[Pride 2021] Make Your Own Experiences: The Anxiety of Intimacy in Thelma

Ever watch something that pulls you down so deeply into the waters of your own memories?

It’s all you can do to tread water, let alone figure out how to condense those memories into writing.  The first and second times I watched Thelma I loved it but couldn’t articulate why beyond an aesthetic argument.  It’s not like Joachim Trier’s quiet thriller was formative to my queer self-awareness.

It came out in 2017. I had come out long before that point. 

Thelma is a beautiful supernatural coming-of-age story complicated by queer attraction that for once isn’t subtext. Thelma (Eili Harboe) is a sheltered, homeschooled young woman leaving home for the first time to attend college. Her horror is born from a newly germinated desire for romantic intimacy. It’s a desire that she never entertained back home where everything was regimented and painted with a cautious, religious brush.

And so it was on my latest rewatch of Thelma that I broke surface and realized that what I had been feeling all along was a sense of mourning. Like Thelma and, I hazard, a lot of queer folk, I was a bit of a late bloomer. My youth lacked (conscious) crushes and awkward romantic fumblings. Like Thelma, I came to know myself in university and felt like I was miles behind my classmates in terms of life experiences. And I felt like I was somehow going about everything wrong.

The first time her classmate Anja (Kaya Wilkins) sits down in an adjacent study carousel, Thelma is taken by her first rush of attraction and the first outward manifestation of her repressive instincts.  

Through a window we see starlings taking flight in whirling murmurations — a testament of control and communication between hundreds of tiny living parts — until birds start to wheel away from the flock to slam into the library windows. Inside, Thelma is having a seizure.

As Thelma uncovers the strange nature of her seizures and the reality-altering effects that coincide with them, she’s met with the recurring message that the desire is the problem and, by extension, her queerness is monstrosity. 

“There’s something within you,” Thelma’s father (Henrik Rafaelsen) tells her, “If you truly desire something with body and mind, there’s something within you that can make it happen.” He nearly convinces her that Anja has disappeared because Thelma is in love with her, rather than because she is afraid to love her. Even worse, he suggests that any love that Thelma might receive in life might be a sham forced into reality by her strange abilities.

Of course, Thelma’s queer desire isn’t the problem. It’s that she denies herself the space to experience desire, thanks to her upbringing and ingrained beliefs that her desires are sinful. While away at college, even testing the waters of a first drink and first cigarette caused her shame and anxiety. Love and sex are fine for other people, but they are overwhelming prospects for her. 

It’s almost funny that most of Thelma’s problems could have been avoided if she’d just taken the plunge into her romantic feelings for Anja. Besides her intense wish for her crush to go away causing Anja to literally wink out of existence, the film is peppered with scenes that could have been safely, blissfully gay, if Thelma had been able to let herself go and embrace the moment. Thelma nearly crushes an entire theatre under an enormous ceiling fixture just trying to keep herself under control when Anja puts a hand on her bare leg, but when they actually kiss in the coat check, there is no cataclysm. There’s uncertainty, sure, but nothing shatters and reality abides by its usual rules.

Of course, it’s easier said than done when it comes to keeping Thelma’s brand of panic in check. If I can point to one scene in the film that resonated with me the most, it would be Thelma’s sleepover scene, in which she and Anja share a bed after Anja appears outside Thelma’s building, apparently called there psychically. Anja sleeps soundly and unaware as Thelma seems entranced with the baby hairs on the back of Anja’s neck (and is probably trying not to breathe on them). She reaches out careful fingers to touch loose strands of hair that fan out across the pillow. When she later finds a single strand of Anja’s hair left behind in her bed, Thelma is nearly reverent, examining it closely before tenderly placing it back onto the bed.

Even before I was out to myself, sleepovers were a source of immense anxiety for me. I would barely sleep because I was hyper-aware that there was a sleeping body mere inches away from mine, warming the air between us. I was afraid to move and accidentally touch them, afraid to accidentally wake them up. I remember a sleepover once where I was sharing a pull-out couch with a friend (crush) and when she threw her arm across me in her sleep I fully panicked. Instead of just removing her arm like a more reasonable person would, I slowly extricated myself from under her arm by practically oozing off the mattress. And then I walked home at 3 am without telling a soul.

So I feel like I understand at least a little bit of Thelma’s agony. 

In his director’s commentary for  the film, Joachim Trier notes that he took pains to establish Thelma’s affinity with nature. The creatures that we see tied to Thelma the most — snakes and starlings — reek of metaphors for desire: an Edenic desire for knowledge in the former, and a desire to understand the auspices of fate, or the machinations of the universe in the latter.

When we finally see Thelma taking ownership of her powers she is surrounded by nature, lake-soaked and lying at the edge of a forest. She vomits a single starling into the moss beside her — the same bird that echoed her distress at the beginning of the film. This time, it flies away, freed. 

We can interpret the ending of Thelma in a few ways. If you believe that Thelma is doomed to only ever conjure love by warping reality, then her ending is monstrous and lonely. To me, the narrative has set Thelma on a path to transcend repression and shed the idea that desire is sin. Either way, she has embraced both her queerness and her powers.

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