CHAPTER TWO Abject Ecologies

Norwegian auteur Joachim Trier’s fourth feature film, Thelma (2017), opens with a flashback. A young girl and her father walk across a frozen lake. The camera captures them in an extreme long shot as they make their way across the wintry landscape, emphasizing the deep space of the scene as the ice recedes into the background. A forest in the distance forms an undulating horizon, hiding the late-afternoon winter sun that has just gone down. The surface of the lake is as smooth as a mirror, giving us a reflection of the two figures as they slowly trudge across it. A cut to a close-up of the girl’s face as she walks shows her looking down at the lake. Her point of view reveals fish swimming just beneath her feet, clearly visible through the transparent layer of ice. The scene cuts to an underwater shot looking up at the girl from underneath the ice, and we see that the fish-eye view of the world above is similarly unhindered by the transparent ice. Cutting back to the surface, the camera follows the girl and her father as they continue their hike toward a snow-decked forest just on the other side of the lake, the father carrying a hunting rifle on his back. As they get to the forest, the pair stops and rests, the girl enjoying a cup of hot cocoa from her thermos while the father readies his gun for the hunt. Continuing their hike through the snowy forest, the two come across a deer, and the father signals to the girl that she should stop and watch. Transfixed by the confrontation with the young doe—who seems blissfully unaware of any human presence in the scene—the girl’s gaze is unwavering. Her father raises the gun and gets the deer in his sights, holding the barrel level and steadying his aim. In the silence of the scene—with her eyes still locked on the doe—the father slowly shifts his aim to the back of his daughter’s head. After a tense few moments without taking his shot, the father lowers the gun, and the doe runs off through the forest. The girl looks up at her father, still apparently unaware of the peril she had been in moments before. The scene cuts to black, and the title card flickers to life in bold letters on the screen: THELMA.

Thelma is a supernatural thriller about a young woman’s queer awakening and the unsettling telekinetic powers that accompany her gradual emancipation from her repressive upbringing as she moves away from her parents to begin university studies in Oslo. Because of its indebtedness to the tradition of horror movies about psychic powers—with films like Carrie (1976) and The Fury (1978), both directed by Brian De Palma, as clear reference points—Thelma’s fixation on the usual tropes of the genre comes as no surprise. The overbearing, fundamentalist Christian faith of parents who have kept their daughter sheltered from the world; the coming-of-age narrative, focusing on Thelma’s belated sexual awakening; Thelma’s gradual mastery of her psychic abilities, which accompanies a painful process of gaining autonomy from an authoritarian parental regime—all of these elements come straight from the playbook of the telekinesis horror film.

But the setting of Thelma’s opening flashback scene in the wintry landscape of the forested Norwegian countryside signals from the very beginning that the film is concerned with the role of the natural environment in the expression of Thelma’s psychic abilities. Seen in a Norwegian cultural context, the opening scene begins the film with a paradigmatic representation of friluftsliv—a term literally meaning “open-air life” (but often translated as “outdoor recreation”) that has deep roots in Nordic cultures. Though the English translation of friluftsliv suggests something banal—as if it were merely an umbrella term for recreational activities like camping, fishing, or hiking—scholars have studied the concept’s connections to Nordic environmental attitudes and imaginaries, suggesting that it may present a kind of conceptual underpinning to the region’s environmental exceptionalism. Some have attempted more expansive definitions of the term in an effort to capture the wide semantic range friluftsliv encompasses. Thomas H. Beery notes that the concept “fuses ideas of outdoor recreation, nature experience, philosophy and lifestyle.”¹ Picking up on the first part of the compound term (fri, meaning “free” or “open”), Gelter adds that friluftsliv is “based on experiences of freedom in nature and spiritual connectedness with the landscape.”² Combining, as the term does, concepts of freedom, the outdoors, and lifestyle, the overwhelmingly emancipatory and harmonious connotations of friluftsliv have been used to explain the exceptionally positive valence of nature and the wilderness in the Nordic cultural imagination. So although the Nordics are regarded as technologically advanced and progressive societies in which most inhabitants live in urban or suburban settings, their famously leading role in promoting ideals of environmentalism and sustainable development has led the Nordic countries to be seen as exceptionally nature-loving.

Seen in the light of the concept of friluftsliv, the opening scene of Thelma registers as all the more unsettling. As the cinematography captures the deep space of the landscape Thelma and her father walk through, the scene is set up to emphasize the open, boundless, and emancipatory spaciousness of the wilderness setting. As we see Thelma enjoying hot cocoa and being guided in how to track an animal and engage with nature in a quiet, unobtrusive way, the scene could hardly seem more wholesome. In the moment that her father, Trond, turns the gun from the deer to the back of Thelma’s head, though, the overwhelming sense of harmony in nature is shattered. The scene oscillates suddenly from the freedom and wholesomeness of friluftsliv to the terrifying specter of paternal violence. This violence, we come to learn, does not come in the form of random or arbitrary attacks, but rather is part of a systematic effort to contain Thelma’s body—to keep her psychosomatic powers bottled up within her. This paternal regime of rigid boundary maintenance is suggested by the icy imagery of the opening scene, which young Thelma seems to ponder as she glances down at the fish swimming just beneath her feet. The hard surface of the ice forms temporarily firm boundaries that will soon give way to fluid interchange between the lake and its surroundings. Set against the celebrated Norwegian love of friluftsliv, the film suggests, Trond’s efforts to keep Thelma’s body rigidly contained strike a strident note, underscoring the hypocrisy of a culture that embraces the supposed freedom to roam unencumbered in nature on the one hand, but also works to systematically repress and contain female bodily expression on the other. Such efforts at corporeal containment cannot be reconciled with the material realities of ecological enmeshment, evident in the transcorporeal porousness of organic bodies.

Rather than reading the film through the lens of genre—through which we might examine how it adheres to or departs from a set of conventions characteristic of telekinesis horror films—I examine the ways Thelma contributes to the emerging mode of ecohorror, especially in terms of its ecocritical presentation of paternalistic and feminist models of embodiment. Such an ecocritical reading of Thelma reveals the ways contemporary Nordic cultures are reimagining women’s bodies in terms of their fundamental ecological and material characteristics. As a film about the unsettling power unleashed by a young woman’s psychosexual awakening, Thelma fixates on the emancipatory energy expressed by the unruliness of the female body. In eco-materialist terms, Thelma is a horror film about the social conflicts that play out along the contested boundaries between a woman’s body and the external world. The film suggests that ostensibly progressive and egalitarian societies like Norway continue to be haunted by deeply rooted traditions of misogynistic paternalism, a social regime that insists—among other demands—on the rigid containment of the female body. Following the opening scene, lingering shots of the wilderness landscape throughout the film repeatedly suggest there is more than a passing connection between this uncannily persistent misogyny and human attitudes toward the environment in the region. As we have already seen in the case of Lars von Trier’s outbreak horror film Epidemic, total corporeal containment is an ecologically untenable form of embodiment that derives from an ecophobic fear of the mingling of human bodies and their environments. In Thelma, these paternalistic and ecophobic containment strategies, far from permanently suppressing Thelma’s psychosomatic powers, in fact have the effect of amplifying them. Refused the possibility of giving vent to her internal life—her impulses, desires, states of mind, and her own kinetic energy—Thelma’s body builds up an explosive pressure that is unleashed throughout the film as a series of uncontrolled, involuntary, and highly material episodes of psychokinetic and transcorporeal abjection.

To set the stage for Thelma’s rebellion, the film posits that—far from its reputation as one of the most gender-equal countries in the world—contemporary Norwegian society has remained mired in a misogynistic tradition of policing and attempting to contain the expressive force of women’s bodies. Against the backdrop of Norwegian nature discourses like friluftsliv and allemannsretten (Everyman’s Rights), Thelma shows how cultural misogyny has been “naturalized” in contemporary Norway, as Nordic nature imaginaries have centered the masculine subject and provided nature-based explanations for the supposedly hysterical expressions of female bodies. In service of this gender critique, Thelma situates the subtle kinds of biopolitical power contemporary societies exert on women’s bodies within a historical continuum of misogyny that can be traced back to medieval witch burning. Seen through the lens of Nordic film history, then, Thelma situates itself in relation to a problematic “tradition of torturing women” in Nordic cinema, in the words of Linda Haverty Rugg—a tradition that encompasses some of the most canonical films of auteurs like Carl Th. Dreyer, Ingmar Bergman, and Lars von Trier. That Joachim Trier overtly places his film in a homegrown Scandinavian cinematic tradition that includes canonical films about witchcraft and female victimhood suggests that we ought to reconsider what the “tradition of torturing women” might include in a contemporary context. Without using Rugg’s terms, Joachim Trier has remarked that Thelma was his response to the regressive gender politics of horror films invested in spectacularizing the suffering of women’s bodies: “Unfortunately some of the films that we look back on, in the ’70s for example, were old-fashioned in their approach to the female body. You fall into the trap of them being more exploitative. I’m riffing off some of the best themes.… I’m trying to do a modern empowerment tale of a young person while riffing off some of those classical traditional tropes from horror movies.”³ For the purposes of this chapter, triangulating Thelma’s place in relation to the Nordic tradition of torturing women and a broader trend of female exploitation in horror is not a question of assigning a genre to the film. Instead, as Trier’s comments suggest, these troubling traditions present a certain view of the female body that he wants to both respond to and work against. To do so, Trier presents on screen a version of Norwegian society that is not far removed from the medieval patriarchal societies that burned witches. Moreover, the continuity of misogyny even in ostensibly enlightened Norway—with its internationally regarded achievements in gender equality—is expressed in terms that lend themselves to an eco-materialist understanding of embodiment. Though the tortures that Thelma depicts are indirect and ostensibly more humane forms of paternalistic social control, the film suggests that any regimes that constrain female physicality—even in indirect and more “humane” ways—will be met with direct and emphatically material resistance from oppressed women who acknowledge and perform their own ecological embodiment. Rather than holding out hope for female spiritual transcendence through martyrdom—as the films in the tradition of torturing women do—Thelma advocates instead for confrontational acts of abjection and transcorporeal resistance.

ABJECT TRANSCORPOREALITY

The central plot conflict of Trier’s film arises when Thelma (Eili Harboe) moves away from her apparently loving—but decidedly overbearing—parents (Henrik Rafaelsen and Ellen Dorrit Petersen) and her rural childhood home to the capital city of Oslo to begin studying at the university. In addition to her fundamentalist Christian faith being challenged by her new, culturally secular friend group, as well as experiencing an intense and (for her) unsettling same-sex attraction to her classmate Anja (Kaya Wilkins), she has had seizure-like episodes that she assumes must be symptoms of epilepsy. As Thelma’s attraction to Anja grows, they become friends and share a passionate kiss in the lobby of the Oslo Opera House. Unsettled by the total upheaval of her conservative social values, Thelma starts to suspect that her strong feelings for Anja are associated not only with her seizures but also with an inexplicable—and possibly malign—psychic force that begins manifesting itself within her. Her uncontrollable telekinetic powers seem to have a direct connection to her most transgressive and deeply felt desires, as if an internal “sinfulness”—to use the moralizing language of Thelma’s upbringing—is escaping the bounds of her mind and body and having potentially dangerous consequences in the real world. After being admitted to a specialty clinic where she is subjected to a draining regime of induced seizures—all of which are recorded by a host of electronic sensors and video monitors—the specialist finally reaches a diagnosis: not epilepsy but a condition called psychogenic non-epileptic seizures (PNES). The doctor explains that the seizures are just a symptom of some other disorder, a physical reaction to something that is being repressed—possibly just stress, but maybe, he says, traumatic memories. Unbeknownst to Thelma, the draining regime of induced seizures has also had a terrifying side effect. As the doctor prods her with questions about her romantic life, Thelma fixates on Anja while she is gripped by a convulsive fit. At that moment, Anja, alone in her apartment, is alarmed by a sudden flickering of lights and the blaring of a stereo she had turned off moments earlier. As she struggles to understand the sudden electrical disruptions, a plate glass window in her living room spontaneously explodes, only to immediately reassemble itself, after which Anja is nowhere to be seen. Thelma’s psychic energy has somehow projected Anja—her secret object of desire—into some vacuous space beyond the physical realm. A strand of Anja’s hair left ominously dangling from the now intact window suggests that Thelma, in her distress, has somehow contained her within its transparent surface. The rest of the film centers on Thelma’s quest to retrieve Anja from her unwitting psychic banishment, a quest that precipitates the revelation of a secret family history and a parental regime of manipulation, gaslighting, and medical abuse to keep Thelma’s frightening powers in check. In a fiery final set piece, Thelma dramatically confronts and overturns the abusive paternalism of her father, and in the process frees Anja from the abyss—setting the stage for the two to begin a romantic relationship without the constraints of her parents’ prejudice.

To get a sense of the film’s eco-materialist approach to the body, it helps to start with the scene of Thelma’s first seizure. There we see Thelma hard at work not long after her arrival at the university. She sits at a desk in a full campus reading room, a textbook open in front of her as she takes notes. Aesthetically the room is characterized by order and rationalism. The study cubicle she sits at is echoed by mimetic copies receding into the background, the quasi-mechanical repetition of the space hinting at the orderliness of the academic system within which Thelma has assumed her place. The rows of books lining the walls, the ample natural light streaming into the room, and the minimalist simplicity of the modern academic architecture suggest enlightenment and learning, as well as the rigid uniformity imposed on individuals within Norway’s egalitarian social tradition. The spare sound design includes the subdued noises of students quietly attending to their work in a library: stifled coughs, the sliding of chair legs along the floor as students settle in or get up to leave, the flipping of textbook pages, and the scratch of pens on notebook pages. Thelma bears a distinct mark of difference in this setting otherwise characterized by social conformity: a crucifix necklace. An unusual accessory in culturally secular Oslo, the necklace serves as a visual reminder of the conservative social values of her upbringing. The one obvious mark of individuality in the scene is thus also a mark of social adherence and obedience to authority in another sense.

Into this space of order and learning walks Anja, a young woman who settles into the empty seat next to Thelma and begins silently studying alongside her. We don’t know it yet, but Thelma is going to fall in love with Anja. Her immediate attraction is only subtly hinted at by stolen glances and polite smiles within this rigidly quiet social setting. As Thelma and Anja quietly continue to study, a murder of crows flock in the air nearby, and we see through the window as one bird separates itself from the others and flies full speed into the surface of the window, dropping like a stone toward the ground upon impact. Immediately after the disturbance, Thelma’s hand starts to quake, a convulsion that she tries in vain to still with her other hand. The effort quickly fails, as the rest of her body begins shaking violently. Thelma’s eyes roll back, her head is thrown backward, and she tumbles violently from her chair, her body assuming a tense and rigid posture on the floor as the convulsions continue. While the students gather around her and try to help, we see that her pants are soaked with urine, her lack of control over her bodily functions and movements now fully on display.

The scene is an uncomfortable one—not only in a corporeal sense because of the tense rigidity of Thelma’s body and the clear physical strains of the shaking, visually evident in tense bones and muscles in her arms and hands. It is also uncomfortable in a social sense. These two kinds of discomfort are clearly linked, as the mortifying experience of becoming an object of worry and pity painfully on display for a group of fellow students has everything to do with her spectacular and very public loss of bodily control. For a young person new to the university who is painfully shy and has no friends in town, the prospect of not only becoming a public spectacle by being thrown into involuntary bodily contortions but also wetting one’s own pants for all to see is the stuff of nightmares—on par with arriving at school with no clothing on. The discomfort of the scene comes from the self being reduced to a quivering body, as well as from the unsettling leakage of bodily fluids no longer contained while shocked and nervous onlookers gather around.

As Thelma’s body is repeatedly seized by terrifying convulsive fits, the trembling, unstable boundaries between the interior self and the exterior world are on full display. She becomes a leaky organism whose fluidity and instability violate the normative model of bodily containment. Horror has long been associated with this kind of negotiation and violation of bodily boundaries, along with the complex affective dynamics of attraction and repulsion that play into such a negotiation.⁴ In her seminal book Pouvoirs de l’horreur: Essai sur l’abjection (Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection), Julia Kristeva argues for a psychoanalytic understanding of horror through the concept of abjection, an experience she describes as crucial to the process of subject formation. In abjection, the subject demonstratively separates itself from the maternal body through actions like spitting out food, vomiting, or otherwise expelling undesirable substances from the body. The experience of abjection thus demonstrates a certain style of contrarian individualism established in basely physical terms: “‘I’ want none of that element, sign of their desire; ‘I’ do not want to listen, ‘I’ do not assimilate it, ‘I’ expel it. But since the food is not an ‘other’ for ‘me,’ who am only in their desire, I expel myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which ‘I’ claim to establish myself.”⁵ As the pre-Oedipal developmental stage is described in psychoanalytic theory as one in which the mother’s body is narcissistically assumed to be an extension of the self, the process of individuation through abjection involves a complex negotiation of the boundaries of self. By rejecting material sustenance, the subject thus prioritizes personal autonomy over the nutritional needs of the body. Such abject demonstrations of the subject’s individuality, moreover, frequently take the form of violent, spasmodic fits of the body, as in the convulsions of gagging and retching: “That trifle turns me inside out, guts sprawling; it is thus that they see that ‘I’ am in the process of becoming another at the expense of my own death. During that course in which ‘I’ become, I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit.”⁶

Drawing on the term’s etymological connection to the action of throwing or the state of being thrown away, Kristeva describes abjection as a crucial (though painful) experience in the formation of the self. Abjection comes about as the subject rebels from the caregiver through an act of expelling matter from the body. The abject substance—the vomit, pus, blood, piss, shit—now demonstrably cast off from the body, occupies an uncomfortable middle ground between the self and the environment. “Unflaggingly, like an inescapable boomerang,” writes Kristeva, “a vortex of summons and repulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside himself.”⁷ In abjection, the otherness that haunts our very body—the filthy, unclean substances within it—is expelled for all to see. The abject thus takes the form of a “jettisoned object” that is “radically excluded” from the self, yet which retains some ambivalent material connection to the self. Abjection is an experience characterized by “a massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me as radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either. A ‘something’ that I do not recognize as a thing.”⁸ Rather than Freud’s well-known formulation of das Unheimliche (the uncanny) as the return of the repressed, Kristeva’s description of abjection traces an opposite trajectory where a haunting otherness does not return but is instead expelled, rejected, cast off from the body in a movement of defiant (and sickening) individuation. And in that moment of casting off the abject substance—which, Kristeva writes, is often accompanied by nausea, involuntary spasms, and the writhing of a body in violent upheaval—the subject individuates herself from the caregiver through the defiant act of rejection, as when children spit out food they have been fed. Abjection is thus transgressive and gross: a dramatic public demonstration of private shame brought into the open. In this uncomfortable scene, then, Thelma establishes her subjectivity by abjecting herself, bringing herself low, reducing herself to a thrashing, leaking, unclean body. In her revolt, Thelma becomes revolting.

In a material sense, abjection constructs an image of the body as a transcorporeal organism. Abjection centers on violent explosions of substance and fluid from within the body into the environment. It is merely a more dramatic version of the type of transcorporeal action that is constantly taking place, vital processes that depend on the transit of substances across the porous boundaries between the body and the world. Transcorporeality is an approach to the body, first elaborated by feminist ecocritic Stacy Alaimo, that emphasizes the “interconnections, interchanges, and transits between human bodies and nonhuman natures.” Transcorporeality sees the body as dynamically enmeshed with its environment, rather than transcendently above or securely separated by strategies of insulation. Embodiment is thus not situated in one location or in one type of substance in transcorporeality. Indeed, by emphasizing the transitory, the theory “acknowledges the often unpredictable and unwanted actions of human bodies, nonhuman creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors.”⁹

Without using the same term as Alaimo, cultural anthropologist Tim Ingold similarly emphasizes material transit and interchange in his ecological description of embodiment. Ingold’s intent is “to think of the body not as a sink into which practices settle like sediment in a ditch, but rather as a dynamic center of unfolding activity.”¹⁰ Moreover, in this dynamic, ever-unfolding process of material interchange with the environment, transcorporeal bodies are leaky organisms. Like clay flowerpots—which must be open to the world in order to receive life-giving water for the plant to absorb and also include an opening underneath for draining excess fluids—the living body “is sustained thanks only to the continual taking in of materials from its surroundings and, in turn, the discharge into the them, in the process of respiration and metabolism.” Living organisms, then, “can exist and persist only because they leak: that is, because of the interchange of materials across the ever-emergent surfaces by which they differentiate themselves from the surrounding medium. The bodies of organisms and other things leak continually; indeed, their very lives depend on it.”¹¹ In the vital functioning of organic life, leakage is a feature, not a bug.

Thelma’s “leakiness” in her first convulsive fit, though, is not included to emphasize the everyday vital processes that keep her alive. Instead, her urine-soaked jeans are for Thelma a sign that something has gone horrifyingly wrong. Because of the taboo status of bodily fluids and waste, a vital process that Ingold dryly describes as the “interchange of materials” across the surfaces of the body becomes a sign of psychosomatic dysfunction. The cultural norms that govern behavior in public space (particularly spaces as heavily laden with behavioral norms as university libraries) forbid the physical expression of bodily fluids, relegating such transcorporeal transits to designated private spaces such as restroom stalls. Clearly, then, open displays of transcorporeality are subject to a great deal of cultural circumscription. The deeply felt cultural association of such fluids with uncleanliness, moreover, indicates the degree to which dominant cultural values rest on a disavowal of the material and ecological enmeshment of human bodies. Thelma’s seizure, then, is both transgressive and embarrassing because of the degree to which it demonstratively displays her own transcorporeality for all to see. In her abjection, Thelma thus not only differentiates herself from her parental caretakers (according to Kristeva’s psychoanalytic take on abjection); she also sets herself apart from her social peer group, becoming a convulsive and leaky organism whose body defiantly resists social constraints.

As an act of material expulsion or leakage, abjection is, then, a transcorporeal act. Despite the universalizing language introduced by the psychoanalytic theory Kristeva works with, the cultural right to abject oneself is far from universal. Some identities, that is, are afforded more of a right to abject themselves than others. As recent scholars have moved away from the universal psychoanalytic subject—a subject without gender, race, or social standing—it has become clear that abjection is unevenly understood across different categories of identity. Abjection can be thought of as a privilege akin to white privilege or male privilege—indeed, a privilege typically only available to straight, white, cisgender men, who can more or less freely indulge in abjection. The profound irony of this is that debasing oneself is a privilege only available to normative and hegemonic categories of identity in many social settings.

In their recent volume Abjection Incorporated, Maggie Hennefeld and Nicholas Sammond are highly responsive to the ways abjection maps onto cultural privilege, bringing potent and relevant political realities to bear in their analysis. They write that, for feminist/queer and critical race theorists “the individualizing drive toward abjecting unwanted elements from the body politic intrinsically forms the basis of normative, white, patriarchal, and heterosexual iterations of the (unmarked) self, which underpin the sovereign subject.”¹² The political extension of abjection, then, provides a basis for defining the social collective by excluding unwanted groups. At the same time, abjection has been co-opted by regressive political movements such as the alt-right, becoming a platform for dominant groups “claiming an abject status in order to adopt, ironize, and undermine the markers of marginalization by which damaging social and power hierarchies have traditionally been administered and enforced.”¹³ Abjection, perversely, has become a contested ideological zone that has fueled the rise of the trollish politics of white male resentment. “If social authenticity is a currency that derives from a wounded identity,” write Hennefeld and Sammond, “abjection is its lingua franca.”¹⁴

One potent trend of popular moving-image media in recent years has run counter to this alt-right co-optation of abjection, namely the reclaiming and dramatic embodiment of abjection by women and other marginalized communities, especially evident in the genres of comedy and horror. Women have traditionally been denied the possibility of embodying overtly visceral and frequently grossly physical performances by social and media norms that deem improper such open displays of unflattering female physicality. Women’s reclaiming of abjection is a response not only to the performative abjection of straight, white men encouraged in right-wing hypermasculine settings but also to the long-standing tradition of disavowing the transcorporeal materiality of female bodies. Dominant and misogynistic cultural structures of patriarchy have situated women as objects of desire, scorn, or moral virtue in moving-image media. At the same time, women have been denied the possibility of acknowledging their base physicality, especially in corporeal displays that are incongruous with paternalistic notions of female virtue or heteronormative standards of female desirability. Denying a living, embodied subject the right to abjection, however, runs counter to the material realities that govern organic life. To impose such restrictions on abjection is to deny and shut off the transcorporeal pathways of material interchange that make life possible. Such a denial (to use Ingold’s preferred metaphor) is akin to fully enclosing a flowerpot so that the plant no longer receives sunlight or water and has no possibility of releasing its excess fluidity. Trapped in such tightly insulated vessels, thriving plants wither away, becoming little more than fetid and rotten clumps of decaying organic matter.

FRAGILE CONTAINMENT

The more we learn about Thelma and her upbringing, the more it becomes clear that she has been the object of unusually repressive and controlling parenting. At the outset of adulthood, Thelma is—to continue with Ingold’s metaphor—like a potted plant that has been tightly sealed off from the world, insulated from the salubrious material flows that sustain life. Rather than a flower, however, it might be more accurate to picture an imposing and powerful botanical organism, as if a giant sequoia were somehow contained within a sealed clay vessel. Rather than simply withering away and dying, the massive tree would burst forth from its brittle confines in a potentially explosive act of arboreal vitality. The volatile pressure ready to burst within Thelma at the outset of the film thus does not derive from some dangerous and pathological force unique to Thelma but is instead the natural result of the parental strategies of corporeal and psychic containment to which her upbringing has subjected her.

In a pair of flashbacks toward the end of the film, we realize why her parents have adopted such a domineering and micromanaging style of child rearing. In one scene, we see a six-year-old Thelma jealous of her baby brother, who receives all of their mother’s attention and care. That is when Thelma’s potentially dangerous telekinetic powers first manifest themselves. When her brother starts crying out for their mother’s care, Thelma closes her eyes in concentration, and the crying suddenly stops. Her brother is nowhere to be seen. Her mother becomes frightened and demands to know what Thelma did with him. Thelma glances over at a nearby sofa, and her brother’s cries start back up again from underneath it. The baby is unscathed for the moment, but the scene shows the terrifying game of telekinetic hide-and-seek that Thelma’s run-of-the-mill sibling jealousy has unleashed. The stakes are raised exponentially in the next flashback scene, where we see a sleeping Thelma telekinetically project her baby brother (who at the moment is sitting happily in a bath) to a frigid and watery death underneath the layer of surface ice on a lake adjacent to their home. In an unsettling scene, we see her father, Trond, frantically run out to the lake and discover the frozen corpse of his baby son peering up at him through the ice. These flashbacks retrospectively make sense of the perplexing backstory to the film’s cold open. Taken together, the flashback scenes elucidate Thelma’s upbringing, showing us that after the revelation of Thelma’s terrifying and erratic psychic powers, Trond decided that they had two choices in how to deal with the girl: either kill her or subject her to an overbearing regime of surveillance and control. Between the two approaches to containment, Trond chooses the less overtly violent path.

Yet softer and more prolonged misogynistic violence is still violence. As philosopher Kate Manne writes, “Misogyny is a self-masking phenomenon” that benefits from flying under the radar, making use of softer forms of brutality that don’t always leave marks.¹⁵ According to Manne, the goal of misogynistic aggression is to police the speech and behavior of women who rebel against their roles in patriarchal societies. Such policing practices work best when they are covert, indirect, and unpredictable. Misogyny is often invisible and silent, and tries to enforce silence on its victims. “Silence is golden for the men who smother and intimidate women into not talking,” writes Manne. “Silence isolates victims; and it enables misogyny.”¹⁶ Rather than overtly abusing his daughter, then, Trond instead adopts a low-key strategy that professes to help and care for Thelma. It is appropriate, then, that Trond acts both in ministerial and medical roles in parenting Thelma, prescribing aggressive pharmaceutical treatments and overseeing habitual self-discipline practices of prayer and other forms of religious confession and supplication. He repeatedly tells his daughter not to worry, that he wants to help her, that they can get her symptoms under control if she follows his directives. In Trond, Thelma presents the often misleadingly benevolent face of systemic misogyny, an ideology that often claims to want to help women and maintain the stability of the social order. Followed assiduously, the habitual strategies of self-control that Trond prescribes may not overtly read as violent and misogynistic practices. Yet such treatment is aimed at containing Thelma’s dangerous powers within her body. To understand the real violence of these measures, it is helpful to read them in transcorporeal terms, since such a reading understands Trond’s behavior toward his daughter as a form of smothering or strangulation, forms of violence that Kate Manne sees as “paradigmatic of misogyny.”¹⁷

Yet the film offers some hope of escape from misogynistic strangleholds. One sign of this hopefulness is found in the figures of containment the film returns to, which are images that hint at the fragility and impermanence of such repressive paternal strategies. In the flashback scenes, the icy surface of the frozen lake is the substance of containment. A low-angle shot from below the ice layer during the film’s cold open shows us a view of young Thelma walking on the surface above while fish swim in the frigid waters below. The relative thinness and transparency of the surface Thelma and her father walk on is an unsettling reminder that this barrier will not last. Its rigidity is a seasonal condition that will soon be superseded by a more seamless relationship between the water and the air above it. The life teeming below the icy surface may be visually obscured to the humans who walk above, but soon the ice will melt. As a representation of friluftsliv, the opening scene thus presents the characteristically Nordic approach to nature as one that is permeated by a rigid sense of boundaries. In the last of the film’s flashback scenes—which chronologically takes place before the cold open—the icy surface of the lake serves as a barrier between Trond and the corpse of his infant son. Ice is a figure of tenuous containment in the scene since it is where Thelma has inadvertently stashed her brother in an involuntary act of telekinetic projection. It is thick enough to ensure the baby is drowned, but not so thick that he can be secreted away forever. Indeed, Trond almost immediately finds the boy’s body, a discovery that angers and frightens him enough to make him consider murdering his young daughter.

A similar figure of fragile containment in the film is the surface of the glass window during the dramatic and pivotal scene in which Thelma unwittingly causes the window to spontaneously explode and reassemble itself with Anja apparently trapped inside. The rupture is a repetition of Thelma’s earlier projection of her baby brother into the lake in the sense that it is an involuntary telekinetic action with disastrous real-life consequences. In this case, Thelma apparently causes the electrical disruptions in Anja’s building and then psychically shatters the window, which subsumes Anja into its glassy surface while Thelma herself is unconscious in a medically induced seizure. The transparency, rigidity, and fragility of the glass are all qualities shared with the icy surface of the lake, and in that sense, both surfaces visually suggest the tenuousness and impermanence of the containment. And indeed, we see that although Anja goes missing for an extended period, she is safe and sound by the end of the film, Thelma having apparently learned how to retrieve her from the glassy abyss.

These visual signifiers of fragile and impermanent containment reflect the repressive strategies of physical and behavioral containment with which Trond inculcates Thelma throughout her upbringing. We learn about one of Trond’s techniques in an early scene when Thelma and Anja are just beginning their relationship. They sit together in Anja’s apartment and sip from glasses of red wine—a supremely transgressive act for Thelma, who previously abstained from alcohol—and Thelma tells Anja about her strict Christian upbringing. Using a candle burning on the coffee table in front of them to demonstrate, Thelma tells Anja that her father used to hold her hand over a candle flame, only taking it away right before it started to blister, telling the child ominously, “Remember: hell is like this all the time.”

As a mark of the relative success of these techniques of parental indoctrination and coercive fear-mongering, we see the degree to which Thelma has internalized strategies of repressive self-restraint in her adult life. When she feels she has gone too far in indulging her attraction to Anja, Thelma turns to compulsive, repetitive prayers and worship services. After she and Anja share a passionate first kiss, Thelma is overcome by shame and retreats to her apartment, where we see her standing with her forehead against a wall, uttering a compulsive litany of pleas to be saved from her temptation. She prays the same line over and over with her head against the wall: “Lord, remove this from me, redeem me from these thoughts. Please, I pray, take them away.” A subsequent scene shows her in a chorus of other young worshippers singing the contemporary devotional song “Graven er tom” (“The Tomb Is Empty”), written by Christian pop artist David André Østby. The chorus from the hymn takes the form of a litany repeated several times: “The tomb is empty / Jesus lives / In majesty and in power / Eternal death is subdued by him.”

Such religious practices of ritualistic self-control—which involve pleas for absolution and removal of temptation, along with invoking the salvific sacrifice of Christ—have a physical analogue in the measures Thelma takes to still her own body in the midst of a seizure. The self-restraining gesture we see repeated in most of Thelma’s seizure episodes is to grab her own hand in a vain effort to restrain a convulsion that threatens to overtake her whole body. The action is completely ineffectual in the first seizure scene at the university reading room; grabbing her own wrist only prolongs and amplifies the quaking of the rest of Thelma’s body in that case. In a more sexually charged scene when Thelma’s body threatens to begin another convulsive fit as Anja furtively caresses her thigh during a ballet performance they are watching together, Thelma barely manages to restrain her bodily tremors by grabbing her quaking hand. The effort is shown to have dangerous external consequences, however. As she restrains herself, the building itself begins to quake as the excess kinetic energy of Thelma’s body is projected to the enormous light fixture above the unsuspecting audience at the ballet, which begins swaying ominously over the crowd. Along with less directly physical practices of self-control, Thelma’s clear efforts to still her irrepressible bodily paroxysms indicate the degree to which she has carried on her father’s repressive efforts to contain her own psychosomatic unruliness.

These efforts at restraint are driven by ideas of mental and physical insulation from the environment that run counter to both Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory of abjection and Stacy Alaimo’s concept of transcorporeality, each of which situates the body as a permeable organism that can only remain viable through material interchange with the environment. Alaimo associates strategies of bodily enclosure with hypermasculine, anti-environmentalist posturing. By way of example, Alaimo mentions a type of performative masculinity found in the carbon-heavy culture of American capitalism, namely oversize-truck culture, in which it is common to adorn one’s massive pickup truck with aggressive accoutrements such as armor-like grille guards or chrome trailer hitch decorations modeled after bull testicles that dangle suggestively under the phallic protuberance. More broadly, postures of corporeal enclosure can manifest themselves in many toxically masculinist practices, all of which style the body as a big, hard, impenetrable—but aggressively penetrative—corporeal fortress walled off from intrusion and insulated from transcorporeal interchange. Alaimo contrasts this posture with an opposite approach that she calls insurgent vulnerability: “A recognition of our material interconnection with a wider environment that impels ethical and political responses.”¹⁸ In its more activist forms, this insurgent vulnerability can become what Alaimo calls a “politics of exposure”: the open recognition of one’s precarious bodily exposure to the environment, which can take the form of demonstrations that use the potent symbolic value of nude bodies exposed to the ecological elements.

In Thelma, however, the danger that Trond’s containment and control efforts seek to counteract is not his daughter’s vulnerability to environmental intrusion but rather the possibility that her erratic and dangerous psychosomatic powers will instead leak out into the environment, threatening everyone around her. Trond’s efforts, then, have little to do with protecting his daughter from intrusive external forces; instead, they keep internal forces safely contained within Thelma’s body. As Trond sees it, the threat lurks inside Thelma rather than outside her. The question of whether to fear dangerous intrusions from without or dangerous leaks from within makes little difference in the strategy used, however; in either case, techniques of paternalistic control, containment, and solidifying psychosomatic boundaries can at best serve as temporary stopgap measures that contravene the material realities of living bodies that depend on two-way transit into and out of the body to sustain life. The similar denial of transcorporeality that underlies both Trond’s parenting style and the carbon-heavy American truck culture cited by Alaimo indicates the toxically masculinist and misogynistic impulses that animate these disparate practices.

Because these efforts at total corporeal insulation are unsustainable, paternalistic containment can strategically adopt subtler, more indirect and covert forms of behavioral policing. Such is the case with another type of paternalistic containment Thelma faces, namely the many instances of parental and medical surveillance hinted at throughout the film. The first sign of Thelma’s status as an object of oppressive oversight is the first shot after the film’s title sequence, which brings us into the present after the precredit flashback scene. Moments after we have seen Trond aim his gun at his young daughter, we flash-forward to Thelma’s student life through an aerial shot looking down at a campus square where students and campus visitors cross at random angles like so many ants far below the camera. After slowly and voyeuristically panning over the crowd for a full minute, the transcendent and godlike camera gradually zooms in to settle on Thelma, who is clearly struggling to figure out where to go in an unfamiliar setting. The film thus leaves behind Thelma’s childhood with a gun aimed at the young girl’s head, only to settle into her young adulthood with a different kind of repressive scope trained on her body, namely the pseudo-omniscient and voyeuristic gaze of the parental surveillance regime Thelma has grown up with. The juxtaposition of her father’s gun barrel in the previous scene with the surveilling eye of the film’s establishing shot in present-day Oslo in the next hints that, although the threat of immediate physical violence has gone away, soft and indirect violence through panoptic surveillance maintains a sinister grip on Thelma’s life.

This move from overt violence to more covert forms of behavioral control accords with Michel Foucault’s well-known discussions of panoptic surveillance in Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison). In Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon—a scheme of institutional architecture that aimed to produce a disciplined citizenry for the utilitarian benefit of modern societies—Foucault sees an image of how modern institutions impose social control through less overt, and therefore more insidious, means than in medieval and early modern societies. In the Middle Ages, states relied on grotesque public spectacles of state-sponsored corporal punishment to impose social order. Modern social institutions instead rely on panoptic technologies of rigid surveillance and minutely ordered bureaucracy. The consequence of this panoptic surveillance is that the constant possibility of authoritarian oversight becomes an internalized gaze that individuals in prisons, asylums, schools, and other institutions sense even when nobody is actually watching them. The goal of the panopticon is not absolute omniscience through total surveillance but rather reinforcement of the ever-present possibility that the eye of authority is watching you. The move from spectacles of punishment to the fostering of disciplined and docile bodies in modern nation-states constitutes what Foucault calls a “gentle way” in punishment.¹⁹ This modern form of discipline contrasts with medieval and early modern forms of public punishment of criminals, which were intended as a display of social justice that could serve as a deterrent to the populace. In modern correctional institutions, however, “the point of application of the penalty is not the representation, but the body, time, everyday gestures and activities; the soul too, but in so far as it is the seat of habit. The body and the soul, as principles of behavior, form the element that is now proposed for punitive intervention.”²⁰ Similarly, the object of paternalistic oversight in Thelma is both the body and the soul, as Trond seeks to manage Thelma’s behavior and her habits. Appropriately, then, the film begins its present-day narrative with an image of panoptic surveillance—the technique par excellence of social control in modern societies, according to Foucault. After the title sequence, the film flashes forward to the present in a lingering aerial shot over the university campus whose form echoes the random sight lines of surveillance cameras ubiquitous in modern cities. Such a panoptic narrative opening hints at the broad scope of the paternalistic gaze under which Thelma has been raised. We see the degree to which this is the case as Thelma establishes herself in Oslo. Her parents keep tabs on their adult daughter’s class schedule and monitor her social media accounts. Thelma calls her parents frequently on the phone, and they gently probe her about her daily schedule, making clear that they know where she’s supposed to be and when. Moreover, the scene where Thelma makes Anja disappear emphasizes the voyeuristic medical surveillance Thelma is under, staging Thelma’s body as the object of a medical gaze that prods and probes her for information through visual observation as well as other forms of bodily monitoring.

But no matter how insidious and pervasive these strategies of smothering containment become, the film offers some signs that their totalizing aims can never be fully realized. Trond’s strategies of psychosomatic enclosure, for instance, are untenable for living organisms such as Thelma. When contained within impervious shells, transcorporeal bodies suffocate and die. But living bodies, the film shows, instinctively resist and beat back the threat of suffocation. Like Epidemic, Thelma relies in several of its most visceral scenes of dread and terror on the primal fear of suffocation or live burial and the instinctual resistance that kicks in at such moments. One of these comes late in the film, as Thelma swims laps in an empty public swimming pool. Halfway through her first lap, Thelma’s attention is drawn to the ceiling as the overhead lights suddenly start flickering. Out in the middle of the pool, Thelma is unable to get back to the side before her body is overtaken by the spasms that inevitably follow flickering lights. Her arms tense up and begin to shake uncontrollably, and Thelma drops through the water like a lead weight, continuing to convulse as her body sinks deeper and deeper in the pool. Several excruciating moments later, Thelma regains consciousness and control of her body, but when she starts to swim in the direction of the surface, she is instead met with the tile floor of the pool. Thelma fights and struggles against the tiles, making every effort to break through to air. The primal terror of the scene echoes the suffocating image of Thelma’s brother’s corpse trapped beneath the ice in the flashback later in the film, drawing an association between her seizures, her telekinetic powers, and suffocating bodily enclosure. After struggling in vain against the tiles, Thelma finally realizes she has confused the pool floor with the surface of the water and frantically swims in the opposite direction until she surfaces.

A more potently symbolic and sexually charged image of suffocation comes earlier in the film, in a scene that may be interpreted as a fantasy or as a hallucination. Thelma—naive and inexperienced as she is—becomes the butt of a cruel joke at a party when she is tricked into thinking that a hand-rolled cigarette she takes several tenuous puffs of is in fact a joint. Under the power of the group’s suggestion, she starts feeling as if she is under the influence of a powerful psychoactive drug. In a daze, the scenario quickly turns into an erotically charged fantasy of Anja passionately kissing—and then sexually stimulating—Thelma. As she closes her eyes in ecstasy and lets her head come to a rest on the sofa, a scaly black snake suddenly emerges and wraps itself around Thelma’s writhing body. The snake curls around Thelma’s neck, then its pointed head makes its way into the open cavity of her mouth and slithers into Thelma’s throat in another unsettling image of suffocation. The scene is heavily laden with symbolic surplus, the snake fitting clearly within the Manichean moral landscape of fundamentalist Christianity. The snake becomes an obvious stand-in for the serpent in Eden who tempts Eve to transgress the interdictions of her patriarchal God. Despite the black-and-white moral binaries to which the scene alludes, however, it is a more emotionally and morally complex image of suffocation than the pool scene. Thelma’s intense bodily desire for the “forbidden fruit” of same-sex intimacy equates the snake with an emancipatory—rather than evil—drive toward sexual autonomy and authenticity. The wires of pleasure and danger become crossed in the scene, then, as suffocation results from the openness to sexual penetration that Anja herself is concurrently performing on Thelma in the fantasy. As a figure of malevolence and asphyxiation, however, the snake could instead be read as a stand-in for her father’s strategies of smothering behavioral control. Read in this light, the scene reverses the gender polarities of the biblical creation myth, associating evil with a suffocating and phallic figure of patriarchal control rather than with feminine moral weakness.

PSYCHOSOMATIC ERUPTIONS

While Thelma has been subject to an exceptionally repressive parental regime of containment and oversight—given visual expression in the film’s many images of suffocation—it becomes more and more evident that the psychosomatic forces within her irrepressibly rebel against such restraints. The fragile and impermanent structures of containment discussed above inevitably give way to more powerful forces that resist the tenuous and artificial boundaries thus imposed. Ice melts. Glass shatters. Thelma’s tense bodily composure bursts into abject and convulsive kinesis. We have already discussed several of these instances of abjection in the film, which establish Thelma’s subjecthood through the expulsion, leakage, eruption, or projection of substances and energies from the body. These moments in the film are crucial to Thelma’s gradual process of assuming agency and autonomy over her own behavior, desires, and body. It is important to note, however, that they are also moments of unsettling, embarrassing, and sometimes terrifying rupture. They are unexpected and explosive moments that lead her toward individual agency and autonomy but are also painful and terrifying. As Kristeva writes of abjection, moments when the subject “gives birth” to the self are accompanied by “the violence of sobs, of vomit.”²¹ In that sense, abjection is a kind of explosive eruption in the fabric of the self.

The positive reading I have offered of Thelma’s abjection so far, however, is tempered by the film’s narrative resolution, which includes particularly violent and threatening eruptions of psychic power. During the final act of the film, Thelma takes a leave from university and returns to her childhood home, seeking parental solace and help after Anja has gone missing. Thelma’s return to her parents is all the more remarkable given that she has, in the meantime, found out that a grandmother her parents told her was dead is in fact still alive and apparently suffers from the same terrifying psychic condition as Thelma. Because of revelations that have resurfaced in the medical records accessed by her doctors in Oslo, Thelma has also discovered that her father took extreme actions to repress Thelma’s condition throughout her life. Not only has Trond kept Thelma’s grandmother away from his daughter, hidden away in a care home, but the doctors also question the heavy doses of sedatives and other drugs her father prescribed to her as a child. Indeed, when Thelma does visit her grandmother, who at this point suffers from dementia, there is a suggestion that Trond took the same tack with his mother, subjecting her to rigid containment measures like overmedication and clinical oversight. Her grandmother suffered from the trauma of somehow telekinetically murdering or disappearing her husband while he was out fishing on a lake, so Anja is terrified that she is capable of the same dangerous psychic actions. In returning to her parents, then, Thelma takes a calculated risk that they will actually care for her rather than subjecting her to the same repressive medical interventions as her grandmother.

The danger of Thelma’s return becomes frighteningly apparent almost immediately after her arrival. After Thelma tells them about her psychogenic seizures, her mother urges her not to worry about her troubles and to drink the tea they have served her. After a few sips, Thelma starts to nod off, and while she is losing consciousness, her father tells her, “Don’t be afraid. We’ve given you something to help you calm down. We know what’s happening to you, Thelma. We’ll help you.” An ominous drone plays underneath Trond’s words of comfort, and as Thelma loses consciousness, she clearly feels terrified and betrayed by her parents. In her sedation, her parents tell her about how she had been accidentally responsible for her baby brother’s death, and they explain to her that “there’s something within you. If you truly desire something—with your thoughts, with your feelings—there’s something within you that can make it happen.” The prepositions Trond uses are telling in terms of the types of control strategies he has used in raising Thelma. If the dangerous thoughts and feelings are “within” her, then containment and restraint are the logical responses. In a subsequent scene we see that Trond has taken to locking Thelma in her bedroom, coming in periodically to check on her and give her more sedatives. He tells her that he should never have let her leave the house and says he thought her psychic powers had finally gone away. Nothing had happened since she “found God” as a young child, he explains. Trond repeatedly tells her not to worry; he’s going to help her get over her condition. Besides the pharmaceutical treatment, Trond watches over Thelma as she kneels with her head against the wall and repeatedly offers prayers of contrition. She prays for mercy, saying she has “sinned in mind and deed” and has felt “a lust for evil” in her heart. As the camera cuts to Trond sitting next to her, we see that he’s mouthing the words along with her, as if coaching and overseeing her compulsively repetitive prayer. When she later confesses her love for Anja to her father, Trond tells her Anja couldn’t have been in love with her—that it was Thelma’s psychic abilities that have attracted Anja to her. “You were probably just lonesome,” he tells her. “You needed somebody.” Trond then insists that it’s Thelma’s fault that Anja has disappeared, and it’s because “deep down inside,” Thelma wanted Anja gone.

Trond’s professed intent to help Thelma, however, clearly takes on the smothering qualities of the soft and indirect kinds of misogynistic violence. Cloaked in reassurances of parental concern and care there lurks a violent and infanticidal impulse. In one unsettling scene, Thelma’s mother becomes a Lady Macbeth figure, telling Trond that he’s done all he can and it hasn’t worked, and they have to “take the consequences” of this failure despite their love for Thelma. The implication is that Trond needs to take more drastic prophylactic measures against the dangerous forces within Thelma—they must either kill her or incapacitate her with stronger sedatives and long-term institutionalization. Trond prepares a syringe, filling it with an unknown medication—perhaps a lethal dose, or perhaps simply enough to render her catatonic on a more permanent basis.

The longer she stays under her father’s repressive regime, the more Thelma resents it. One evening as Trond is giving Thelma her nightly pills, she tells her father that she has discovered the truth about her grandmother and, in an accusatory tone, asks if he has the same plans to overmedicate and institutionalize her. Trond refuses to answer, says goodnight to his daughter, and locks the door behind him as he leaves. Early the next morning, Trond goes out in his fishing boat and has a smoke in the middle of the lake. The scene cross-cuts between Trond on his boat and a sleeping Thelma, who thrashes anxiously in her sleep. Trond notices a murder of crows who have flocked nearby and becomes frightened when he thinks he sees Thelma on the distant shore of the lake. Seconds later, Trond gazes down at his hands as they start smoking and then burst into flames. Soon his whole body is engulfed, no matter how much he tries to smother the flames. He plunges himself into the water and stays under for several moments, but when he emerges, his body bursts into flames again. The flames drive him under the water again, and he never emerges. At the moment of her father’s death, Thelma is startled awake. She walks out to the lake—the site of her grandfather’s, her brother’s, and now her father’s deaths—and sees the empty boat floating in the middle of the lake. She plunges into the water and swims deeper and deeper, apparently losing consciousness as she dreams that she has swum back to the public swimming pool in Oslo and finds Anja there, where they share a passionate kiss. She wakes up again having washed ashore, and as she’s crawling out of the water, she coughs up an apparently dead bird, who then suddenly bursts into life and flies away as Thelma’s phone starts buzzing with a call from Anja. Whatever happened beneath the water, she has apparently retrieved Anja from the void and brought her back to life, coughing up and resurrecting a bird as a symbolic analogue of her revival of Anja. Following on the heels of her father’s death by telekinetic immolation, Thelma’s final abject act thus stands in for both a triumphant and lasting rejection of her father and the completion of Thelma’s painful process of individuation. What is more, Thelma has not only “given birth” to herself through abjection but has also secured Anja’s rebirth in the same action.

In terms of understanding the transcorporeal dimensions of abjection, it is important to note that the climactic eruptions bursting forth from within Thelma are the almost predictable results of her father’s most pronounced efforts to smother and contain Thelma’s psychosomatic agency. If eruptions result from the buildup of extreme pressure, the repressive regime of behavioral and bodily control to which Trond subjects his daughter is to blame for the climactic burst of telekinetic energy we see in the film. By bottling up his daughter’s psychic and bodily energies, Trond has only sown the seeds of his own explosive demise.

That demise comes, as we have seen, with the film’s return to the Norwegian wilderness setting it opened with. Rather than the icy surface that Trond and Thelma walked across in the opening scene, however, the summertime setting of the final scene means that Trond must navigate the fluidity of the lake in search of a restorative experience of friluftsliv. Instead of the salubrious influence he had sought in retreating to the wilderness setting, however, he meets his demise in an unsettling scene in which Trond suffers an excruciating death by both water and fire. As a culmination of the film’s imagery of bodily containment giving way to fluidity, abjection, and transcorporeality, the scene demonstrates the shortcomings of Trond’s misogynistic and ecophobic approach to the natural world. Intent on containing the dangerous transcorporeality of the female body and the natural world, Trond is doomed to be consumed by the resurgent fluidity of both.

WITCHCRAFT THROUGH THE AGES

In its climactic scene, Thelma returns to its conceptual origins in the “witch film” subgenre, prevalent both in European and American horror and also related to the Scandinavian tradition of torturing women that Linda Haverty Rugg writes about. This connection is signaled in part by Trond’s death, which is an overdetermined witchlike execution in that he is both burned and drowned. Just like the suggestion-induced fantasy scene from earlier in the film, however, which associated the paternalistic containment of women (not feminine evil) with original sin, traditional gender polarities are reversed in this final sequence, with the father suffering a witch’s death under the telekinetic power of his daughter. In framing Thelma as a narrative of female emancipation from smothering patriarchal control and oversight, Trier seems intent on counteracting the frequently regressive gender politics of many witch films along with films that dramatize transcendent female suffering.

In this revisionist take on misogynistic film traditions, however, Trier in fact picks up where one of the earliest Scandinavian “witch films” left off: Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan (The Witch; distributed as Witchcraft through the Ages, 1922). A remarkable and singular film, Häxan freely mixes documentary and dramatic storytelling to trace a history of witchcraft and the historically contingent beliefs and attitudes that guided public response to marginalized women that medieval society deemed evil but which modern society has diagnosed as suffering from pathological disorders like hysteria. The most aesthetically remarkable sequences take place in the Middle Ages, dramatizing the strange lore and superstitions that fed into the self-perpetuating mass hysteria of witch accusations and trials. Christensen himself plays Satan—complete with horns, batlike ears, pointy claws, a devious smile, and a lasciviously flicking tongue. A variety of other monsters and folkloric chimera are brought to life in the film as well, in scenes that depict the decadent and perverse Satanic orgies medieval folk beliefs assumed the accused witches were party to.

The intent of such sequences, it becomes clear as the film goes on, is not merely to dazzle the audience with Christensen’s mastery of cinematic spectacle, though he succeeds marvelously in this task. Rather, the payoff comes at the end of the film, when Christensen’s historical narrative brings the spectator into present-day medical and psychiatric treatments of pathological women. According to one intertitle late in the film, “There are several connections between the ancient witch and the modern hysteric.” Nightly visits from the devil, according to the film, are now understood as sleep disorders like somnambulism. In one sequence, a shot of an accused witch being prodded on the back during her interrogation dissolves into a shot of a modern hysteric similarly prodded by a doctor. A condition of tactile insensitivity—which in the Middle Ages was seen as a sign that the devil had visited the witch and touched her skin, rendering the flesh insensitive—is now seen as a sign of psychosomatic disorder, since spots of numbness are now considered a symptom of hysteria. After showing how the doctor threatens to have the patient legally detained at his clinic, a subsequent intertitle empathetically comments on the plight of the woman: “Poor little hysterical witch. During the Middle Ages you came into conflict with the church. Now there are run-ins with the law.”

Häxan ends by directly questioning the degree to which such historical shifts toward the medicalization of non-normative femininity represents progress. “The witch no longer flies away on her broom over the rooftops,” remarks one intertitle, followed by a shot of a female pilot waving to the camera in front of a modern biplane. “But isn’t superstition still rampant among us?” The film illustrates the persistence of superstition by showing fortune-tellers and tarot card readers plying their craft. While we no longer burn the old and impoverished, “don’t they often still suffer bitterly?” The film invokes the “little woman whom we call hysterical,” and asks rhetorically, “Isn’t she still a riddle for us?” “Nowadays we detain the unhappy in a mental institution or—if she is wealthy—in a modern clinic. And then we will console ourselves with the notion that the mildly temperate shower of the clinic has replaced the barbaric methods of medieval times.”

The final two shots of the film offer a withering critique of this self-congratulatory notion of social progress in the modern era. In the first, a modern woman—evidently a well-heeled hysteric—is ushered into a warm shower by a pair of nurses. This picture of bourgeois opulence in the gentle and humane treatments offered by modern psychiatric clinics jarringly dissolves to a shot of three bodies being burned at the stake, a shocking image of female suffering and barbaric societal cruelty that the film lingers on for the final twenty seconds of its running time. The polemical implication of this dissolve is clear: though treatments have become ostensibly gentler under the guise of modern medical practice, there is an undercurrent of misogyny that bridges the gap between the Middle Ages and the modern age, lingering in the uncanny persistence of prejudice and cruelty.

In its revisionist approach to the tradition of torturing women in Scandinavian cinema, Thelma takes a similar tack to Häxan by fixating on the persistence of misogyny in contemporary Norwegian society. Though it may have assumed the more benign guise of parental concern and medical observation, the social techniques of misogynistic control have only become more refined. Like the historical trajectory Foucault traces from the medieval public spectacles of penal punishment to the “gentler” and more covert practices of discipline and panoptic surveillance, misogynistic violence has become a softer and more insidious policing mechanism. As Kate Manne writes, misogyny is a self-effacing system that spreads more virulently when it goes undetected. By training his critique of paternalistic control of women on Scandinavian cinema, Joachim Trier is not setting up an exceptional example of misogyny in an otherwise progressive and egalitarian society. Instead, Thelma shows how progressivism can serve as an absolving and self-congratulatory cloak that obscures pervasive and systemic practices of gender-based violence.