characters whose intentions, decisions, and morals are uncertain and unpredictable. Similarly, in Ciro Guerra’s 2015 release, Embrace of the Serpent, he cast a scientist-indigenous alliance against the encroaching rubber boom contrasting the intentions of those who wish to remove resources for healing versus those doing so for profit. Guerra’s film focused on an indigenous shaman, reframing cinematic tropes of tropical forests from the inside out, collaborating with tribes to tell truths about their experiences (though the tribe used is fictional). Within the context of the globalized environmental movement, this essay argues that while these films assert pro-conservation and anti-extraction messages, the very value they place in the forest – the curative properties of its vegetation – could also lead to extraction and exploitation.

Author

• Kelly Enright, Flagler College