(Note: The following entry only discusses the
first four-and-a-half-hour section of Lars von Trier's The Kingdom, a 1994 television
miniseries that was released theatrically in America. The second of a proposed
three sections was produced and released under the title The Kingdom II, but I've left it out,
partly to keep things concise, and partly because the concluding third was
never produced. Besides, for as many questions as The Kingdom leaves unanswered, it's
pretty damned satisfying as a standalone movie.)
Lars von Trier is known as many things—a
provocateur, a misanthrope, a moralist, a scold, a gimmick-meister. And based
on a body of work that includes Breaking The Waves, Dogville, Dancer In The Dark, Manderlay, The Idiots, and other controversial
films, he's certainly earned all those labels many times over. But I've always
seen him, first and foremost, as a prankster, the sort of kid who must have
spent his grade-school years planting buzzers on seats and hawking spitballs
from the back of the class. Often when you see him onscreen—like in the
closing credits of The Kingdom, or in his playful experimental documentary The
Five Obstructions—he's
got a sly grin on his face, like he's delighted to be the one pulling the
strings on some elaborate cosmic joke. He's a master manipulator, which is
central to why so many people resent him, but at times, even detractors should recognize
how skillfully von Trier can orchestrate a narrative.
The Kingdom is one of those times, mainly because von
Trier is having fun rather than servicing some high-toned polemic. That doesn't
mean he has nothing on his mind—quite the contrary, as I'll get to in a
bit—but the miniseries may be the most purely entertaining and frivolous
undertaking of his career, a delirious genre-jumping fusion of soap opera,
horror, and farce, with a dash of social commentary thrown in for good measure.
Owing debts to work as wide-ranging as David Lynch's Twin Peaks, La Cage Aux Folles, and the florid tradition
of daytime television, the series purées a seemingly incompatible mix of tones
into a cohesive, witty, persistently creepy whole. And like the Lynch series, it
significantly expanded the boundaries of what television could accomplish.
Shooting in the unadorned sepia-tone left over
from his 1984 noir Elements Of Crime, von Trier and his co-director, Morten Arnfred,
set up a direct conflict between the rational world of modern science and the
world of the supernatural. The prologue establishes "The Kingdom" as a
sprawling state-of-the-art hospital built on ancient marshlands, where bleachers
once toiled over cloth in a permanent steamy fog. Building the hospital on
these haunted grounds (shades of The Shining) arrogantly asserted that
"ignorance and superstition were never to shake the bastions of science again."
But alas, the gateway between the human world and the spirit world is opening,
and those snobs who deny the supernatural are the ones it's most likely to swallow.
To that end, the chief foil in The Kingdom is Dr. Stig Helmer (Ernst
Hugo Jaregard), a hilariously elitist Swedish neurosurgeon who has little but
contempt for the boobs and quacks who populate the Danish hospital from the top
down. Every morning, he pulls into the parking lot and pries the hubcaps off
his Volvo to keep them away from local teenagers. Once inside, he doesn't
suffer fools—in this case, all the insolent staffers, administrators, and
patients that aren't named Stig Helmer. Though he's having an affair with a
Danish nurse (whose passion for Haitian voodoo is a major turn-off), Helmer
despises virtually everyone who crosses his path. In a hospital run by
eccentrics at best and incompetents at worse, every minute hastens his descent
into crimson-faced madness. And when it gets really bad, he takes to the
rooftop:
A surgeon with no respect for his fellow
physicians, much less the whiny patients under his care, Helmer faces two
serious interrelated problems: His touchy-feely boss has instituted a policy
called "Operation Morning Air," which is designed to improve transparency and
communication in the hospital. (The campaign is promoted by stickers of the sun
giving the "thumbs-up" sign.) This is bad news for a guy who prefers to dictate
from his ivory tower, but it gets worse when Helmer is faced with a malpractice
suit over a botched operation that left a young girl in a vegetative state.
Taken out of context, the Helmer subplot could fit into any ER/House/St. Elsewhere hospital show, where
in-house politics, doctor-patient relationships, and personal melodrama is par
for the course.