Lars von Trier you’ve got to love his “comments” at the end of each epi in kingdom…hilarious)
Bkgrd info:
“Lars Trier was born in Copenhagen, Denmark. He was raised by nudist communist parents. Trier notes that he was brought up in an atheist family, and that although his stepfather was Jewish, he was not religious. His parents did not allow much room in their household for “feelings, religion, or enjoyment,” and also refused to make any rules for their children, with complex results for von Trier’s personality and development. The young Lars found in cinema an outlet to the outside world through which he could learn about subjects otherwise forbidden from his study by his parents. He began making his own films at the age of 11 after receiving a Super-8 camera as a gift and continued to be involved in independent moviemaking throughout his high school years.”
the film maker
“Listening to him talk about his films, one senses that in school he developed a lifelong delight in breaking conventions and rules. He made the early films work despite (or because of) opaque story-lines, self-conscious voiceovers, and unusual manipulations of sound and image.”
the pornographer?
“Von Trier wasn’t indulging in pornography to turn people on — the basest but perhaps most honest motivation…”
The one we watched was the first part of the mini series:
Riget (1994)
“The Kingdom is the most technologically advanced hospital in Denmark, a gleaming bastion of medical science. A rash of uncanny occurrences, however, begins to weaken the staff’s faith in science–a phantom ambulance pulls in every night, but disappears; voices echo in the elevator shaft; and a pregnant doctor’s fetus seems to be developing much faster than is natural. At the goading of a spiritualist patient, some employees work to let supernatural forces rest. “
While watching what cross my mind was how it reflected pretty realistically – hospital politics, loved the parody of the elite superior mentality (the betheren of ‘brothers’ doctors), the strange lady who can “connect with the dead” (thought of the highly hilarious Supernatural and Ghost Whispherer ) but most importantly critquing the right of mankind messing with “human life” i guess…to do with ethics, morals again… what stood out for me was the two mentally challenged children in the basement doing the dishes
it has been known that much studies have been done to understand the DNA sequences of these children and sometimes they have this special ability unlike “normal” human beings and may be specially gifted in one certain aspect.
though they look different, sound different, behave different, they are at times even more aware of their surroundings then we are because they notice things that we overlook. i’m not quite sure why Von Trier chose to do so…what was his purpose… will try and find it out…
the camera work at times made me feel a bit oozy, but the general plot kept me wanting to know more…stayed to watch the 2nd epi and prob try to get the dvd series when possible
there is part two to the series:
Riget II (1997)
“It starts with the birth of “Little Brother”, the son of diabolical murderer Aage Kroeger and the nurse Judith. Doctor Helmer is back from Haiti with some poison and is set to turn Krogshoej into a zombie. Mrs. Drusse gets hit by the phantom taxi. The two dishwashers feel that the forces of Evil are about to wreak havoc on the hospital.”
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So now then what is our obession with medicine/biology/science?
Are we perhaps like Von Trier curious? wanting to push borders of the unknown or even forbidden? or even just our own morbid fascinations…
as put by the 2 great minds Deleuze and Guattari (3rd reading for the week)
“You never reach the BWO, you can’t reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit.”
“Scurrying like a vermin, groping like the blind, running like a lunatic, normad of the steppes, we sleep, we live our waking lives, fight-fight and are fought, seek our place, exprience untold happiness and fabulous defeats, we penetrate and are peneetated, on it we love.”
like per my last entry, because we do not know, we seek…
we try by understanding the human make up
from blood cells to nerves to neurons, transmiters, muscles etc
somehow maybe by knowing ourselves we can figure out WHAT causes us to behave the way we do,
understand our cognitive patterns
just yesterday after attending the Million Paws Walk with my friend who is now in her 4th year of med, we got ourselves a hearty KFC meal and went back to her place. her number of medical textbooks proudly displayed in her hall has grown. the sheer size and thickness of each book is just jaw dropping…anyway her recent purchase:
Classic Anthology of Anatomical Charts, 2 Volume Set
which i casually flipped through while we waited for the water to boil, each page meticulously (expensively) laminated, with colorful “life like” drawings and squished words, explaining from what cases migranes, reason for depression, stages of different type of cancers, more importantly CURES, OPERATIONS, MRI, CT scans and so on… reminded me of the 2nd article by Eugene Thacker and the whole visble human anatomy and who we “decode the body and read the body through the use of x-rays, in order to have a anatomical gaze…” interesting how he compared the body to creating a website…
i guess the Pathology branch of medicine 
is something that we see a lot in shows like CSI, Bones, ER, even in House. think it was a great punchline when one of the doctors in Riget, who wanted to obtain the right do a postmot on the patient who was technically still alive but dying soon, to retrieve the whole cancer mass, so as to be able to wrap up his 10 year research and could not obtain permission from the family, he turned to the berethen of doctors in the kingdom to in some way “help him for the greater good of medicine and IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE“
sure it is great with the medical advances that we have, larger number of lives can be saved but again like in my previous entries, it all starts to go wrong when it lands in the wrong hands and brought to extremes.
everyday we are trying to make sense of, discovering new thins, attempt to comfort ourselves, trying to find ways to extent life, solve illness that we cant see (think of previous week-infect) but it is all complicated with the selfishness of the human psyche…
mmm moving along…way of reading the various bodies that pop to mind was this:
-the schizo body : when some one first gets cancer
-the drugged body : when the person with cancer is on pills and in chemo
-the masochist body : the body fighting , the person’s suffering to battle cancer
“the BWO is what remains when you take everything away, what you take away is precisely the phantasy, and significances and subjectifications as a whole.”
“the BWO can no longer be populated by anything but intnsities of pain, pain waves”
the emotional aspect of dealing with life, our ranges of emotions from happiness, sadness, pain, conflicts etc are just as important even if “psychoanalysis does the opposite of bwo: translating everything into phantasises, it converts everything into phantasy, it retains the phantasy, it royally botches the real, because it botches the bwo.” because i feel it is necessary to a certain extent for us to stay sane…or deal with reality. (esp now with the tragedies happening, from the 5 car collision on lygon, to the quakes in china, to the weather in america causing devastation, to the on going wars…)
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everything above tends to sound a bit depressing/negative even but perhaps it is the effects of the furry 4 legged friends but as from D&G’s article, reading this bit:
“matter equals energy. production of the real as an intensive magnitude starting at zero. that is why we treat the BWO as the full egg before the extension of the organism and the organization of the organs, before the formation of strata; as the intense egg defined by axes and vectors, gradients and thresholds, by dynamic tendencies involving energy transformation and kinematic movements involving group displacement by migrations…”
what came to mind when reading this was LIFE…
when the fusion of sperm and egg occurs, to form the zygote
ie the egg before extension
extension being perhaps head body arms legs and internal organs to form the foetus,
dynamics including the mother’s womb, the fluids, the feeding tube etc
the fact that we are hopefully have the resilence to fight on, and at the end of the day pray for the best.
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to sum it up, our interest in the medical body (pathology) is the same as our interest in juicy celebrity gossip, our desire to belong (thus commodity culture or even commodity fetishism), we will always want to know more, push the lines and see how far we can go…human nature?
its a cycle that we feed…(just like capitalism) vicious maybe but thats just how it goes…
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