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  • “Where She Comes From”: Mindreading in Levring’s The King is Alive
  • N.R. Helms (bio)

Kristian Levring’s 2000 film The King is Alive actively frustrates the modern demand for psychologized back stories, instead offering a contextual, social concept of character. Yes, character can be understood as the end-product of an autobiographical self, but such a character does not need to be constructed through lengthy backstory: it can emerge from the social context of the present moment. By close reading Levring’s film through the lens of cognitive theory, I will offer an empathic model of character that challenges the historical and theoretical models of identity popular in literary studies today. Empathy can become a tool of criticism, an imaginative performance of emotion that fleshes out character.

Today, critics typically analyze dramatic characters by applying social and historical theory. One understands King Lear through an analysis of kingship, primogeniture, father-daughter dynamics, dementia: a thorough grasp of his character is the sum of the social and historical factors that compose his identity. Alternatively, the critic can approach characters through empathy. Empathy is not a feeling, per se. It is a way of feeling, a method of exercising one’s emotions critically and imaginatively. The empathic critic does not necessarily feel for characters (though empathy is the precondition for sympathy). Instead, the empathic critic feels as if he is the characters that he studies, adopting their perspectives and—by playing upon his own emotions, the strings of that instrument we call the human—inhabiting their worlds. In this framework, Levring’s The King is Alive becomes an experiment in empathy: one can approach these characters of the desert, devoid as they are of all but the vestiges of a larger historical or social context, only through a close attention to their immediate interactions, imaginatively dwelling in their present circumstances by proxying one’s emotions for theirs.

While The King is Alive is a vigorous film by any standard, its true strength is its intimate connection to Shakespeare’s King Lear. Levring’s film is not an adaptation of the play: there is no easy one-to-one correspondence between characters or plot, and even when Shakespeare’s language is used, it is fragmented, de-contextualized, and almost always misunderstood by [End Page 289] the stranded travelers who use it. Yet the film does duplicate the tone and themes of the play quite precisely. As Henry (David Bradley) notes, “It’s good old Lear again. Perfect.”

Filmed on location in the Namibian Desert, The King is Alive follows a group of travelers who find themselves stranded after their bus driver, Moses (Vusi Kunene), accidentally takes them several hundred miles off course. As the fourth of the Dogme 95 films, Levring’s production follows rules of filmic chastity, including a vow to include only strictly diegetic props, lighting, and music. Stylistically, the film is as bleak as the hopes of the travelers, who must contest with blindingly bright days, empty nights, and a howling desert wind. The audience is given little indication where each traveler has come from (in terms of locale or of character) or where they are going. There is only the desert, the necessary eye of the camera, and the sheer fact of survival. Henry deems it “some fantastic strip-tease act of basic human needs.”

After Jack (Miles Anderson)—the only desert-savvy person on the bus—walks off into the desert seeking help, the empty days pile up, and the travelers are left with only boredom, booze, and a rusted supply of canned carrots. Onto their chaotic desperation, Henry imposes an artistic order: a production of King Lear using a script imperfectly recalled from memory and an untrained cast, his fellow travelers. As the travelers begin to rehearse the play, their own lives and relationships are strangely warped by the characters they perform. Liz (Janet McTeer), cast as Goneril, pursues an affair with Moses, who plays Edmund, in order to anger her husband, Ray (Bruce Davison). Paul (Chris Walker) plays Edgar to his father Charles’ Gloucester (David Calder), and Gina (Jennifer Jason Leigh) looks to Henry as a father figure after she is cast as Cordelia...

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