Epidemic
Directed by Lars von Trier
1987
In Kierkegaardian style, this film twists narrative voices and meshes ‘reality’ with ‘fiction’ so smoothly that its audience is played against itself. What is real? Where does the writer’s voice start and end? How much can we trust the filmmaker? It plays with the genre of a ‘film within a film’ only upon its ending we are left wondering “how much of this is a film about a film in a film? Or is it a film which is pretending to be a film in a film?” Exactly what kind of film experience one is having is never quite clear. Even at the end the rug isn’t exactly pulled out from under us as it is only given a hard tugging.
The film centers on the two real writers, von Trier and Niels Versel. It comes across as a “behind the scenes” documentary about the making of another project, The Cop and the Whore, but a computer failure dumps the completed script. So the two writers begin a mission to come up with a new script with only days available. Their new project is Epidemic, which will be about the plague of 1348. As a tongue in cheek choice, von Trier has emblazoned the title Epidemic in the upper left hand corner of the whole film. Despite the confusion he is intending, he is assuring us of a coherency.
Like in Carl Dreyer’s Day of Wrath where a belief or faith judgment’s veracity is not of importance, so too here is the theme of belief having weight. In terms of the coming plague, it is said that real or imagined it is a threat. The panic and madness sweeping before it is deadly enough. The mere suspicion of its coming can spark a city’s mortal despair. This is similar to Kierkegaard’s all encompassing ‘despair’. By his appraisal of our existence, we cannot escape its grip. Through his near paranoiac evaluation of our human situation, we are led a type of despair, not necessarily because of any truth Kierkegaard is unveiling to us, but because of the shadow it casts in its consideration.
Epidemic is a film of decay and ‘sickness unto death’. When von Trier and Versel enter a damp library’s basement they learn that the ‘walls are rotting’ because of saltpeter leeching in though the ground. It cracks and snaps the walls like its own plague. A friend visits the two for dinner and is an accomplished wine taster. He discusses the formidable varieties of vine rot which have plagued France’s wineries. When they travel through Germany, Versel states that the large swathes of industrialized land in Germany such as Essen are “splotches on the map” like boils on the face of the earth.
There is a greater rot and plague upon the earth: ourselves. It is said that in the plague of 1348, Milan bricked in the first affected families and let them starve to death in their own homes rather than allow the chance of the infection spreading. The story is told in Essen of the allied bombing which used the now illegal phosphorus bombs-banned because of their horrific torturous effects on flesh. There, a man describes how his dying mother finally relayed to him the horror of this bombing on her death bed. It is her last confession of the darkness in the hearts of men. “My mother was no Nazi” the man says looking over a lake where Essen came to hide from the burning effects of the bombing. “These were just innocent people.”
Of a lesser type of human cruelty, the co-writer Versel exposes a pen-pal correspondence he began with teenaged American girls. He convinced them he too was a teenager, though he was in his late twenties, and maintained a ‘relationship’ with dozens of adoring girls. Like a true seducer, he displays the trophies of his victory, audio tapes, pictures, and letters, all from young women that he had no intention of ever meeting or revealing the truth to. Whether the petty crimes of our selfish attention grabbing egos or the needless bombing of civilians ‘in a just cause’, our world pulses with a plague of despair born from our own darkness, fear, hatred, and dread.
