Ecological Wunderkind and heroic trollhunter: the celebrity saga of Greta Thunberg

ABSTRACT

In December 2019, a Swedish climate activist was appointed Person of the Year by Time Magazine. Greta Thunberg was only 15 when she inspired a wave of school strikes and protest marches. She stole the media attention at a series of global summits, until public gatherings and international travels were interrupted by the pandemic. The aim of this article is to highlight a short but intense celebritisation process with culture-bound responses. First, I will establish Thunberg’s deep roots in a Nordic children’s culture, which defends bio-diversity with ‘superhoney’ and science. Then, I will compare the strong impact of an ecological Wunderkind in the EU with the polarised reactions in the US. In the conclusion, I will relate Thunberg’s activist strategy and persona to other types of eco-celebrities and discuss the significance of diverging time horizons.

KEYWORDS:

• Greta Thunberg
• eco-celebrity
• climate activism
• Wunderkind
• trollhunter

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my two anonymous reviewers for pushing the article two steps forward.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The primary source for this article has been audiovisual material available on YouTube. The problem with this highly accessible archive for media research, is the lack of systematic classification and instability of private accounts. During a check in March 2022, however, I was able to trace all my references by writing Greta Thunberg plus one or two keywords.

2. The conception of a Nordic tradition of trolls in folklore and fairy tales, does not respect the significant disparity in geography and history. In Norway and Sweden, many communities were formed through a dramatic interaction with dark forests and high mountains. The congregations on the flatland in Denmark, developed another interplay of puritanism and individualism, manifested in the (post)protestant continuity from Søren Kierkegaard and Carl Th. Dreyer to Lars von Trier (Sjögren 2019, pp. 115-19).

3. There is no clear divide between the group fantasies of ‘unstoppable youth’ and the Climate Fiction that is produced in Hollywood with a heavy carbon footprint. In the apocalyptical tradition the symptoms of ‘ecosickness’ are treated as an addictive form of horrific enjoyment (Bozak 2011, McGillivray 2017).

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Notes on contributors

Olle Sjögren

Olle Sjögren, professor emeritus of Film Studies at Gothenburg University. His latest book is The reimagined community: a postnationalist kaleidoscope of European cinema, Berlin: Peter Lang 2019.