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... In other words, The Kingdom, Lars von Triers four hour miniseries depicting the bizarre occurrences at a Danish hospital’
(Michael Tice, http://www. ... org/enigmata/v10no1/kingdom. ... Now it has become The Kingdom, a futuristic model of Danish health care. ...
Lars Von Trier’s The Kingdom was first broadcasted on Danish Television in December 1994. The drama serial received attention because of its new conventions regarding genres, cast, multi-narrative and the conflict between science and history, to mention some. ...
The main aim with this essay is to examine the traditional conventions of the hospital drama and then further compare these to Lars Von Triers’ The Kingdom. Introducing theories like Freud’s psychoanalysis, Barthes on semiotics, some theories on post-modern drama and the history of the hospital drama in general, is a necessity in discussions regarding The Kingdom, since the drama is grasping a vast selection of different issues, characters, genres and narratives.
It is pointless to mention all the hospital dramas broadcasted throughout the decades since there are so many of them, as one critic put it in the 1990s:
‘At the moment there are so many medical series being aired that if you watch a cleverly planned selection, you will soon be able to conduct your own operations’ (Creeber, 2001, pp. ...
Perhaps this was one of the reasons that inspired Lars Von Trier to create a hospital drama totally different from anything seen before, and indeed being introduced to The Kingdom’s large cast of characters, it does not take long to understand the corruption, the ample erotic intrigue and the lunatic secret fraternity the doctors take part in. To exemplify, one of the characters runs a black-market operation out of the hospital basement, another tries to further his career by inducing the family of a dying man into allowing him to dissect the man’s diseased liver. The hospital’s inane director leads staff meetings in song, even as his medical-student son attempts to impress a sultry nurse by leaving a decapitated head at her station.
In hospital series like ER, it may on the one hand be possible to pick up medical advices, but with The Kingdom, it would however be disastrous to do so. ...
Even though The Kingdom was released a year earlier, there are still traces to be found in the hospital serial of the laws and conventions of the DOGMA ’95, ‘Wow of Chastity’, that Lars Von Trier must have been familiar with.
Approximate Word count = 1998
Approximate Pages = 8
(250 words per page double spaced)
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