There is a curious scene in the 2013 film Frozen, where the main character, Anna, is exposed to what might be considered traumatic, but instead has no traumatic weight to it whatsoever. What do we make of this?
First, we ought to recap the film. As children, Anna, and her sister Elsa, are quite close. Elsa was born with the magical ability to manipulate ice, which she uses to play with Anna rather often. At one point, Anna is struck by Elsa’s magic powers in the head. Her parents rush her off to see the mystical trolls, where the grand troll removes all memory of Elsa’s power from Anna’s head — leaving intact all the “fun,” as he says — telling the small group, “the head is easily persuaded.” He also, cryptically and perhaps unhelpfully, tells Elsa that, “fear will be your enemy.”
Upon returning to the castle, the parents decide to close all the gates and shut themselves in, most especially Elsa, who they attempt to teach to conceal her powers. “Conceal it, don’t feel it… don’t let it show,” becomes a refrain in the film. Anna deeply misses the friendship she once had with her sister, who now all but refuses to interact with her.
Many years later, the parents die, leaving Elsa to take up the throne. After her coronation ceremony, there is a party where the sisters almost begin to reconcile. Anna asks for Elsa’s blessing to be married to a man she meets, Hans, which Elsa refuses. Anna chases down her sister, goading her into providing an adequate response as to why, at which point Elsa becomes angry, turns around towards Anna, and uses her magical powers to summon a wall of protruding spikes of ice in the ground.
This is the scene in question. Why does Anna fail to recoil in horror from Elsa? Why don’t traumatic memories come rushing back to her? What did the grand troll actually do to Anna?
Before we can answer any of those, or indeed, any worthwhile questions, I think it’s necessary to return to the traumatic scene and interrogate it first.
The troll removes all memory of Elsa’s ice powers from Anna’s head, leaving the “fun.” We are shown images from Anna’s head that are transformed from involving magical powers to not. For instance, a scene of Anna creating a large snow hill is turned instead into a scene of the pair sledding together. So, as far as Anna remembers, she and Elsa are still supposed to be close. The fun remained in her memory. But this is not what happens to the two. Instead, Elsa becomes distant and cold (forgive the joke, although it is likely intentional in the text) toward Anna. Having no recollection of being struck by Elsa, then, what exactly is the trauma that Anna has experienced? Well, it can only be the loss of her friendship with Elsa.
What the grand troll does, unknowingly, is target the conscious elements of Anna’s trauma, leaving behind all the unconscious elements — not that he would have been able to destroy them anyway. Thus, we see that it is not the traumatic event itself which comes to bear as a trauma on this subject, but rather, it is the events after the trauma which do so. (This is not meant to be an all-encompassing statement; it can be equally true that the events leading up to the trauma become the site of trauma, or that the trauma itself is the site of trauma.)
This leads us to a new question: what was the purpose of removing Anna’s memory in the first place? Are we to take it that the grand troll simply made a mistake, a poor interpretation? Well, probably, but it also serves another function — largely on the behalf of the narrative — which is to lubricate the wedge that will be shoved in between Anna and Elsa. Again, before the opening scenes of the film, there is no wedge between them. They wake each other up early in the morning, they play together, and at one point, Anna says that Elsa used to be her best friend. So, even though the memory removal performed by the grand troll does not erase the trauma of the preceding events, even though Anna does not become afraid at the sight of her sister’s terrible power, the narrative requires that there be a space between the characters for it to unfold.
Here we run into another road block. Why is there a wedge at all? What exactly is Elsa to Anna? Throughout the film we see that Anna is tirelessly devoted to Elsa: she treks through a frozen wasteland, climbs a dangerous mountain, gets struck again by her sister (this time in the heart), faces a mammoth of a snowman, and at one point even sacrifices her life for Elsa’s. Why does she do all of this? We’ve already noted that the loss of Elsa’s friendship (and here, we should read love) is the site of trauma for Anna — she spends much of the film bemoaning her loss of Elsa — so why should she be concerned whatsoever with this woman who is, functionally, completely foreign to Anna by the time of the main story?
There is one clear answer: Elsa is Anna’s symptom, that which she loves more than anything, that which she keeps in her pocket, so to speak, and cannot leave behind without the stability of Anna’s subjectivity being thrown into disarray. Perhaps we could more accurately say that the love from Anna to Elsa is the symptom: peering into the future, “love” is the remedy for the frozen wasteland, and even further on, we see that Anna can be perfectly okay without her sister’s physical presence, so long as she knows that Elsa is still out there.
So then, what Anna is holding on to throughout the film, desperately, is Elsa’s love. It is not a narcissistic love (at least not exclusively), nor is it a symbolic love (Elsa does not stand in as a symbol for the dead parents), but a real love, real in Lacan’s sense of the registers. It is the hand which reaches back that Lacan describes in his Seminar on transference.
And this brings us back to our original question again. Why is Anna seemingly perfectly fine with the revelation that Elsa is a creature with magical powers, perfectly fine even when those powers are directed toward her with malicious intent? It is because the presence of these powers does nothing to upset her symptom. In fact, the revelation retroactively explains all the events that have been impinging upon the symptom throughout the first scenes of the film. We see Anna slowly realizing that these powers are why Elsa has been shut away for so long, cut off from everyone, even her best friend. At one point, Anna says, “I just thought [Elsa] liked wearing gloves.”
None of this is particularly striking. Obviously, Anna has to realize that the ice powers explain everything which was wanting for explanation. It is meant to be understood by children, after all. However, what we have gleaned from this inquiry is a sense of the retroactivity of trauma and symptom, as well as a sense for Anna’s symptom generally.
We must turn now to Elsa, who is, for all the emphasis given to her, a rather nondescript figure in the film. Unlike Anna, Elsa has very little to her character: the former falls in love twice, makes new friends, has a tangible personality, and is generally more likable, in my analysis anyway, than the latter. She does not reciprocate the attachment that Anna has. If asked to describe Elsa, we might say things like distant and cold, as we did above, or we might say that she is independent (though we might be wrong to say so). Outside these few descriptors, there is little to say about her character. Why?
To answer this, we should hold fast to the idea that Elsa is simply a symptom. She is not a character in the narrative — at least not in such a way as Anna. Does that mean there is nothing else to say about Elsa? I think not. Elsa becomes entirely representative of the relations between demand, drive, and desire, the sole character able to articulate these clearly.
Demand is the simplest place to begin. Elsa is shaped entirely by demand: the demand from her parents (especially her father, interestingly), that she “control” her powers, or that she at least conceal them. This demand is absolutely palpable. During one scene, Elsa is shown pacing around an empty room saying to herself, “control it; conceal it, don’t feel…” Despite all of her efforts, and those of her parents, Elsa is unable to control her powers, and they cause harm and distress.
This leads us to a discussion of the drive as embodied by Elsa. Because what are her powers other than pure drive? They are the destructive repetition that causes harm to others, including the subject herself, even as (or maybe because) she attempts to halt them. She goes through various rituals that, in the end, fail in their conscious aim: she wears gloves at all times, she shuts herself away in her room — she even goes so far as to whisk herself away alone to a tower in the mountains.
We arrive, then, at the question of desire. What is Elsa’s desire? It is to be alone, to be one-by-herself.
To understand this, we need to bear in mind two things. One, that desire is always desire of the Other; two, that desire is shaped by demand, ($<>D), subject in relation to demand (of the Other). Taking the first, we understand that Elsa’s desire is obviously borne of the desire of her parents. Her constant refrain, “conceal it, don’t feel it… don’t let it show,” is evidence enough of this claim, as is the reversal of this refrain, “Conceal don’t feel, don’t let them know / Well now they know / Let it go.” Thus, Elsa’s desire is inextricably linked to the desire of her parents, the Other. Taking the second should be a simple step: Elsa’s desire is given shape by the demand from her parents that she keep her powers under wraps — whether that means concealing them or controlling them is unclear, though perhaps also unimportant. In any case, the demand of the Other becomes desire, and so we have the constellation of Elsa’s character within the narrative of the film.
Desire for Elsa is to be alone, is the assertion we held above, so what are we to make of the end of the film, when Elsa returns to her home and surrounds herself again with others? Here we might find something interesting: an obvious reversal of the stated desire.
So, what do we make of desire given these conflicts? Well, first, that desire is rarely so easily articulated. Second, that desire exists in a dialectic; it can be turned on its head. Thus, the desire for alone-ness can be reversed into the desire for together-ness. How does this reversal take place? It is only when Hans reveals his plan to Elsa, which is to kill her and marry Anna, that Elsa can take any action. This is the point at which she rushes to find Anna, the only point at which she takes any action that isn’t narcissistic, and the point at which her desire becomes reversed. Because it is at this point in the film, when Anna gives her life for Elsa’s, that she finally comes to a realization: Anna’s love can keep her in orbit; it is the objet a that can keep her drive steadily humming along.
We come to our final question: to whom, then, does drive belong, the symptom or the subject? If we have asserted that Elsa is nothing other than Anna’s symptom, are we to then take it that subject and symptom are separate? No, of course not. Anna and Elsa form a pair, a single pair, that is only extricated due to narrative necessity. The drive does not belong to either one independently, but to each. Hence, the pair must be united at the end, the drive having been placed on a regular path, allowing for desire to take the floor once again.