ARTvonTRIER
Author: Malou Lykke Solfjeld
Co-Author: Christian Kortegaard Madsen

“To simply say what we learn in the midst of plague: there are more things to admire in men than to
despise”(2

The quote is announced by the narrator in Albert Camus’ novel The Plague from 1947. A town is hit by plague. At first, thousands of rats are found dead in the streets and as the gruesome disease spreads in the human population, the town is sealed off. After several months of isolation, compassion and madness, the town finally re-opens and people reunite with their loved ones from other cities. Though much is recognizable in Niels Vørsel and Lars von Trier’s meta-movie Epidemic from 1987, the approach of the latter is more of a sinister one.

Doctor Mesmer, the Good Samaritan, starring Lars von Trier himself is levitating over soft fields. His body is lifted just above the dynamic waves of the land under him, as he holds on to a wire connected to a white helicopter above. He has left the city to set out for the countryside where people are in great need of medical assistance. An epidemic is ravaging the lands. People are dying everywhere, and there is no cure.

The film, Epidemic, is made in 1987 – the years in which the modern world trembled/shuddered under the fear of AIDS – “the disease without cure”.
Mesmer is wearing a suit and his left hand holds onto a small suitcase with medical tools and medicine. He is the stereotypical “missionary man entering the wilderness” committed to solve a necessary, but impossible task. Following the vertical line of his right arm is the notorious red cross flag symbolizing protection and indicating his pure and self-sacrificing mission, while also ironically emphasizing the heroism of his deed, as it lifts above his body and flutters in the wind.

The painting Liberty Leading the People by the French revolutionary painter, Eugene Delacroix from 1830 shows a similar scenario, where Liberty is personified as a woman carrying in one arm a rifle and in the other arm the French flag, the flag of the people. Her breasts are exposed, and as she makes her way over piles of dead heroes, she looks back at the revolting mass as she encourages them to move forward. She is a mother figure, a symbol of the mother country and unlike the awkwardly limp, levitating body of Dr. Mesmer, Liberty is having her feet solidly planted on the blood- spattered grounds of the revolution.

Doctor Mesmer tries to help in places where he thinks help is needed the most, but he is also depicted as a hypocritical idealist motivated by his naive ambition to cure the world. He finally realises that he himself – as did the white western missionaries carrying along diseases, alcohol and drugs as they entered remotely located tribes/land – is the carrier of the virus, thus infecting the people he tries to save. This seems more than ever relevant today, not only in relation to the current COVID-19 pandemic causing the entire world to shut down for months during 2020, but also in relation to the many different attempts to “save the world”, through a broad variety of beliefs (from religion to financial models) that perhaps inherently holds the power of destruction.

2) Albert Camus: The Plague, 1947, translated to English in 1949 and published by Hamish Hamilton