Trauma, queer sexuality and symbolic storytelling in Joachim Trier’s Thelma

Abstract

This article analyses Joachim Trier’s Thelma () through the concept of trauma, brought on by the title character’s perception of her sexuality as ‘deviant’ and reinforced by her rigidly religious parents’ efforts to tame it by force. Their symbolic enactment of bad parenting manifests itself in a form of Foucauldian biopower on the father’s part and as a Kristevan monstrous-feminine attitude on the mother’s. To heal from trauma, Thelma must free herself from parental control. By focalizing the narrative through Thelma’s mental subjectivity and with religious and supernatural imagery, the film expresses this process symbolically rather than figuratively.