Chapter Two: Riget II
By Brett Beach
October 28, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
For this week’s Halloween-ish column, I kick off the hullabaloo with an opening that’s part trick/part treat. I couldn’t decide between the two beginning sentences below and have opted to stick them both up top. This may make the body of my column a lot less quotable than it normally is, but that is a risk worth taking:
Opening sentence No. 1: The obvious question to ask, in hindsight, would be: why didn’t I simply call a cab on one of these occasions?
Opening sentence No. 2: You, as a devoted cinephiliac and proud Chapter Two reader, may believe you have seen everything, but if you have not yet allowed your ocular companions to feast upon the vision of Udo Kier’s head (full–sized) emerging from a vagina (regular-sized), as it does in the closing shot of the first Riget series, then friend, there are still more cinematic wonders on this earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Riget II, the 1997 continuation of Lars Von Trier’s 1994 limited-run (four episodes) series for Danish television, likely marks the end of the line for what was planned to be a three-part, 13 episode miniseries. Between 1998 and 2000, three actors - including two of the leads - passed away, all due to natural causes. This may strike some as an eerie omen, fitting for a show that cheekily and with deadpan gusto delved into such thorny topics as voodoo possession, demon seed, devil worshipping, and the relative intellectual merits of the Swedes vs. their Scandinavian neighbors, the Danes. And did so almost entirely within the confines of a hospital and the generic marker of a hospital show-cum-soap opera.
I came a little late to the party for The Kingdom (the English translation of Riget, which also inspired and informed Stephen King’s 2004 adaptation for American audiences). I had the chance to view the first four episodes when they played theaters here in the U.S as a “feature film” in 1995, but passed on spending 271 minutes in the theater when I was only familiar with Von Trier from his feature film Zentropa. (Breaking the Waves had not yet come out at this time.)
So it wasn’t until the summer of 1996, when I balanced viewings of the Summer Olympics with first-time screenings of Alien and Nashville, among others, that I plunged into Von Trier’s vision of hell, smack dab in the midst of what is supposed to be the pinnacle of technological, bureaucratic and medical efficiency. Spooked and incredulous in equal measures, I was also hooked by the insane cliffhanger of the fourth episode and attempted to calm myself with the knowledge that - supposedly - a second installment was on its way.
The beginning credit sequences of the episodes of both series are the same and fairly encapsulate both what is appealing and novel about the series and why, in my final analysis, I think Riget and Riget II remain faintly overrated (The complete series placed 49th in the original BOP list of the 50 Best Horror Films of All Time.) As Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide succinctly observes “The unusual look of the film (a brownish dirty-looking print texture) was achieved by shooting on 16mm, transferring to video, editing on video, transferring back to 16mm and blowing up to 35mm.”
The first half of the opening credits is among the most stunning of any randomly selected 60 to 90 seconds of footage in the entire ten-hour series. A deep, chilly voice (the perfectly named bass-baritone opera singer Ulrik Cold) provides the back history of the grounds on which Riget was built. One of the images accompanying this - an exquisite shot of water being wrung out of a sheet - is so tactile and visceral you may feel compelled to duck or attempt to wipe the condensation off your viewing screen. This atmospheric mini-film ends with the title etched on a piece of wood and an homage to a key image from The Shining. No explanation is ever given for how this ties in, if at all, to the supernatural events about to unfold. Perhaps the concluding episodes would have provided some answers. Perhaps not. Final analysis: Creepy, dreamy, and hypnotic.
Then the second half with the actors’ names kicks in. Driven by a pounding techno number apparently titled “The Seizure”, the footage, all pulled from random show episodes hits the eyes like the strobe lights at an Ibiza disco hot spot, and aims to induce just what the title says. Final analysis: Chaotic, jumbled, and flippant, but it’s got a beat and you can dance to it.
Riget and Riget II are, first and foremost, soap operas of the medical variety, with all of the plot intrigues, illicit romances, and arrogant professionals that this implies. Von Trier plays all of these moments utterly straight. One’s first inclination might be to label them as parodies or heavy-handed satires but I don’t think that’s the intent. By grounding his show in the ordinary “reality” of the clichés of medical dramas and soap opera romances, von Trier paradoxically allows himself to more easily veer off into a carefully focused, but no less potent, escalating insanity. The characters are no deeper than a brief character synopsis might suggest, with very little in the way of back story. They are also completely acted on by the plot, warm and compassionate when required, cold, clinical and/or zombified as needed.
I first saw Riget II on June 17, 1998 at Cinema 21. (Thanks to the wonders of online archiving, I was able to ascertain this with 100% degree of certainty - which is a lot more than I can say for my brain at this point.) It played for only four days (six screenings total.) All four episodes aired in sequence with a brief break halfway through. There were about 30 of us in the audience for the first evening show. It’s an honest assessment to say that the camaraderie created through setting aside the entirety of a weekend night to watch a television show in a theater added to the overall enjoyment of seeing Riget II. But the length of the show pointed up a dilemma I often found myself faced with during this era.
What started at seven ended at just past midnight, which left me about 20 minutes to run 12 blocks over and 16 blocks down - passing from NW to SW - to catch the 12:32 bus (the last one out of downtown) back over the river to the apartment complex I had just moved into with my girlfriend of 1 year. Without a car of my own, I did a lot of running to catch late buses in the mid-90s. After catching shows by the likes of Juliana Hatfield and Aimee Mann at the now defunct club La Luna (in SE) that might end at around or past midnight, I would make a beeline towards the river, sprint across the Burnside Bridge like a mad man, make my up to 5th Avenue and then veer left, sometimes coming in behind the bus, a minute or two before it pulled out.
So revisiting Riget II over a decade later, I found myself, much to my surprise, getting quite antsy (even in relation to watching Riget once again.) Did it not hold up without an enthusiastic (though small) audience and a keen sense of anticipation? It certainly isn’t due to a paucity of plot or grotesque imagery to keep one gorged on new sights. The gross anatomy instructor has (someone else’s) diseased liver inside of him instead of his own, all in the name of research and posterity. The already large baby-with-Udo Kier’s head continues to grow and grow and grow while von Trier makes much sudsy melodrama with the philosophical implications of a mother loving her child no matter what condition he might be in (or unconcerned that he comes out of the womb talking.) Having made peace that she was impregnated by a demon, it seems logical that a talking newborn might not throw her for a loop.
Elsewhere, cocky antagonistic Swedish doctor Stig Helmer (Ernst Hugo-Jaregard), scrambling to avoid a malpractice suit, takes to observing his bathroom constitutionals to see if he is expelling floaters (signs of good health) or sinkers (not so much). These are always shot from the point of view of the toilet with Helmer’s furrowed countenance and bulldog jowls glimpsed through rippling water.
So whereforth the antsiness? It might result from the unusual time frame of events on the series, which doesn’t strike me as unique to Riget/Riget II but seems to be endemic to soap operas in general. I have never had much interest in soap operas (of the daytime or nighttime variety) but my viewing does include about a year each of Guiding Light (’95-96) and All My Children (’00-’01). What I recall are events that take place within hours or perhaps a day being spaced out over several episodes or even weeks, to give a continual sense of cliffhangers in the making. And yet, it always seemed as if, simultaneously, time went on as normal. Observing that major holidays were always recognized on or around their proper days, even if there was very little lead-in for their arrival, supports this thought.
I haven’t worked my way entirely around that theory, but Riget II would appear to provide a worthy case study. It begins at what would seem mere hours after the end of the first season and works its way through seven or eight days at most, based on the cycles of day and night (there never appears to be much, if any, skipping ahead in or between episodes.) And yet, to use the dilemma and fate of Little Brother (Kier) as an example, time is accelerated yet seems to stretch itself out far past the point of all reason, to an eventual breaking point. There is never any slowing down but sometimes individual moments of an episode seem to drag on forever.
Von Trier counteracts this by bringing together concurrent plot strands in a comical frenzy of cross-cutting that makes the case that each mini-apocalypse on the show is going to deliver more of a big bang than the last one. There is chatter from the Greek chorus of Riget (a pair of highly omniscient dishwashers) about Christmas being the time when the final battle between opposing forces will be waged. I can only imagine if von Trier would have waged a literal Celebrity Deathmatch between the Son of God and the Prince of Darkness in the third installment. The final moments of Riget II spill forth in a rousing, rising crescendo that include a head-on car crash, a freight elevator taking the express track to hell, the disappearance of a brain-damaged adolescent within the very bowels of Riget, and a hospital-wide blackout all uniting to wash the audience away on a sea of calamity.
Von Trier himself appears during the closing credits of each episode with concluding observations that become steadily more cryptic and impenetrable with each passing hour. As the ringleader of this circus, he comes off as more affable and relaxed than his reputation might suggest. Then again, he also looks convincing throwing up devil’s horns with his fingers.
Epilogue: Proving that it does pay to stay through the credits, I discovered last night that there is nearly half a minute of footage at the end of the last episode that did not get played when I saw the film in the theater. And yet one more cliffhanger… If I have perhaps undersold the originality of the show and its ability to undermine the mundane with a creepiness and dread that roll in like the fog, it’s only because I really, really love the opening two minutes and it’s hard to accept that the show doesn’t entirely live up to that promise.
Next time: For 35 years we’ve all been doing the Time Warp (again), but for nearly three decades, you could also have been “Bitchin’ in the Kitchen” in Denton, USA. Have you? An unheralded Chapter Two get its due.