ABSTRACT
What do recent genre films, addressing at the same time queerness and foreignness while obliquely reflecting on the status of migrants in the twenty-first-century European Union, have to teach us about feeling and looking? This general question is explored with reference to four very different features – Border/Gräns (2018, Abbasi), Gutland (2017, Van Maele), Thelma (2017, Trier), Queen of Hearts/Dronningen (2019, el-Toukhy) – which, although not engaging with the current migrant crisis per se, explore issues corollary with the topic of migration and minorities, namely queerness, adoption, seasonal work, and the strictures of a professed ‘multicultural’ society. Moreover, all four films, as a function of their embracing genre, emphasise – over traditional narration, dialogue, and even the visual/descriptive – dimensions of textures and touch. Through analysis of key sequences, it is argued that the various allegories laid out in these films allow us to engage with them as dealing with the status of any individual or group confronted with an environment trying to repress or normalise ‘intruders’, often out of fear or xenophobia and Islamophobia. Indeed, they fit well into the recent discussion proposed by Thomas Elsaesser around the abject subject in film, for all the protagonists, not unlike migrants or homeless people (or both), are treated as abjects, i.e., individuals who are not so much victims as beings with an ill-defined legal status. Ultimately, what all four films have in common is the topic of integration and the more-often-than-not abject failure of this project in a neoliberal society. While they are flawed in different ways, together they reveal how cinematic genre has a renewed valence in addressing deep societal issues and dealing with the ‘homo sacer’ status (Agamben), and how abjection, self-abjectifying, and objectification are played out and can be productively used (if only as parapraxis) by people from minorities – be they sexual, ethnic, or indeed geopolitical. That such films can be empowering to representatives of these groups is far from certain, but that they express the anxiety of established entities over the organising and mobilising into genuine political communities of those who successfully resisted uniformisation is both unsettling and exhilarating.
