Review of Troll 2 (1990) by Laika B — 12 Apr 2014

You thought you'd be going to see an epic bad epitome of campiness featuring some rubber goblins.

The truth is; you saw a deeply disturbing metaphor for the futile attempts of several Teenagers of escaping the sexually repressive and violent society of their home and neighbourhood to reclaim their own body and therefore sensuality.

Joshua, the about ten years old son of the Waits' family, frequently hallucinates about his dead grandfather, Seth, a wise and kind man, and therefore represents the typical aspects of the ideal Machiavellian patriarch. Joshua's father, on the other hand, is a classical example of a cinematic interpretation of the Freudian ?Primal Father? - elder of the so-called ?Primal Horde?, ?where all of the sons knew that they were equally persecuted by the primal father, and feared him equally? - and it follows the tradition of famous examples like Shining's Jack Torret, or ?The Godfather? Don Corleone.

Holly is, despite being only sixteen, is wildly eroticised and objectified by the camera's male gaze.

She would like to date a young boy from the neighbourhood, Elliot.

In a moment of female empowerment, she tries to seduce him and in consequence reclaim an autonomous state of sexuality, besides her father's means of control.

They rudely are interrupted by Elliot's friends, representing the homosexual tendencies of typical adolescent desires: but forced by a heterosexual matrix, the boys are only allowed to discover those sensual and emotional depth of their subconsciousness only thinly veiled by the excuse of boyish camaraderie, and only accompanied by a permanent reassurance about one's own heterosexuality ? they might cuddle half-naked in bed together, but they still talk about girls in mini skirts.

Holly demands him to decide between her and his friends.

The father announces the next day, the family is going to have a vacation in the rural village of ?Nilgob?, much to his children's dismay, shortly followed after by Elliot and his friends in a caravan.

Soon after arrival, the family realizes there might be something wrong with the inhabitant's of their idyllic vacation paradise-to-be.

Soon after, the son once again hallucinates about his Grandfather, who orders Joshua to stop his family from eating the offered food: it is the first scene Joshua encounters the true face of Nilgob's population: ugly, grey-faced monsters living off of humans turned to plant slime.

Joshua only sees one way to save his relatives from eating said green goo:

He urinates on the table.

By this phallic act he has fulfilled his grandfather's wish who here represents the absolute bourgeois sovereign, to commit regicide by symbolically castrating the cruel ruler and establishing civil society.

Near the town lives the mysterious Creedence Leonore Gielgud of Druid Origins, representing sinful, promiscuous female nature and thus a permanent thread to the fragile order of patriarchal reign of pure instrumental, male-connotated reason.

Two of the boys succumb her succubical suction: one of them is turned into a tree, she lovingly tends and caresses: the young man is forced to embrace effeminacy.

Since nature in this movie is a symbol of femininity ? of course one might feel inclined to criticise the antiquated display of the female as uncontrolled, elemental, almost even anarchic, force and masculinity as reason, that has to overthrow and subdue nature, even if it's cruel and instrumental ? the Druid compels him to do a drag performance. She wants to make him realize that his idea of gender is mere a social construct that has to be reproduced by everyday actions to maintain the stable power of the heterosexist discourse.

Since he refuses to become a tree willingly, this scene is easily read as a female-to-male rape scene, who are often parts of sexual fantasies experienced by submissive Oedipal characters.

The other boy is watching the telly, a highly sexualized music video, but the excitement on his face seems shallow ? like he's only watching the video because he is supposed to.

In the next scene, Creedence offers him a corn cob ? an obvious metaphor for the phallus.

This boy on the other hand embraces his homosexuality ? they both enthusiastically eat the corn cob, which strongly resembles oral sex performaned on a phallic object.

During the movie, the family encounters and successfully fights the now goblin-turned villagers. But they only manage to do so with the help of Grandfather Seth, whose ?ghost? is getting stronger and stronger every time he appears.

In the final quest given by his mentor, Joshua faces both the Druid and his own awakening sexuality, as he enters what appears a giant, glowing vagina: he's re-entering his mother's womb, just to resurrect again now as a grown man.

He commands his family to touch the sacred Stonehenge Crystal, Creedence hides in her lair, and in this last act, the family, who, for once sticking together for the greater good, defeat the perilous element.

Joshua proves himself as a greater, better patriarch than his tyrannous father, who stood helpless against the goblinish embodiment of the threat of castration.

Returned home, everything seems peaceful and quiet, only Joshua isn't able to deal with the traumas witnessed ? it implies, the whole episode in the town of Nilgob was only a fantasy of him to deal with his own awakening sexuality, Elliot's friends nothing but a projection of his own, repressed homosexual desires.

A fantasy to escape the cruel, abusive reality forced upon him by the Primal Father.

First a strategy to overcome the terror Joshua has to face everyday, his daydreams have become more and more vivid and blur the thinning line between fantasy and reality.

Since his daydreams are his way to develop his sexuality within a house, where it is controlled by his father, their increased frequency indicates that it has become an urge too strong to control: only the daydreams are left to explore his desires.

As we see in the scene in which the goblins return to the seemingly peaceful household and kill his family, ending up devouring Joshua's mother, the camera rests upon the last part of her body that has remained human: her snow-white, maternal breasts.

Once again, Freud can be applied here: his daydreams overcome his whole personality, the It overthrows the already broken home: his sexual urges become this forceful, he is n.

The final cut shows Joshua's horrified face as the goblins turn towards him, leaving an interpretation about the end to the spectator.

This, as a clever device of postmodern film, that we as the spectators do have the power to write and end for this story ourselves, that we created as discourse,as we name it in a performative utterance as proclaimed by Judith Butler, that we, in conclusion, are nothing but discourse ourselves, written by the matrix of society.

Joshuas daydreams display the prevailing of his unbridled sexuality. The only way his family can be viewed now through the eyes of the compulsive beast as effeminate green goo.

The goblins, his subconscious representation of this kind of nature, that only can be expressed as a violent one, finally may swallow Joshua himself.

He has destroyed his father in an act of feminizing and therefore, in this patriarchal society, destroying his father ? but thus, became in this ironic moment of dethronement, the bigger monster himself.

Summary: ?Troll 2? is fucking deep.