There’s something within you. If you truly desire something with your mind and body, there’s something within you that can make it happen.
– Trond
Mary Oliver’s poem ‘Starlings in Winter’ narrates an encounter with a starling murmuration that encourages the poet to overcome grief: “I feel my boots / trying to leave the ground, / I feel my heart / pumping hard”.1 For Oliver, the dazzling phenomenon of the starlings’ flight calls her back from the edge because their movements are beyond her comprehension (“and you watch / and you try / but you simply can’t imagine”). Rather than questioning the phenomenon, Oliver is seemingly content to remain in a state of wonderment, summarising the experience as if with a wistful sigh: “Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us”. When we first meet Thelma (Eili Harboe), the protagonist of Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s 2017 film of the same name, she too is transfixed by the presence of a wild animal. Accompanying her father Trond (Henrik Rafaelsen) on a hunting trip to a silent, snowy forest, six-year-old Thelma stands frozen on the spot, her gaze fixed on a deer in the trees ahead. She obediently waits for the sound of Trond’s gun to fire, unaware that his rifle’s sight is trained on the back of her head. We anticipate the shot, but it is the startled deer that breaks the tension as it recognises the danger and darts away. Thelma turns innocently back to her father, the magnitude of what nearly came to pass eluding her.
Skipping forward in time, we rejoin Thelma as she begins university to study biology. Gone is the sense of childlike wonderment, instead replaced with an appetite for scientific knowledge that we quickly understand to be at odds with her conservative Christian upbringing. By her own admission she is struggling to make friends, a confession she shares only with Trond in one of their scheduled daily phone calls – a rare social contact during days otherwise committed to study. It is on one of these days that we follow Thelma to the university library. Beyond the rows of silent heads bowed in study, a murder of crows swoops and dives through the air outside. The arrival of another student, Anja (Kaya Wilkins) in the adjacent seat shifts the tempo from calm scholarship to turbulent action, as Thelma begins to suffer from an uncontrollable shaking in her hands. Outside, the crows whirl and twist in increasingly frenetic patterns, ultimately culminating in a single bird separating from the flock only to thud into the window pane of the library – at which point Thelma loses control completely, drops to the floor and experiences a seizure. This, and further inexplicable episodes, provide the structure for a fraught queer bildungsroman. Thelma’s experience of natural phenomena could not be further from Oliver’s blissful ignorance, tethered as it is to a series of increasingly dark psychic episodes. Where Oliver is happy to set aside logic and reason in favour of a theatre of spectacle, Thelma spends the duration of Trier’s film seeking an explanation for her psychic abilities. Caught between childhood and the dawn of early adulthood, Thelma’s character is a vessel for Trier to grapple with grand ideas – of faith, religion, family, quantum physics and queer love. “I want / to think again of dangerous and noble things”, announces Oliver in the closing lines of her poem: here we find some common ground with Thelma.
Trier has described Thelma, a contemporary overhaul of folkloric themes, as committed to “possibilities of difference”.2 Not – as one would expect given the premise – a keenness to explore sexual diversity, but rather a comment on the canonised binaries of nature/culture, urban/rural and id/superego that remain steadfast in the Scandinavian imaginary. Guided by Douglas Kahn’s assertion that the growing realisation of a finite planet has debunked such myths of separation, you may be better served by treating Thelma not as a queer ‘coming out’ story, but a form of punk-ish deconstruction of how ‘nature’ is used in service of socialised and ideological norms. 3 In a film teeming with metaphor, from religious iconography to Freudian slippage, Thelma seems to skip over any de facto folklore of ‘coming out’, leaving us wondering whether it happened at all. These displays of metaphor must then be considered a proxy for queerness to ride in on, and it does so in turns, yet is often held back from blossoming beyond subtext. As a film which at least initially feels easy, it repeatedly finds ways of creating new layers, each time doing a little more work. What is unexpected about Thelma is its subtle introduction of quantum field theory to arouse epistemological trouble. This is not to suggest that Trier’s negation of a formative sexual encounter is by any means a gracious act, but that the film attempts to tussle with something juicier than human sex.
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Thelma has variously been described as “dreamy” and “sexy” with Thelma as its “superhero” – so which is it? Thelma undoubtedly undergoes a sexual awakening and Trier has spoken about not wanting to trap female sexuality in a bind that so often feels exploitative. Trier is checked by this charge – play modest or be admonished – and his cautiousness shows. The sighting of a female superhero/ine is no rarer than non-exploitative (or even, female-directed) accounts of lesbian sex on screen. It is not the first queer film to parry a sexual encounter by way of luscious cinematography, all hint of lasciviousness eclipsed by alabaster décor and immaculate film colourisation. In his essay ‘The Hypothetical Lesbian Heroine’, Chris Straayer contends that lesbian visibility is produced by going against the grain.4 Following this, the invocation of a female superhero figure makes a befitting surrogate for Thelma’s lesbian tryst. And although Thelma’s femme-ness appears to topple Straayer’s assertion that lesbian heroines are typically masculinised in order to subvert the gendered construction of heroic doing and acting, it is true that she uses her ‘powers’ to upend the patriarchal and heterosexual structures ordering her life.
You may be better served by treating Thelma not as a queer ‘coming out’ story, but a form of punk-ish deconstruction of how ‘nature’ is used in service of socialised and ideological norms
Thelma is beset by what are thought to be epileptic seizures that increase in their erotic candour as she becomes closer to Anja. Following an evening spent together, Thelma, in a desirous interlude between waking and sleeping, subconsciously wills Anja to appear outside her apartment. We are led to believe that Thelma makes Anja appear by desiring her: she arrives in a daze, unable to recall what spurred her visit. Sensing a connection between the seizures and her burgeoning relationship with Anja, Thelma is elusive when the campus doctor suggests contacting her long-term doctor to consult her medical records. It transpires that Trond, a doctor himself, has historically handled her medical care. Trier thus marshals medical, religious and patriarchal establishments as one, rendering them synonymous and transposable. Thelma’s life is overrun by the biopolitics of domination but her subjugation to this patrilineal order must soon give way. Meeting Anja prompts her to reconsider her prior convictions and the structures that bind Thelma to her family are slowly dismantled.
Thelma’s religious certitude is thrown into sharp relief by Anja’s blithe attitude toward her own absentee father. Socially adept and seemingly thriving, Anja is a mirror for Thelma’s deepest anxieties. While Anja is at ease with independence, Thelma’s life is defined by dutiful reports at the behest of her calmly controlling father and nervous, overbearing mother. Much of the film revolves around this dynamic, a closeness that creeps ever closer to discomfiture through moments such as Trond’s near filicide in the woods and the revelation that Thelma is blamed for her mother’s paraplegia and her infant brother’s death. Thelma and Anja’s growing attraction only strums the film’s ideological baseline harder. As they get closer Thelma’s life becomes more disturbed, her vexed conscience translating into forces of elemental change. Perturbations of natural phenomena, used so often in literature and cinema as a symbol for internal metamorphosis, signal the vicissitudes of Thelma’s psychic state.
Thelma’s psychosexual awakening is both exogenous and endogenous. As titillating as meteorology is for conjuring desirous feelings – where sparks must fly and fireworks explode – climatic conditions have also been studied as a potential risk factor for epileptic seizures. It is a coupling evoking Donna Haraway’s ‘naturecultures’ – a metaplasm which recognises phenomena as both biophysically and socially formed.5 The film moves us beyond the nature of sexuality, which is of course made more tense by the warp and weft of Thelma’s religious schooling. Crucially, what is at stake is not just a cross-formation of identity (faith, gender, sexuality): Thelma is an ambitious undertaking in radically undoing concepts of being and identity. More prosaic ciphers, from serpent temptation to the mysteries of aviary murmuration, are continually pushed to surpass themselves. Rather than falling back on simple allegories, Trier leaves the task of portraying Thelma’s renouncement of her faith to the performative materialism of quantum mechanics – a recurrent motif used to deconstruct the belief systems around which Thelma’s life revolved.
Crucially, what is at stake is not just a cross-formation of identity (faith, gender, sexuality): Thelma is an ambitious undertaking in radically undoing concepts of being and identity.
Crucially, Trier seems to push queerness beyond what Mel Y. Chen has called “the pure clash of human body sex”.6 His bringing together of quantum physics and lesbian desire is an ostensible first outing for queer cinema. In Meeting the Universe Halfway, Karen Barad proposes that we take the political repercussions of physicist Niels Bohr’s concept of ‘intra-action’ beyond the realm of quantum physics. ‘Intra-action’ as an empirical measure of phenomena emerges through specific material relations rather than an assumed fixed identity: it is founded on the notion that reality isn’t independent from our understanding, but ‘performs’ according to our view of it. 7 Where Barad uses quantum physics to further an understanding of feminist issues and practices, Trier uses it to challenge widely accepted cultural norms. Early on, Thelma is exposed to the notion of nature’s performativity in a lecture on the double-slit experiment. She is told that atoms may perform as waves or particles, depending on the apparatus used for observation. Not only is a lesson on science’s queer performativities a Trojan horse through which identity politics are carried in, it is also a relatively novel metaphor for thinking about desire: a desire that isn’t hardwired or forced, but that buds in the ‘intra-active’ contact between desiring bodies.
Thelma makes some adventurous leaps in its apprehension of queerness, yet it remains on frustratingly well-trodden ground when it comes to representing lesbian desire. At a concert, Anja strokes Thelma’s leg in the dark to cosmic effect, causing a suspended panel in the auditorium to tilt on its axis, whilst Thelma shudders in a state of breathy ecstasy. With little deviation from trope, we are left to build a queer female identification from amplified pleasure haptics. But for many this is not our pleasure, and it is worrying that we are no further from the rut of mystification. Other recent additions to the canon of queer cinema – Sebastián Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman (2017), Dee Rees’s Pariah (2011) and Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country (2017) to name a few – run laps around Thelma’s performance of intimacy. But not all of Thelma’s desires are libidinous, and one is left with the suspicion that Trier is more confident examining themes of divine judgement and familial collapse than he is exploring how Anja and Thelma’s desire might manifest on screen.
Thelma pieces together an understanding of her abilities mostly through private investigation. Trond’s method of filling in the gaps of a childhood she is unable to recall through false storytelling – a cruel strategy to reinstate patriarchal order – ultimately widens the schism between them as Thelma’s expanding comprehension betrays his culpability in connection to past traumas. After learning her diagnosis, Thelma scrolls through images of female subjects appearing to have psychogenic episodes. This is an under-examined history, despite the oft-misunderstood convulsive spells having haunted the western medical imaginary for centuries, and is overrun with examples that mirror the domineering dynamic between Trond and Thelma. Nineteenth-century table massagers were introduced for doctors to mechanically ‘percuss’ female hysterics, ridding them of their caprices and emotional ‘afflictions’: fainting, insomnia and sexual forwardness were some of the symptoms thought to inhibit ‘normal’ sex, and in many ways Thelma fits the contemporary paragon of the hysteric subject by ‘making trouble’ in her familial order.
It is perhaps no coincidence, then, that as the carefully orchestrated world Trond has built around Thelma starts to unravel, a path to understanding emerges along matrilineal lines. During a medical examination Thelma is informed that her grandmother – whom she had been told was dead – is in fact a permanent resident at a psychiatric institution. Thelma finds her there, medicated to the point of unresponsive stupor. She learns from a nurse not only that it is Trond who is responsible for keeping her grandmother in this catatonic state, but that before being admitted to the institute the woman had exhibited similar psychic abilities to Thelma. The film turns on this moment, as Thelma not only comprehends for the first time her parents’ schemes to keep her contained, but also comes to realise her own agency. In accepting her condition and rejecting her father she must, by default, also welcome same-sex desire. Her capacity to shift the order of the universe is, depending on which way you look at it, a gift or a disease. It is an ontological hitch which skids across the natural and the supernatural. In other words, it is a leap of faith, just not the kind Thelma is used to. And even more than this, it is a quantum fix, explicable only by episteme-shattering science and perhaps humoured by the fact that Thelma isn’t a student of physics, but (of the safer plains) of biology.
She didn’t love you Thelma. Think about it. Did she like you before you wanted her?
Do you think she had a choice? With what’s within you? – Trond
In a later scene, Thelma sits repentant, forehead pressed to the wall, praying for purification of her heart. Instead of decrying her feelings for Anja as anathema to his Christian beliefs, her father glides across all mention of Thelma’s ‘coming out’ by replacing confession with the wraith-like logic that their romance is a manifestation of Thelma’s wishful thinking. It wasn’t love, Trond explains, with the cool intonation of a psychopath, but Thelma’s loneliness manipulating Anja. With Thelma able to turn fantasy into something real, reproach is a powerful form of self-discipline when wielded by her detractors. The existential spiral of doubt is enough to unsettle her entire world-view. Up to this point, Thelma has been capable of using her faculties only as blind wish fulfilment. It wasn’t that she had meant to cause her brother’s disappearance, she simply dreamt it, and this fantasy was followed by a catastrophic real-world manifestation of second-sibling syndrome. But in the case of Anja, Trond implies Thelma has consciously coerced another body into fulfilling her desires: herein lies the “new take on body horror as well as a love story” that Trier attributes to the film – neatly summarised in his choice of Thelma’s name, originally from the Greek word thélma meaning ‘will’ or ‘volition’.8
Thelma’s ‘coming-out’ is a non-event: Trond calmly suggests her desires are delusional, his reaction evoking a long history of the pathologisation of queerness in psychoanalytic frameworks – in particular Freud’s linking of paranoia to non-normative sexuality. Such queer paranoia is characteristic of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick called ‘paranoid reading’.9 Its proximity to queer phobia and trauma (Trond’s tactic is to exploit a textbook definition of internalised homophobia) means that the mere idea of paranoia is enough to cause damage. The direction of paranoia is a ‘future-oriented vigilance’, in which the mitigation of humiliation and rejection by family and lovers here plays a key part.10 Erotic paranoia makes for indelible cinema – not just as a historical trope for anti-queer times, but as something that continues to be rolled out in contemporary cinema, from Ben A. Williams’s The Pass (2016) to Stephen Dunn’s offbeat Closet Monster (2015), in which the teen protagonist’s PTSD following a traumatic event is invariably tied to his sexual desires and compounded by his homophobic father. In her analysis, Sedgwick turned to child psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s concept of the ‘reparative’ as a position from which life-affirming practices are built in the wake of traumatic events as a way out. Thinking ‘reparatively’ then, is to find an exit route via queerness.
Why can’t I just be what I am? – Thelma
The film continuously pushes queerness and its frissons up against domestic and planetary scales. Without comprehending how, Thelma is the causal link in both her infant brother’s death and mother’s attempted suicide and resulting disability. She is also responsible for issuing electric charges and moving magnetic dipoles. In the area of quantum electrodynamics, electromagnetic forces occur when an electromagnetic field interacts with charged particles, providing a fitting metaphor for the ways in which bodies, environments and matter are inextricably linked. There is something of Sedgwick here: with all its world-shattering affect, Thelma moves toward queer world-making by way of working through psychic impasse.
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Perhaps the only signifier Trier has left unclouded by metaphor is a hauntology of ecocide. Why is it that Thelma’s psychic fevers cause birds to involuntarily swarm and kamikaze into glass? A nod, perhaps, to the catchy circa-1998 slogan of the Christian Coalition, “Do unnatural acts cause natural disasters?” To see them thud so gracelessly to the earth is a shock to the system. But beyond the cloak of cinematic fiction, many avian species have been brought back from the precipice of extinction. The film makes a grandiose spectacle of truth, but perhaps most enigmatic is its linking of human activity to environmental disaster in the context of a queer ‘coming-of-age’ film.
The reality of the natural world is often elided by human fantasias: from the gendered waters of lakes proposed by Gaston Bachelard to the drifting travelogues of writers such as Bruce Chatwin. More recently, in the recent series Blue Planet II (2017) a pilot whale reluctant to let go of her dead calf became the empathetic figure of a mother in mourning. Tellingly, the scene relies on a normative image of familial grieving and gendered care to tug at the heartstrings of a viewing public unable, or unwilling, to grasp the scale of our self-inflicted ecological ruin. While the truth of extinction makes for an uneasy pill to swallow, Thelma brings the imbricated reality of our ‘naturecultures’ closer to home.
Beyond the central narrative arc of Thelma’s sexual awakening, various forms in the film are open to queer readings. Consenting to Sedgwick’s assertion that queerness is “eddying, troublant”, it follows that water comes to perform a special kind of liquid pedagogy in Thelma, with the lake next to her childhood home functioning as both a reservoir of past traumas and as a kind of queer baptismal font.11 During Thelma’s first psychogenic episode she uncontrollably urinates and the phenomenology of this event is as physiological as the rural lake at her parents’ house. At once a retentive mass and a slippery gate through which to pass, water steadily comes to represent a metaphor for psychic transformation. Though bodies of water are figuratively vast and incomprehensible – framing Melvillean odysseys and leviathan behemoths – our oceans are also irradiated by plastics, polymers and petrochemicals, which do not disappear. In contrast to Bachelard’s idea that water only reflects the human psyche, scholar Astrida Neimanis has described bodies of water as the perfect archive for desires we cannot hold.12 What disappears beneath the water’s surface in Thelma is both psychically and materially contained.
In the film we are repeatedly fed images of Thelma in and under water. It is in the swimming pool that she first talks to Anja and there that she later becomes ‘stuck’ under the surface, reliving the suppressed anguish of her accidental fratricide, when she inadvertently sealed her infant brother under the surface of the frozen lake. The lake’s underbelly is a surrogate for Thelma’s suppressed desires, and it’s here, ultimately, that the film reaches its crescendo. Understanding Trond’s plan to drug his daughter and consign her to the same fate as her grandmother, Thelma dreams, we suspect, of the flame he held her hand over as child to teach her that hell is immolation. We watch, meanwhile, as Trond rises early and takes a boat out alone to the lake where he spontaneously catches fire. Leaping into the water to extinguish the flames, he finds himself trapped – unable to remain on the surface where the fire reignites, but equally unable to survive beneath the water. This is a becoming end: in Christian theology fire is both a miracle (the burning bush) and a guarantor of perpetual punishment. By contrast, when Thelma arrives at the lake to confirm the reality of her dream, she wades into the water and swims effortlessly to the depths in order to emerge, improbably, from the university swimming pool at Anya’s feet. Passing through the lake, Thelma finds a future in which her and Anja magnetically attract.
If the film’s undercurrent of Christian iconography is a way of considering human actions and emotions within a supernatural narrative – from the fire that consumes Trond to the water that reifies existence – then Thelma is perhaps most compelling when it manages to upend prevailing Western logics around anthropocentric identity. Thelma’s rupturing of ecological systems effectively demolishes the episteme that nature is cleaved from culture and materiality from identity. As Barad writes: “when it comes to quantum field theory, it is not difficult to find trouble – epistemological trouble, ontological trouble, a troubling of kinds, of identities … of being and time, to name a few.”13 That Thelma’s world started to unravel when she commenced her science degree is not coincidental. In this sense, Thelma makes possible an existential narrative in which posthumanist thinking calls into question human ‘nature’, a cue which helps us probe what counts as natural or innate in other contexts.
But for all the film’s philosophical queerness in this radical ‘undoing’, Thelma’s disappointment is that Trier borrows from cinema’s stock of thigh-stroking and hyperventilation in its representation of lesbian relationships. Queerness, like Thelma’s psychic faculties, reads as a condition with real and physical effects, which moves centrifugally from the body out into the world, but which ultimately requires ‘management’. Thelma courts the domestication of queer sexuality, culminating in the harnessing of Thelma’s more volatile emotions: the extraordinary elements of the film are replaced by Thelma’s visible contentment. In short, Trier proposes that the unruly femme is an unsustainable idyll in the hinterlands of queerness. The queer ecological imagination is thus one which is eventually cultured, moving Thelma (and us) toward the lesbian in-joke of twinning (“You look like a real babe today” / “You too. My jacket suits you”), the calm resolution of which is arrived at only after laying past demons to rest. However, beyond Thelma’s performance of queer love, there is something more significant to be extracted from the ‘intra-active’ promise of Barad’s diffractive politics. When Anja is believed missing, Thelma arrives at her apartment to find a few strands of her hair caught in the glass of the window. This image brings together much of the film’s preoccupation with hermeneutics and their capacity to rupture the present reality, not by throwing things out, but drawing the eye to the relations which bind them together. The hair isn’t trapped under glass, like something under the lens of microscope: it is impossibly caught between.
Gabriella Beckhurst is a London-based writer and PhD candidate at the University of York, UK. Their research intersects moving image and photography, life narratives and autoethnography in art and theory, feminist, queer and environmental politics.
1 Mary Oliver, ‘Starlings in Winter’ in Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003). Further references in the text are to this edition. 2 Joachim Trier quoted in Tasha Robinson, ‘Thelma’s director explains why he made a dreamy gay coming-of-age superhero story’, The Verge (https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/10/16635068/joachim-trier-thelma-interview-behind-the-scenes-academy-award-submission), published 10/11/17. 3 Douglas Kahn, Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 18. 4 Chris Straayer, ‘The Hypothetical Lesbian Heroine’ in Jump Cut, No. 35, April 1990, 50–57; reprinted in Straayer’s book, Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies: Sexual Re-orientations in Film and Video (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 5 Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), 1–17. 6 Mel Y. Chen, ‘Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections’ in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol. 17, 2–3, January 2011, 265–86. 7 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 8 Joachim Trier quoted in Jacob Stolworthy, ‘Joachim Trier interview: “Thelma is a new take on body horror”, The Independent (https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/thelma-joachim-trier-interview-horror-florida-project-sean-baker-isabelle-huppert-eile-harboe-louder-a8033361.html), published 02/11/17. 9 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You’ in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 123–51. 10 Ibid, 130. 11 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), xii. 12 Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). 13 Karen Barad, ‘TransMaterialities Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings’ in GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol. 21, 2–3, June 2015, 387–422.
