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

Abstract

Robert Gliński’s post-communist film Cześć Tereska generated extensive controversy as a story of Polish teenagers disconnected from traditional morality in an anonymous apartment block. Its central character of a young girl, Tereska, makes the film appear to be about femininity and danger in 1990s neoliberal Poland. In an alternative interpretation using the approach that neoliberalism is a form of governmentality, an analysis of male characters surrounding Tereska demonstrates that the film can also be interpreted as a depiction of the inability of individuals to achieve neoliberal ideals of masculinity. The 1990s’ dominant ideology of individualism and freedom created expectations that men would embody a self-contained, self-restrained potency that functioned to curb the excesses of the society around them. We argue that the impossibility of achieving this embodiment generates tensions in the film that are only resolved at times when Tereska is made to take on the responsibility for managing men’s desires. While several scholars have pointed to a “crisis of masculinity” in Eastern Europe, we find that Cześć Tereska can be seen as a narrative that delineates the specific effects of anxious masculinities on female-gendered agency and autonomy, but that is limited in its ability to fully work out those implications.