Polish Manhood in Transition: Anxieties of Neoliberal Masculinity in Robert Gliński’s Cześć Tereska

Masculinity and Film Analysis

Since the opening up of academic inquiry after 1989, scholars within Poland have developed a rich literature on masculinity. Their concerns have centered on how state interventions in social relations in different historical periods—such as nationalism, state socialism, or liberalism, to name a few—have shaped the construction of gender identities. ³ Specifically, for these scholars Poland’s history of devastating wars and revolts against external occupiers represent a difficult legacy for masculinity. The history of persistent political defeat renders any archetypal masculine assertion, such as heroism, tragic, inaccessible, or a delusion. ⁴ Within Polish scholarship, cultural expressions such as film and literature always bring with them this context of a wounded or closed-off masculinity, even when they are attempting to question it. ⁵ Men who are presented as emasculated, powerless, or with “feminine” characteristics are interpreted as exhibiting the consequences of Poland’s political history, or at least a social malaise stemming from the costs of traditional forms of manhood. ⁶ In this framing, men on screen reflect men in off-screen social relations. This “reflection” approach asks compelling questions about Polish history and culture, especially about how identity can be constructed in the face of such a complex history. ⁷

By the 2000s, both academic and popular observers were connecting the impact of capitalist economic forms with this historical legacy for masculinity and femininity. ⁸ Specifically, sociologist Zbyszko Melosik argued that Poland was experiencing a renewed “crisis of masculinity.” ⁹ Because a free market brings with it a receptivity to Western popular culture, Melosik found that Polish “masculinity” was increasingly affected by Western consumerist concerns with the visual presentation of the male body. He diagnosed this as a “feminization.” Melosik’s arguments fit into wider social fears about how Poland’s cultural values, themselves heavily informed by Catholicism, could survive in the post-1989 environment of moral openness. The “crisis of masculinity” became a popular way to frame conflictual issues in social relations. ¹⁰ Specifically, women’s increased access to economic resources, status, and mobility in the post-communist years is often labeled as indicative of an excessive “feminization” of Poland. ¹¹ Those supporting gendered hierarchies use “crisis of masculinity” to justify resisting these changes. In their view, the loss of a coherent, integrated masculinity has disempowered men. Often this lost masculine formation is tied to claims for the superiority of “traditional” gender roles, a nostalgia for the past, and a call for an ethnically pure exclusionary nationalism. Some scholars have labeled this call a “re-traditionalization,” that is, an attempt to re-install definitions of masculinity that legitimate the disempowerment of women. ¹² Thus, in Poland today the terms masculinity and femininity are associated with highly emotionally charged political strategies and interpretations of the past and present.

The “reflection” approach to men on screen, which assumes an understanding of Polish masculinity as a coherent, unified set of behaviors and values that are easily legible with obvious cultural referents, is a fruitful mode of finding significance in a visual text, but it is not the only one. Indeed, specific Polish directors such as Andrzej Żulawski have been analyzed as locating their visions of a Polish experience completely outside of the specifically Polish history of a struggle for manhood. ¹³ Film scholars who have been influenced by psychoanalytic theories about identity, self and gender have questioned the assumption that gendered portrayals are direct expressions of femininity or masculinity, or of a particular community’s history. ¹⁴ Specifically, they question two aspects of the “reflection” approach. First, they find “identity”—and with it, gender—to be elusive. Psychoanalytic approaches to identity find conflict, contradiction, and anxiety in self-making. The “I” seeks out “other” for self-definition, even as that self-definition is a never-ending process. Thus, difference (especially sexual difference) is always a prior condition of what “gender” expresses, be it on screen or elsewhere. ¹⁵ An influential voice in this regard is Gilles Deleuze, whose work questioned the status of a pre-existing identity that anchors our understanding of the world around us. ¹⁶ For him, asserting an image—or description of any kind, in visual or other languages—is always an attempt to limit or control meaning. This control might not be apparent, even to those it benefits. However, it is part of all representation. This representation is a response to, for Deleuze, unbounded possibility, that is, “desire.” He notes that to “ground no longer means to inaugurate and render possible representation, but to render representation infinite.” ¹⁷ How, then, to understand film, or even a specific film? For Deleuze and others influenced by psychoanalytic approaches to meaning, we may enjoy a film as a representation of an imagined scenario, but to take the portrayals in that film as expressions of a unified aspect of identity—masculinity, for example—would be a misunderstanding. Instead, these theorists look at films as processes of working out, narratively, a problem, or as a sequence of images that expose contradictions in our accepted (dominant) system of representation. Thus, a film may be understood as an interruption of a hoped-for imagined scenario, rather than an affirmation.

The second way scholars have questioned the “reflection” approach concerns ideology. As noted above, the “reflection” approach posits a “crisis of masculinity” in Poland because of the near-constant external coercion Poland as a national community has experienced over time; this makes the development of a consistent, integrated masculinity very difficult to achieve. The “crisis of masculinity” assigns these external forces the position of ideology and assigns gendered individuals the position of either resisting this ideology or exhibiting the wounds it creates. Scholars using psychoanalytic approaches to film view ideology differently. They find that it is not limited to belief systems imposed from the outside on members of a cultural community, but that it extends to culture itself, and that it is sustained—often unconsciously—by those it controls. In a sense, ideology is Deleuze’s controlling representation made systematic.

Kaja Silverman’s work brings these two critiques of the “reflection” approach together in her theory of ideology and gender. ¹⁸ For her, “masculinity” and “femininity” live within ideology. Ideology is the dominant social order as it is represented and carried out in public culture; it is the attempt to capture the infinite possibilities of meaning and limit them, generating a certain sense of the world in doing so. We can never “step outside of ideology altogether,” because we need language, but we can “become aware of its operations” and what it hides. ¹⁹ In other words, we can realize that the unified identities we are presented with in culture function to manage our desires. Film, with its “unprecedented realism of the image—its apparent naturalness,” in Linda Williams’s words, can work well to reinforce this management, or it can interrupt ideology’s unities. ²⁰ Similarly, the viewer can look at the screen and “find” reinforcement of an ideological wish or find that wish subverted. The difference depends on how the film itself uses techniques to push the viewer into identifying with a character or portrayal on screen, by “suturing” (in Silverman’s words) us to an on-screen identification as a way to resolve tension, anxiety, or “seek refuge within the film’s fiction.” ²¹ Of course, film narrative can privilege a certain viewer’s wish over another’s. ²² Masculinity, in this view, is part of this process, not prior to it. For Silverman, the key is to find the discontinuities hidden by the dominant order—to become aware of the processes by which a subject’s desire is made to serve ideology.

In this light, Cześć Tereska’s problematic male figures do not just reflect Poland’s post-transition problems with masculine identity. Using Silverman’s view that masculinity is not a pre-existing social construction referring to “maleness,” but a facet of ideology, we argue that Cześć Tereska positions its male characters as working through impulses that are staged as “masculine,” but which exact a high personal cost and which require a repeated summoning up of an imagined feminine. Moreover, an anxiety about the consequences of these enactments—that is, an awareness of the contradictions hidden underneath them—finds expression in the film and repeatedly justifies the narrative’s location of Tereska, who is forced to play the role of “woman” for the men in the film, in harm’s way. In other words, instead of representing types of men, Gliński’s film exposes the ways individuals negotiate expectations generated by “masculinity” (especially those called for by neoliberalism) and in so doing create negative effects for others.

Neoliberalism’s Impact on Poland

Cześć Tereska was one of the first Polish films to look back critically on the collapse of state socialism and its replacement by neoliberalism. ²³ Neoliberalism is the assemblage of practices and discourses that acquired enormous legitimacy in Eastern Europe and Eurasia as a powerful alternative to state socialism as Communist Party rule eroded in the late 1980s. ²⁴ The withdrawal of the state from the economy and the linkage of private property to individual freedom are the most prominent elements in the collection of neoliberal practices. While Venelin Ganev has challenged the view that neoliberalism functions as a dominant ideology in Eastern Europe and that there are discernable unique elements common to all neoliberal projects, it is the case that the state withdrawal of subsidies from many parts of the economy in Poland was experienced as a reorganization of economic and social life according to a neoliberal logic. ²⁵ Economic privatization of large firms entailed the retreat of the state from ensuring employment, which led to uncertainty, a loss of wage-earning work, and newly strained household budgets. ²⁶ The shift to a capitalism that was structured around privatization, private property, and the privacy of family life generated significant stresses on family structures, gendered social relations, and public and private morality. ²⁷ The early 1990s were economically devastating for many in Poland who found themselves suddenly unemployed and without savings, yet exposed to the consumerist dreams of the West. ²⁸ The positioning of private property as the ultimate indicator of economic success for self and family undermined other values, such as care for extended family. The heralding of the nuclear family as ideal and the home as the private sphere led to public spaces becoming sites of neglect, criminality, and the absence of morality. ²⁹

Scholars have pointed out that neoliberalism’s discursive dominance in the societies in which it has been installed has resulted in imperatives for individuals to reshape themselves—to create new, liberal “selves” that fit into the new economic, political, and cultural structures. Examples include Trenholme Junghans on how specific “techniques” and “dispositions” of entrepreneurship connect individuals to new resources in post-communist Hungary; ³⁰ Banu Gökarikson and Anna Secor on the ability of the fashion industry to shape expressions of Muslim piety and modernity in Turkey; ³¹ and Aihwa Ong on the emergence of the “knowledge worker” in Malaysia. ³² For the case of Poland, Elizabeth Dunn’s study on privatization and the shaping of baby food consumers skillfully captures how new corporate marketing campaigns (“niche marketing”) functioned in the “restructuring of desire and social personhood.” ³³ Drawing on Foucault’s theory of governmentality, but also on ethnography—how people actually behave in the context of neoliberal values and institutions—this literature points out how little room there is for subjectivities outside of neoliberalism. ³⁴ In other words, neoliberalism calls into being neoliberal subjects—people who view themselves first and foremost as individuals, resilient, capable of self-discipline, and able to ward off threats to property rights and family well-being. ³⁵

These subjects are, of course, gendered. Most critical approaches to gender in neoliberalism stress the importance of the subject as a productive, autonomous, and rational individual who operates in gendered modes. ³⁶ Neoliberalism creates processes in which men are rewarded for the specific traits of independence from others, entrepreneurship, self-control, physical robustness, virility, self-government, and the capacity to function as vigilant protectors of the private family home, that is, the space in which private property and family merge. Men should know their own limits and at the same time be capable of establishing limits for others, especially their own family members. The ideology of neoliberalism embeds “masculinity” within its symbolic order, such that it appears natural and uncoerced. Sexual difference is, then, carried by “femininity.” Women are to keep the privacy of the family intact and sustain the family within the private home (among other things), and to also enter the public realm to function entrepreneurially in the labor market. ³⁷ Finally, neoliberalism also marks out gendered (and racialized) practices that are labeled dangerous to the dominant political community, such as use of social services or living in an urban underserved neighborhood. ³⁸ Women who transgress the domains of home and workplace, refuse the pathways of family and labor productivity, and engage in sexual practices that do not support neoliberal aims are threats.

Analyzing Cześć Tereska

Commentary and reviews immediately following Cześć Tereska’s release agreed that the character Tereska symbolizes a “girl gone wrong,” a female whose femininity becomes distorted. ³⁹ In this view, Tereska and her street friends represent threats posed by teenagers with “criminal habits” unsupervised in the public realm. ⁴⁰ Gliński himself invited this interpretation in interviews, in which he publicized his casting of a nonprofessional actor, who previously had been in legal trouble, as Tereska. ⁴¹ The media eagerly picked up the storyline of the “juvenile delinquent” actress, Ola Gietner, who disappeared after the film was distributed. ⁴² The New York Times even labeled Gietner a “reform school girl” who was given a chance for stardom by Gliński, but was in some way too incorrigible to make it to an awards ceremony in the United States, where she had been nominated for best actress. ⁴³ That Gietner may have been affected by trauma in her youth, exploited by Gliński for the film, or overwhelmed by the publicity about her, was not noted. Gliński’s casting, the media’s fascination with Geitner’s moral virtue, and the centrality of the Tereska character all contribute to a framing of Cześć Tereska as a film about girlhood gone awry.

In the analysis of Cześć Tereska presented here, we challenge the naturalizing focus on Tereska/Ola as a source of danger, and instead develop a reading of the film that brings to the forefront instances in which the supposed easy alignment of manhood and competitive individualism on behalf of the family are ruptured. Through what may be called a counter-reading—since it does not stem from the director’s intentions—we argue that the gestures presented as “masculinity” are carried through to crisis rather than to the actualization of an integrated gender formation. Each “male” character is legible as (neoliberally) masculine in some aspects, but ultimately cannot fully achieve the manhood demanded of him. Moreover, the anxieties generated by these ruptures devolve onto Tereska, as the narrative positions her to contain and accommodate them. While the film frequently situates her as initiating danger, a detailed look at selected scenes opens up an interpretation from outside of neoliberalism that allows for Tereska’s struggle to imagine choices on her own terms to become visible.

To develop this interpretation, we provide readers with specifics about the interactions between Tereska and others and the contexts in which they interact, often describing scenes in detail. This approach enables us to accommodate readers who have not viewed this film or did so in the distant past. Using this textured description, we document significant instances in which a series of masculinizing gestures are attempted, and then brought to a crisis or rupture point. We then place Tereska in relation to these gestures and their dissolution, developing the implications of these processes for her as a person. In this way we look with rather than at Tereska, to see the fragility of masculinity itself.

Problematic Autonomy: Stasiek’s Neoliberal Father

The political and economic values of private property, individualism, and privacy ushered in a conception of “the family” that began to displace Poland’s commonly accepted extended kinship forms, in which responsibility for children, acquiring food and shelter, and dealing with crises such as unexpected financial hardship was spread among parents, grandparents, in-laws, and longtime family friends. ⁴⁴ While state socialism (and its accompanying postwar urbanization) had eroded some of these practices, in the 1990s the definition of family as two parents with one or two children, living with no other relatives in self-contained housing, came to be seen as the ideal expression of Poland’s entry into modern, “Western” social relations. Within the environment of uncertain employment and rising prices, this truncated family structure was to achieve its goals via a male father who took responsibility for not just the family’s economic stability but its external security and internal discipline. As the neoliberal public face of the family, the father was to embody this stability, security and discipline, as wage-earner, public citizen, and inside the private home, law-giver. ⁴⁵

Cześć Tereska opens with an extended scene of children in church dressed for their Holy Communion ritual; the camera lingers on the faces of different children, finally coming to rest on a girl who opens her mouth to receive the wafer from the priest’s hands. This theme of innocence, receptivity and trust is destabilized as the camera abruptly cuts away and the audience is presented with a long shot of apartment buildings, called “blokowiska” in Polish to refer to their block-type aesthetic. The camera pans across the private balconies and gives the audience short glimpses of men on them. These glimpses each invoke a type of “typical” Polish masculinity, as the men smoke, spit, appear barely clothed, and usually alone. The camera then pans around the buildings to the front plaza where the children, released from the church service, run to launch a snowball fight. Tereska is shown on an apartment stairwell, tenuously negotiating a pair of roller skates, and looks with delight out onto the plaza until a boy throws a rock and shatters the window. Injured and on the ground, Tereska’s blood stains her white Holy Communion dress in an obvious mark of loss of innocence. This opening series of scenes establishes the theme of a young girl encountering expressions of manhood in its culturally specific variety. The shock of the fallen child is resolved for the audience by the introduction of Tereska’s father, Stasiek, who they see calmly smoking in front of the television with the bandaged Tereska lying in his lap. The implication here is that Stasiek has given or taken Tereska for medical treatment, calmed her down and is himself unperturbed yet completely available to offer comfort and care.

Tereska’s mother, who goes unnamed throughout the film, is frequently on screen in the first half of the movie, initially a stable caring presence that allows the audience to track time passing through her attendance at childhood rituals such as a school concert, eventually with a second child. It is important to note that approximately seven minutes into the film Tereska suddenly appears as an adolescent; the rest of the movie follows her through this period in her life. Both mother and father attempt to make a place for Tereska within Poland’s school and vocational structures. Early on, Tereska’s mother notices her interest in clothing and enrolls her in a clothing design program, but her tuition and supplies place an additional financial burden on the family. Both parents are portrayed as working to sustain the small, cramped apartment in which Tereska and her younger sister share a room.

Tereska’s uncomfortable negotiations with her mother about funds for school set the stage for her father, Stasiek, to gesture toward neoliberal masculinity. In a noteworthy scene in the small kitchen, Tereska is rebuked by her mother when she requests additional money to purchase supplies. Stasiek abruptly reaches into a container holding the family savings and presents Tereska directly with a large bill. With this move, he calmly and triumphantly asserts an individual economic power that he does not truly have. In the process of claiming a privileged position in the family, he undermines the careful work Tereska’s mother has done to set parameters on Tereska’s desires (and to protect the family unit).

Initially, Stasiek is presented as a humorous, loving figure whose body language and self-presentation invoke the posture of a familiar Polish male figure: smoking, watching television, drinking alcohol, commenting dryly on what he observes. As the film proceeds, Stasiek’s ability to consistently care for and protect Tereska is compromised by the difficulties of keeping his job, finding extra income, maintaining stable relationships with neighbors in the cramped apartment building, and repressing any expression of need. He is played by Krzysztof Kiersznowski, a well-known film and television actor who brings a specific type of gendered authority to the role. This authority works to first help Stasiek appear to be in control of himself and his family, emotionally and financially. He is well aware that he functions as the border between his loved ones and the chaos of the outside world.

This control is lost over a series of scenes, initiated by his abrupt arrival home in the afternoon unsteady on his feet. He is wearing his security officer uniform and holding two inflated toys. Tereska and her sister stare in shock. Tereska’s mother pushes him into the bathroom, away from the girls. His anger at this is smoothed for the audience by his humorously tight hold on the toys. But in a later scene—set at midnight when Tereska returns home and Stasiek is waiting up for her—he loses his temper and hits her, berating her with “In my home you do what I say!” She maintains her calm and accuses her father of bad behavior himself, as he is drunk. The interaction escalates as Tereska’s mother intervenes, Stasiek raises his voice, and a neighbor calls through the apartment walls for Stasiek to be quiet. Enraged at his inability to control his teenaged daughter, but also at the intrusion of neighbors through the thin apartment walls, Stasiek puts on his security officer’s coat and moves into the darkened, cramped hallway to threaten the complaining neighbor physically. As residents and Tereska’s mother try to calm him down, he becomes increasingly agitated, grabbing an axe and chasing others down the hallway, stopped only by a metal gate thrown quickly across an entryway. Shouting that he must institute order, he takes the axe to the elevator control panel.

The camera lingers on the out-of-control Stasiek, inside a tiny elevator, pointlessly hacking at its walls. The incongruity of his large body within the small frame of the elevator is heightened by another contrast, that of the security uniform he is wearing and the fact that he is perpetrating actions that he would normally be policing. Here it is clear that the demands of masculinity are generating contradictions that Stasiek cannot contain. That he paused to find his work apparel, putting the uniform on over his nightclothes, indicates his need to invoke his work identity, the symbol of his social status. More importantly, the jacket mediates his desperation by giving him the illusion of permission to act out his fears in public, through violence. Stasiek is not reflecting a male stereotype, archetype, or “role”; he is bursting through the constraints of neoliberal masculinity.

During this extended scene, the camera cuts away periodically to Tereska and her tearful mother. Tereksa tries to dissociate from what is happening but eventually comes out of her room to watch her father. It is clear she is confused and fearful at his complete breakdown. After this event, Tereska becomes even closer to her classmate and petty criminal, Renata, and adopts her rebellious manner of speaking to adults disrespectfully. In a subsequent scene, when Tereska returns home late and finds her father passively lying on a couch, she stands over him and berates him with sarcasm, mocking him for his breakdown. He looks away, unable to meet her eyes. Silverman and others who theorize sexual difference as an effect of ideology might argue that this scene plays out for the audience as a failure of connection. Tereska looks for the man in her father and finds it missing. Stasiek’s loss of self-control has not made him more manly; instead, it has rendered him ashamed and immobile. The removal of the father-as-limit gives Tereska temporary intermixed feelings of fear and power, which register in her face.

The Disabled Figure in the Neoliberal Landscape

The European welfare state’s provision of subsidies to support disabled citizens had extended into Eastern Europe during Communist Party rule, conditioned, however, by the social marginalization of those with compromised abilities. ⁴⁶ The arrival of neoliberalism’s insistence on individual effort, wage work, and autonomy added to this marginalization to increase the vulnerability and isolation of disabled citizens. ⁴⁷ This compounded the already existing cultural stigmatization of the disabled, ⁴⁸ a norm that Gliński exploits through the character of Edek. Edek is initially introduced as a figure of pathos; he relies on a wheelchair and it is established early in the film that he has no feeling in his legs. His sexual potency is left ambiguous, although Tereska’s mother assumes him to be safe enough to entrust elementary school–aged Tereska to his care after school.

Edek’s inability to use his legs as a fully abled person makes him, in the neoliberal order but also the larger heteronormative one, an incomplete person and thus unable to claim manliness. However, through a series of scenes, the film moves him from an object of the viewer’s sympathy to a subject who draws Tereska into his reality in order to sexually exploit her. The audience is invited to see Edek as a debased masculine figure, able to express his sexual desires only on the very vulnerable, that is, Tereska as a child and then later when she is a distressed teenager. The exact relationship between his physical disability and his predatory behavior is ambiguous, to the audience and to the character Tereska. Edek at times exhibits masochistic impulses as well as sadistic. The contrast to the fully-abled Jasiu—a character discussed below—seems to imply that it is his physical incompleteness that causes his sexual desires to become distorted. He not only does not fit into the physical ideals of neoliberal manhood, he acts to pervert them.

Gliński presents Edek initially as in control of his environment, employed as the building attendant of a multistory structure. His ground floor room operates as his workspace and living quarters. Edek is never depicted outside this space in the film. One wall consists of sliding windows that open onto an entry hallway. Users of the building collect and drop off keys as they come and go for work. Edek’s interactions with other adults are circumscribed by the workday structure, leaving him alone in the building in the evenings. Gliński uses the camera to frame Edek’s interactions tightly, to foreground the space itself as a limitation and a refuge. Yet Gliński also shows how, as the narrative unfolds, Tereska gradually begins to enter this space more assertively. The space is simultaneously his own, marked by door frames and windows, but his personal life is exposed more often than not because of his duties. And when Tereska barges in (in a late scene with Renata), Edek is portrayed as grateful for the company.

The first time Tereska’s mother asks Edek to watch Tereska, she is in grammar school and he entertains her with wheelchair tricks. The film depicts Edek moving about with confidence and grace; his disability is not an obstacle to his assertion of his full persona in this establishing scene. Edek jokes with the shy Tereska. Eventually he pulls her onto his lap and rhythmically moves his wheelchair—and his body—to simulate a playground ride. His playfulness metamorphizes into sexualized danger as the camera lingers on them in profile until the tension of the encounter for viewers is ended by Tereska and Edek tipping backward onto the floor. He has lost control of his wheelchair, and in the process of falling, the wheelchair has cut open his leg. In an attempt to reestablish control, Edek reassures the concerned Tereska that he does not feel any pain. His self-assured presentation of his wound to Tereska, offered almost as a gift, seems to bolster the sense of Edek as in control of his body, even while they both are on the ground.

Tereska next encounters Edek after a personal crisis—one of her schoolmates has stolen the large sum of money her father gave her to purchase supplies for her fashion design program. Now age thirteen or so, she greets him through his open window as she waits on a corner across from his building. Edek comes into view at this point as a more degraded persona than in his first scene. His hair is disheveled, his skin is sweaty, and he does not recognize Tereska at first. She enters his office, seeking consolation, and reminds him that they had known each other when she was younger. ⁴⁹

In this scene Edek seeks to create an intimacy with Tereska, transgressing once again what a self-disciplined adult male “should” do with an adolescent girl. This occurs when Edek acknowledges he knows Tereska and points out the place on the door frame where he marked her height as a child; he uses this gesture to establish her maturity. He invites her to address him informally (as Edziu), as an equal, and share an alcoholic drink. With these enticements, he appeals to her desire to be taken as an adult while at the same time attempting to create a bond of shared transgressive behavior. Tereska must take charge if she does not want to be sexualized; she does this by declining the drink, which reasserts the age boundary between them.

Yet Tereska also takes note of Edek’s desperation as he is unable to prevent himself from taking a drink himself. She asks him for money, to replace what has been stolen from her, so that she will not have to tell her parents. He refuses but initiates a sexual transaction by asking her to kiss him. Tereska rejects him, stating, “I’m going,” gets up and moves toward the door. Edek frantically follows in his wheelchair, pleading for her return. The audience can see that Edek has lost his sobriety, his resources, but more importantly his control of the transaction and ability to measure precisely how to exploit Tereska. It is only when Edek offers Tereska an opportunity to abuse his body that she turns and re-enters his room. In this moment the audience sees a new side of Tereska, as a person willing to exploit Edek’s vulnerability and begin to set the terms of the bargain. In the startling continuation of this scene, Edek invites Tereska to burn his unfeeling legs with a cigarette. She kneels down and does so with fascination, asking him periodically if it hurts. The interchange between them is marked by an intimate closeness. The audience is invited to share in the fascination and transgression, through identification with Tereska. The camera moves in tightly to her face. The interaction is interrupted by Tereska’s mother, who works in the building, returning keys to the office. She is immediately suspicious, asking, “What are you two doing?” and the scene is immediately re-read as one of sexual intimacy, Tereska hunched down over Edek’s torso.

In the penultimate scene of the film Edek again presents himself to Tereska as an object, by inviting her to beat his legs with a metal rod used to prop open the window. Tereska stands, circling him with the rod, as Edek, unable to remove himself from the situation, follows her movements with his eyes. With this scene, Gliński invites the audience to see Tereska as transferring the fear and vulnerability she feels elsewhere onto Edek’s body. Yet this is another transaction, one of Edek offering his body as an object to entice attention and intimacy from her. The only power he has over Tereska is his ability to make this offering, an action inconsistent with neoliberal expectations of bodily self-possession. In a reversal of liberal heteronormativity, Tereska—legible as female—stands with a weapon over a partially immobile Edek, who is allowing himself to function as an object for her use. The casting of Zbigniew Zamachowski, among the most well-known actors in Poland and a celebrity, as Edek only works to heighten the tension of this reversal.

Sexual Assault and Becoming the Neoliberal Man

The third significant figure that fails to live up to neoliberal expectations is Jasiu, a teenaged boy who Tereska meets roaming the city. This happens through her growing relationship with her schoolmate Renata.

While at school, Tereska develops a friendship with Renata, who is also in her early teens but whose make-up, smoking, and braggadocio contrast with Tereska’s naivete and reserve. Renata shows Tereska how to make fun of their teachers, lie, and flirt with the boys who wander through the apartment complex courtyards in the early evenings. The risks Tereska takes, such as smoking her first cigarette and sharing her first bottle of beer, portray her as tentatively seeking a way out of her naivete. Although Renata takes advantage of Tereska and lies to her, Tereska only partially registers this, and holds onto the relationship, drawn in by Renata’s confidence and seeming empowerment. They begin to interact with a specific group of boys regularly. These young men are portrayed as disrespectful and ill-mannered, but are also shown embodying a swagger and boldness that Renata tells Tereska is desirable. In later scenes, it becomes clear that their assertiveness is a compensation for aimlessness and isolation, as they linger in public places during daylight hours out of boredom and exhibit difficulty communicating authentically with each other. The boys do not truly speak with Renata and Tereska; instead, they keep a distance and loudly call out challenges and dares.

These young men are not burdened with familial obligations like Tereska’s father, nor are they trapped in prohibited desires like Edek. They are free, so to speak, but the absence of constraints seems to leave them at a loss. In one scene, they shout out football slogans and joke while the camera cuts to isolated adult men in the same public plaza collecting scrap metal or drinking alcohol. The contrast invites the audience to view the boys’ bravado as a reaction to the economic difficulties that await them. They do not see any person in their milieu who offers a pathway toward the self-sufficiency and autonomy asked of them. Gliński presents them as a group of four, moving as a pack as they follow Renata and Tereska to a mall. While Tereska is entranced by the clothing in the shops, the boys watch the girls from behind the shopfront glass, gaping, leering. Renata browbeats Tereska into identifying a boy she “likes,” and chooses two boys to invite into a dilapidated wooden building for sexual intimacy. Tereska selects Jasiu, but refuses his attempts to kiss her and he allows her to leave.

In a later scene, Tereska and Jasiu begin to be more physically intimate, but she stops him from touching her further by issuing a dare: Jasiu must assault a man who has harmed her to prove his love. Tereska seems to have come up with this plan on the spot (seemingly to postpone any sexual encounter) and is amazed at the power her promise of future physical intimacy has over Jasiu. Once Tereska points to a (random) man exiting a store, Jasiu and his friend beat him, displaying for both Renata and Tereska their prowess and willingness to violate the law for them. Jasiu’s agility in moving from boy to man, from participant in childlike joking to defender and potential lover, seems to signify his control over his environment and his own desires. Neoliberal masculinity expects self-control but also potency. Like Edek’s measured seduction of Tereska, Jasiu must measure precisely how sexually assertive he should be.

Jasiu again lives up to this expectation when he and Tereska encounter Tereska’s father while walking home from a grocery store. They encounter Stasiek drinking with other men outdoors on the side of a building. It is midafternoon and it is clear these men are unemployed. Stasiek himself is even more degraded than when Tereska challenged him in his pajamas. He is unshaven and loudly boasting with the other men. As Tereska approaches with Jasiu, Stasiek sees them and chooses to remain with his group. It is telling that he does not move away from the other men to connect with his daughter. Indeed, Stasiek articulates this failure by calling out to Tereska to acknowledge him. With this request, he admits that he has become unrecognizable as a father. He again aligns himself with the other men to scrutinize both Tereska and Jasiu, mocking her by asking if Jasiu is her fiancée. Stasiek’s comments suggest that it is Tereska’s place to belong to a man, and if not him then possibly this youth; but they also function as an attempt to displace his own degradation onto Tereska. At this point, Jasiu steps forward and chastises Stasiek, and he and Tereska turn away and depart as a unit.

Tereska’s acceptance of Jasiu’s masculinity in the place of her father’s initially results in a charming domestic scene. She accompanies him to his family’s empty apartment with her groceries. She asks about the updated appliances in the kitchen and Jasiu carefully explains their workings. He teaches her how to use the microwave and waits patiently while she tries it. But soon he forces her to the floor and rapes her. The camera lets this scene slowly unfold so that Tereska’s “no” and “get off me”—that is, her attempt to stop Jasiu’s actions—is repeatedly heard by the audience. Jasiu’s potential embodiment as a self-possessed, trustworthy confidante who might be a romantic partner gives way to his unwillingness to acknowledge any limits on his sexual impulses. He is not depicted as degraded by his failure, inviting the interpretation that Tereska herself is responsible for being assaulted. But the scene also suggests that Jasiu’s potency has escaped the boundaries of his neoliberal aspirations. When the audience last sees Jasiu, he is outside with the other boys who are taunting Tereska about being her next sexual partner. Although Jasiu tells his peers to be quiet and to leave her alone he is not successful in controlling them.

Murderous Womanhood

The ending of Cześć Tereska is central to what made the film compelling for many audiences. Gliński and the actors create an intense nighttime scene between Tereska and Edek in which Edek provokes her into first striking him and then rendering him unconscious—and possibly dead—when she beats him without any restraint. Tereska’s actions move her out of the range of identification for many viewers. Her loss of self-control fits with Gliński’s theme of young people resisting traditional forms of authority and exploiting the new “freedoms” of modern, Western, neoliberal Poland. This reading of Gliński’s purpose is reinforced by the final scene. We see Tereska in daylight walking across the community play area toward her family’s apartment building. A door swings open and a young girl appears in roller skates and greets her; it is a re-enactment of the opening scene of the film where Tereska is injured by shattered glass as she skates from the security of the family home into the public realm. The audience is invited to recognize another girl ready to embark on the journey Tereska has just taken. There is no obstacle to choosing to interpret the film as a narrative of Tereska’s choices.

An alternative interpretation extends the transactional intimacy that Tereska and Edek have created into the ending. In this interpretation, Tereska is once again forced to set limits on Edek’s desires but reaches the end of her ability to do so. Edek directly confronts Tereska’s defenses and undermines them. She cannot contain him on his behalf and cannot reconstruct a reality that would leave her intact as a person. In this interpretation, the consequences of Edek’s failure as a neoliberal adult male is borne by Tereska.

After Jasiu rapes her, Tereska seeks comfort from Renata, who fails in this regard by inadvertently revealing that she stole Tereska’s fabric money. Finding herself doubly betrayed, Tereska goes to Edek’s room. Upon arriving, she requests cigarettes and an alcoholic drink. Edek provides these and makes clear he is available to listen at a price: Tereska is to tell the story that he wants to hear and to reveal the details he wants to know to satisfy his desire. The negotiation is conveyed in a slowly paced scene with the camera using close ups of Edek and Tereska. It begins with this exchange:

Here Tereska accepts Edek’s recognition of her as a mature partner. At the same time, with “today” she notes that Jasiu’s sexual assault is what has forced her into this status.

Edek immediately initiates a bargain in which he asks for details about the sexual encounter in exchange for giving Tereska permission to hit him with the metal bar.

Tereska responds by slowly describing a fantasized version of a romantic scene with Jasiu. In this fantasy Jasiu respects, seduces, and falls in love with her. But Edek rejects this version. He begins to fill in the scenario on his own. In response, Tereska picks up the bar and strikes his legs, insisting “no!” after each of Edek’s increasingly explicit questions.

Edek’s development of the narrative is too much for Tereska to take in. She must create an alternative encounter to the assault in which she has agency to sustain her sense of self. In contrast to her previous focused fascination with Edek’s lack of pain, in this scene Tereska is dreamlike as she hits him. She stares off into space. The words come slowly as she weaves her story out of her imagination. The exchange with Edek also plays out slowly, over several minutes, as Edek’s questions become more graphic and he more directly narrates what he guesses must have occurred.

When Edek crassly asks, “How did he do you?” Tereska suddenly uses the bar to smash the bottle he is drinking from and begins hitting him not on his unfeeling legs but on his shoulders and back. He bends down into his wheelchair in response but does not cry out, and he does not tell her to stop. It is Tereska who must know to stop herself. As Edek falls out of his wheelchair to the ground Tereska continues to hit him with vigor. The camera lingers for a few seconds on Edek’s unconscious face as the audience hears the stick continue to make contact with his body. Tereska eventually stops. She is breathing heavily and looking, with the viewers, at Edek’s sprawled form on the floor. In a certain sense, Edek has achieved his goal of provoking her into admitting that any story in which her own desires can be achieved is a false one. In his failure to interact with her as an autonomous, self-possessed man who perceives limits and enforces them, he has taken from her any defenses against that failure—and the failures of Stasiek and Jasiu.

Conclusion

Cześć Tereska offers viewers different characters who are portrayed as male, but who cannot live up to the demands of manhood in the new, capitalist Poland. The female character at the center of the film, Tereska, is made to bear the consequences of these failed attempts. The film serves as a study of the significance of sexualized difference for legitimating social and economic change, as well as the contradictions embedded within the gendered identities produced by that change. Clearly Gliński’s aim was to position the character of Tereska as the symbol of the ethical breakdown of the Polish family. However, instead of an exclusive focus on the central figure of an adolescent female negotiating a series of moral challenges, Cześć Tereska can also be interpreted differently. Tereska is surrounded by other characters, mostly male. These characters structure her world and in a powerful sense are expected to enact the limits of that world. When they fail to do so, they position Tereska as the source of that failure, a move to which the film’s director seems sympathetic at times. In terms of both story and image Tereska is paired, as the narrative unfolds, with three male figures, each struggling to consistently achieve a legible manhood: a father, an adult male acquaintance, and a teenaged peer. Each of these characters embody an aspect of masculinity as the “reflective” approach would define it, but what happens to that masculinity cannot be contained by a gender role alone.

Instead of looking at Tereska, we can look with her at these other figures, that is, we can share her gaze. With this move we can notice how the male characters in Gliński’s film enable the violence she must grapple with, while at the same time struggling with their own identities. This re-direction of attention to the men in the film does not, we argue, take away from the extent to which Tereska’s femaleness is central to the film’s concerns. Instead, in bringing neoliberalism’s requirements of sexual difference to the forefront in understanding Cześć Tereska we might begin to ask new questions about how ideology makes use of “manhood.”