Thelma and Louise

Thelma and Louise (1991) is often referred as a successful mixture of different genres in a single picture. To begin with, it is possible to trace the elements of contemporary Western, seventies ‘buddy’ movie, and most notably road movie. Since it is the story of the journey of the two heroines Thelma (Geena Davis) and Louise (Susan Sarandon), it will be more appropriate to analyze the film within the scope of road movie, without losing out the influence of the other genres that are well placed in the movie as the indispensable roadside bars for an American road movie.

The film opens with the introduction of the two main female characters separately with the scenes from their daily routines. The viewer first gets to see Louise in the café she is working. The first bits of information provided is that she is a self-dependent middle age woman with some emphasis on her being hard-edged as she talks like an elderly sister on the phone to Thelma, while smoking. On the contrary, Thelma is a young housewife, who is oppressed in her marriage by her husband Darryl (Christopher McDonald). The road story begins as the two women hit the road for a little weekend escape from their seemingly not entertaining daily lives. It will not be wrong to claim at this point that as opposed to most of the other movies within the road movie genre, Thelma and Louise’s journey does not start with a drive for the search of something related to their being or a higher aim to leave everything behind. But it is still an escape from their lives although their initial plan is to get back to their routines after a couple of days of break.

The story evolves as Thelma and Louise become outlaws after Louise murders Harlan (Timothy Carhart) when he attempts to rape Thelma in the parking lot of their first stop on the road. From this point on their little escape from home turns into a bigger escape from the police and their route shifts to Mexico, which is the ultimate direction of American outlaws for freedom when the West closes down. Up until that moment in the film the Western influence is present to be felt strongly, especially with the men and women dressed alike in the Western style and filling a Western space with the scene in the roadside bar. When the two heroines lose the direction of their lives after the murder, a map comes handy to show them the route they have to follow to reach Mexico that is passing through Texas. Louise’s refusal to go to Texas can be read as the refusal of the movie to mess about genres as they offer wide spaces that can conjugate different styles. The movie instead follows the main lines of the road movie still with notable references to Western, such as the panoramic views from John Ford’s Monument Valley.

As common to road movies, the two women’s relationship changes form as the journey takes place. They get to know each other better while they get to know themselves better and develop a more emotional and deeper relation. In that sense, the film can be said to have elements of seventies ‘buddy’ movie because the relationship they develop on the road converges to the typical male protagonists’ buddy relationship as they admit their new identities as outlaws. Thelma and Louise has been the focus of different criticism by the time it was released, most of which aroused from that shift in gender perspective. One interpretation of the movie was that of a feminist reading whilst antifeminist reading was also among the popular critique. It is hard to agree with both claims since the movie is a collaboration of a liberal director, but still working in a capitalist Hollywood cinema industry, Ridley Scott and the female screenwriter Callie Khouri. So it will be more appropriate to analyze the gender aspect of the movie while going deeper with the characters and at the same time considering the loose end in its gender discourse.

Since the change that the two women go through will be the focus of the analysis now, it is important to look at their ex-ante and ex-post conditions in relation to the journey. Thelma and Louise before the journey fit into two different woman stereotypes of the late eighties and early nineties. Thelma is typical to the continuation of a tradition of young housewives, whom are in need to secure themselves with the first man they have interacted in their lives and more or less dependent on their husbands in life because they are inexperienced to sustain themselves. This dependency also creates a sense of isolation from life for Thelma and once she is on the road she is eager to experience whatever the road brings to her with an enthusiasm of a teenager, but she also portrays a vulnerable woman since she does not have the knowledge on how to respond to potential threats that are awaiting her. On the other hand, Louise appears to fit into another socially accepted woman figure by that time, which is self sufficient to stand as a single woman, but in order to do so she must play the tough woman. In comparison to Thelma, she is more organized with her life and suspicious to whoever approaches to her because she has some sort of a social phobia as a consequence of her interactions with life. The differences in their characters first give the sense of a default power relation amongst each other of Louise being dominant in this friendship. From those ex-ante conditions, two women go on the road that will create a change in their standpoints and Scott gives the hints of this change right after the journey starts with the scene, in which Thelma takes a cigarette from Louise’s pack and acts as if she is smoking while watching herself on the side mirror of the car and says “Hey, I’m Louise.”

Louise’s dominance over Thelma does not change until JD (Brad Pitt) steals the money that Louise gets from Jimmy (Michael Madsen) in order to get to Mexico. Louise killing Harlan creates the first shock in Thelma and Louise’s relationship but since they behave respectful to each other all through the movie they take the responsibilities of their own actions and play the strong to fix the problem they created for both of them. In other words, first shock comes from Louise losing her control over what she sees and it is now her responsibility to take care of the situation and Thelma still appears to be the weak one to be taken care of. After the only night they spend off the road, they realize that JD fooled Thelma and ran away with their only asset to their freedom. The loss of their last hope breaks Louise’s strong image and now it is time for Thelma to take control and get Louise back on the road. This break point works as a tool to balance the power scale of their relationship and they become buddies, running to the same end consciously and willingly.

The feminist reading of the film focuses on what unites Thelma and Louise in their journey to their freedom whereas antifeminist reading of the film concerns what follows after they form that male type of alliance. Feminist manifesto finds its form also as a character in the movie, which is the sympathetic detective Hal (Harvey Keitel), who keeps his belief till the end in the heroines being ordinary women, driven to extraordinary ends by male oppression. This is actually the main idea that the movie advocates. There are several indicators in the movie to claim that feminist manifesto holds, such as Thelma being oppressed by her husband, Louise with her mystical past presumably a traumatic experience of rape, JD as an abuser of Thelma’s naivety, Harlan’s attempt to have sexual intercourse as opposed to Thelma’s wish, the truck driver’s almost absurd reaction to the two women travelling on the road and so on and so forth. These are direct critique to American culture with its easily accepted empty pleasures and demoralized sexual chauvinism toward women, in which Thelma and Louise stand as feminine figures who are still struggling to redefine their individualities.

The antifeminist critique can be explained through the similarity between Thelma and Louise and another famous road movie Easy Rider. In Easy Rider, the two heroes hit the road for the search of freedom, as well as adventure and hedonistic fun. In that respect, Thelma and Louise offers the same thing, but the underlying approach to a decaying culture beyond desire. The similarity of the macho actions in both movies can be explained as the standpoint of antifeminist critique because what those feminine figures stand for should be a protest against that macho violence rather than a portrayal of dangerous phallic caricatures of the same behavior, if the movie advocates some kind of a resistance to women’s oppression. The problem defined and the action taken in order to fix the problem seems controversial if the resistors also adopt using the same tools that cause the problem. The movie falls into the same trap while trying to define that trap, for the sake of entertainment that conventional Hollywood cinema has to offer its audience by turning tragedy into tragicomedy. Yet, it is argued that the film evoked sympathy in male audiences and enabled them to engage with the women’s story through attributing male characteristics to the two heroines. Although the antifeminist reading puts a strong emphasis on the fallacy of using male symbols such as the usage of guns and violence, the film insisting on the tragicomic aspect by letting the heroines make their own feminine ways how to use those symbols, as can be realized from their polite way of committing the crimes by uttering how sorry they are to do it every time they break the law, is claimed to have worked out in delivering the underlying message to a larger number of audiences. The analysis here then results in a harmonized cinematic conveyance of the depiction of the two believable female figures by Callie Khouri when combined with the heroic representation of Ridley Scott.

Back to the topic of change that Thelma and Louise go through, there is an issue of relativity still to be touched upon. Although the journeys reveals a lot about the two main characters, it is easier to observe the change that Thelma goes through whereas the viewer gets to know less about Louise. They come to the same grounds on their escape to freedom but Thelma deviates more from her initial state. She discovers the repressed lust in herself towards life. Once she goes out her limited life she realizes that she does not want to go back and does whatever she has to do in order to keep being on the road even if it requires her to break the laws. Although in the beginning Louise seems to be the one who does not want to surrender and keep going till she reaches a place where she will be free, Thelma does not pause to join her as soon as she realizes that she was trapped in her own prison by attributing such importance to an unloving husband. The relief from her mental prison makes her act in the opposite direction with such passion that she becomes the one that leads the way to their end. Louise on the other hand, does not deviate very much from her initial set of mind. She is fond of her freedom to some extent in the beginning and she is headed towards that direction whole throughout the movie. She experiences a different kind of relief in the sense of her repressed emotion from a past trauma which finds a way out to the surface, but that does not create a domino effect in her reactions and she does not experience a major change in her character.

The end of the road in Grand Canyon is both physically and metaphorically the end of their journey. Until they reach the cliff in the Canyon they were able to shift to sideways, changing their destination for the sake of being able to move on. The dead end of the road, revealing their ultimate end, brings them up to the final point that they have choose between going on or giving up. As freedom, being reduced to the only option of eternal freedom after death, the two heroines decide, acknowledging the irreversible change they had been through, to keep moving and reach their eternal freedom with Ridley Scotts’ freeze frame. With such a heroic ending it is possible to step back from the reality within the film and look at the tools Scott uses to turn the story into a myth. Two angelic figures fly into a deep opening holding hands, and another heavenly good figure trying to reach them before their salvation. He refers to such tools to break the thick air of a tragedy also in some other scenes some of which are mentioned above as the ridiculous truck driver and the Rastafarian biker who blows joint to the policeman locked in the back of his car.

The narrative structure of the film is also chosen as convenient in a way not to disturb the audience with back and forth movements. The narrative is linear and as plain as possible meaning that there is no use of special editing or voice over. The only structure notable is the parallel narrative of the women and the police. The escapees and the chasers are shown with a parallel timing and Scott makes good transitions from one story to the other especially after Thelma’s robbery scene when she starts telling what happened in the story the story shifts to the chasers line and the viewer watches the robbery from the police’s screen. These smooth transitions strengthen the flow of the road movie and leaves necessary space for the viewer to digest the on the run rhythm of the road story and follow the timing of the episodes. Additionally, the setting of the parallel stories works as a reminder to the viewer where the story started from because the police is located in Arkansas, with the people that the two women left behind, till the end of the movie when the two lines finally emerge. In the meanwhile, the viewer is reassured of the incidents happened on the road by encountering the people involved in the storyline of the police. In other words, the viewer is left to enjoy the privileged position of getting informed about both of the stories even before the two parties figure out what is going on with the other story.

As prior to the road movie genre, much attention is given to the landscape in the film. The open spaces head along with the deserted highways of the American dream enforcing the idea of freedom as the two women proceed with their journey. The photographic images from the different timelines of the day such as the dawn and the sunset create a feeling of continuity in the flow as well as referring to the women’s control over their own time by being able to experience all the difference feelings the day has to provide them to link their broken identities in a continuum of time. The images also change as they escape from the reality of their initial lives, the massive machinery, oil drilling equipments fade into the images of Monument Valley. Especially Louise lightens up with all the faces she confronts on the road. She loses, leaves, her belongings after each confrontation of herself in the other. She leaves her watch and earrings to the old man then she throws away her lipstick after seeing the old woman becoming more simple, admitting herself the way she is and gaining her freedom by losing her belongings. All those scenes being emotionally strengthen by Hans Zimmer’s influential music with the classic tones specific to road movie and Western. Ridley Scott seems not to have missed one single detail to put out a complete movie of road movie genre.