If the soul and the ego were objects we could look at, the soul would be a translucent heart beating.
—
George Condo
Lars Von Trier: The Kingdom II by Maria Mackinney
Part of the Editor's Choice series.
- Stellan Skarsgård by Larry Gross
- Aharon Appelfeld by Thomas Thornton
- Eric Kraft by Frederic Tuten
- Richard Powers by Sven Birkerts
- Jesús “Chucho” Valdés by Zoë Anglesey
- Lou Reed by Tim Nye
- Tracey Moffatt by Coco Fusco
- Maurice Berger and Patricia Williams
Interviews
- Amy Adler by Linda Yablonsky
- Charles Hagen by Ann Lauterbach
Artists on Artists
- Two Poems by Brent Hendricks
- Ghost Writing by Charlie Smith
- Two Poems by Cynthia Atkins
- Two Flowers: An Inca Tale by Gabriella De Ferrari
- Days and Nights in Manila by Luis Francia
- ’70s Slight Return from Pink Instrument by Max Blagg & Ralph Gibson
- The Bear by Rick Bass
- Wes Mills
- Yayoi Kusama by Mimi Thompson
First Proof
- Inka Essenhigh by Grady T. Turner
- Ravi Coltrane’s Moving Pictures by Zoë Anglesey
- Stewart Wallace & Michael Korie’s Harvey Milk by Bruce Bauman
- Rolf Belgum’s Driver 23 at New York Underground Film Festival by David Schulz
- Lars Von Trier: The Kingdom II by Maria Mackinney
- John Lurie: Fishing with John by Glenn O'Brien
- Danny Hoch’s Jails, Hospitals, and Hip Hop by Mark Magill
- Vincent Gallo’s Buffalo 66 by Bette Gordon
- Pierre Clastres’s The Chronicles of the Guayaki Indians, translated by Paul Auster by Calvin Reid
- Sara Chin’s Below the Line by Lawrence Chua
- Melanie Rae Thon: First, Body by Suzan Sheman
- Nuruddin Farah’s Secrets by Rone Shavers
- Glenn O’Brien’s Soapbox, essays, diatribes, homilies and screeds by Betsy Sussler
- Rubem Fonseca’s Vast Emotions and Imperfect Thoughts translated by Clifford Landers by Minna Proctor
Editor's Choice
- Éduoard Glissant’s The Last of the African Kings and Maryse Condé’s Poetics of Relation by Caryl Phillips
- The Yale Younger Poets Anthology: Open to Any American Writer Under Forty by Thomas Bolt
- Joan Murray by Thomas Bolt
- Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence by Jenifer Berman
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Kirsten Rolffes as Mrs. Drusse in Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom II.
I drew my first breath at the Kingdom Hospital in Copenhagen. Many years later, my dear 94-year-old great-grandmother drew her last within those same walls, and that same year I spent my 22nd birthday there after my boyfriend had tried to open my inaugural oyster with scissors. Life, death, love, and strange accidents are what make the walls of the Kingdom Hospital tremble both in life and in four new, spooky episodes of the serial The Kingdom by Lars von Trier (Breaking the Waves, Zentropa).
Essentially a good old-fashioned ghost story, The Kingdom II, is as idiosyncratic as it is mundane, and even more unclassifiable than the first four episodes from 1994. Lars von Trier turns Denmark’s bastion of science, the Kingdom Hospital, into a massive haunted house where a fierce battle between science and the occult conjures up a gory, grotesque, and downright silly high-tech soap opera pastiche. In his exploration of the dark side of humans, von Trier combines the supernatural with everyday triviality to create an intricate tapestry of satanic cults, doctor masonry, malpractice victims, deformed demon offspring, and a misplaced head. All of this, according to the Swedish neurosurgeon Stig G. Helmer (Ernst-Hugo Järegård), is to be blamed on that “fecal hell of a country” and its “Danish scum.” But others know better: the two dishwashers with Down’s syndrome functioning as a Greek choir, and the nosy patient, Mrs. Drusse (Kirsten Roiffes), the hospital’s very own Miss Marple.
Ernst-Hugo Jägåerd as Stig G. Helmer in Lars Von Trier’s The Kingdom II. Courtesy October Films.
Lars von Trier delivers a 279 minute tour de force of metaphysical horror and social satire, juggling at least ten parallel plots without losing his balance. This visual and narrative frenzy will come to an end—filming resumes this summer—making a haunting 13 in all. To be continued …
—Maria Mackinney
Related
A satirical novel about a craven millennial politician and a taxidermist in search of souls.
On visual art as a tool to write about narrative, creating different kinds of time, and juggling complicated realities.
Originally published in
BOMB 64,
Summer 1998
Featuring interviews with Tracey Moffatt, Aharon Appelfeld, Eric Kraft, Maurice Berger, Patricia Williams, Richard Powers, Stellan Skarsgard, Jesus “Chucho” Valdes, and Lou Reed.
