Chapter Two: Riget II
By Brett Beach
October 28, 2010
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.
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