The Kingdom is another text in which Lars von Trier challenges conventions, not only of the cinematic form but also of the principles of institutions and cultural attitudes. The direct aesthetic of this television show is shared with von Trier’s film The Boss of It All (2006), set in an institutionalized environment and largely a comedy, like The Kingdom, although the comedy works to intensify criticism of conservative discourse. It also follows in the form of Dogville (2003) as von Trier explores the reaction of such a discourse to other realms (spiritual) and other bodies (cadavers, injured bodies, foriegn bodies). In Dogville, Nicole Kidman’s Grace, as a foreign body, is rejected by the townspeople because they do not want to co-exist with an outsider, they see their own perception of the world as the one and only allowed in their space. In The Kingdom, Mrs Drusse is not tolerated by the medical hospital because her spiritual beliefs represent outside of their scientific discourse on the body. There is far too much unknown in the realm of spirituality for such an institution where epistemological variation is not allowed.
Modern science, having progressively become techno-science – the product of the fatal confusion between the operational instrument and exploratory research – has slipped its philosophical moorings and lost its way
- Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb, 1.
The Kingdom tries to come to terms with human feelings associated with ‘the modern scientific gaze on the body’ (Thacker 1998). By highlighting the medical world’s preoccupation with the physiological and anatomical form of the human body, von Trier reveals the incongruence of such study with the emotional, feeling (and spiritual) aspects of human life, and death. Thacker writes, ‘what is at issue is the explicit recoding of the body of medical science and what will come to be culturally understood as a body more generally.’ What is the harm that such institutionalized thought brings to the body? The fascistic nature of this thought is signified through the two workers in the kitchen of the hospital, who have an innate sensibility as to what is going on in the hospital, spiritually and otherwise. As the working class characters of the television show, their beliefs are systematically opposed to those of the people (literally and figuratively) above them. The opposition/oppressors of the working class within the hospital are dictated by microfascistic politics. The workers in the kitchen, and Mrs. Drusse, can ‘see’, they possess a spiritual sensory perceptive ability by which they can detect individual need and see past the cultural and institutional regime.
So what does become of the body when it is put into an institution dictated by such thought? In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, creator Joss Whedon addresses this question with the death of Joyce, Buffy’s mother. In the episode ‘The Body’, Dawn sees Joyce’s deceased body in the morgue wing of the hospital. It’s not her, she’s gone, Buffy tells Dawn. Then, “Where’d she go?” In The Kingdom Lars von Trier tells us that ‘Ghosts are in the space in between.’ So, the body could be just a vessel for the soul. Perhaps it does not matter what happens to a body when it is deceased, because the human soul has departed for a new home already (which does not mean that doing anything to a body when it is merely under hypnosis is called for). Yet as that original vessel the body should not be under dictation of a cold and limited institution, because it is still important to those who are living. Like the son in The Kingdom who does not want his father’s body cut up for science, he still sees the body as a part of the person. In Buffy, Dawn’s strongest spiritual reaction to her mother’s death is when she sees/touches Joyce as cadaver. The body, although perhaps only a vessel for the human soul, is necessary.
The technobody, the ‘live-feed’ body, is a body that only takes shape, or becomes digital [sic] embodied, as it is encoded’ (Thacker 1998). ‘These reconfigurations of the body-technology interface forms an assemblage of new digital anatomies, where bodies are strategically and experimentally digitized, transmitted, and remotely displayed – here the hyper-texted body is not so much an archived database of images as it elaborates and extends a process of digital embodiment.’ What are the implications for this kind of body on humanity, then? This time, not a medically institutionalized body but a body without organs in the techno-realm. In the gaming world, human bodies can be virtually transferred to a screen and their virtual bodies can participate physically in a world, interacting with other virtual objects. Touch becomes unnecessary. Perhaps, soon, with the advancement of digital technologies we will no longer need to touch. Along with Antonin Artaud’s concerns that human bodies and organs will no longer be required for reproduction, perhaps they will no longer be needed for sex, for play, anything.
Because one must produce,
one must by all possible means of activity replace nature
wherever it can be replaced(Artaud, To Have Done With the Judgement of God)
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