Thelma and Louise Is Even More Awesome Than I Remembered
LatestThelma and Louise:
The ultimate road movie, feminist revenge flick, 128 minutes of vicious
male-bashing, the one where Brad Pitt is stoopid sexy, a punk-rock Western —
however you think of this iconic 1991 film from Oscar-winner Callie Khouri and
director Ridley Scott starring Geena Davis as the fun-loving Thelma, and Susan
Sarandon as the no-nonsense Louise on a road trip to “freedom,” chances
are, you have definitely thought of it. I thought of it again because it was
just added to Netflix streaming, and upon re-watching, I saw a world of new
things I’d forgotten.
Thelma and Louise is fucked-up and brilliant.
One of the most skillful things about this film is the way
it manages to have such fun with the road trip genre —there are radio
sing-alongs, drinks, a line-dancing sequence, excellent sunglasses, windblown road hair, hilarious
witticisms, sweet ’90s denim, a hardcore paean to female friendship — while still offering a fucked-up, scathing, serious movie about rape and trauma and loss and the crime of living in the world female. Even if it pulls a
Trojan horse by packaging it through a fun premise — check out the original trailer — it
still embodies the very real challenges women face trying to be free. Issues that we are still debating today and it’s been over 20 years since its debut.
The tension between
men and women is pitch perfect.
There is the world of men in the film — restless, driven, and
autonomous — and the world of women — tenuous, fraught, limited. And the
symbolic bridge between them is Harvey Keitel’s Hal Slocumbe, a character who
in many ways embodies a kind of moral, harmonious blend of both sexes. Whereas
the men in this film are very much “men” and the women are very much
“women,” heteronormative quotes on purpose, Slocumbe is tough and shit-talking, still kinda looks like a
1970s detective, but is deeply compassionate and intuitive about these women’s
plights.
The women are flawed
and complex and also “strong.”
In the debate about why there aren’t more “strong
female characters,” in film, some folks have argued that requiring all the
female characters to be strong is its own kind of limitation. We should want, they
argue, complex female characters who may or may not be strong but, as Neil
Gaiman put it, “strongly
written.” Done and done here. Thelma may be a longsuffering housewife, but she’s no
wallflower. Louise is a tough-as-nails waitress with trust issues, but she has
to confront her past and reconcile it before the clock runs out. They both may
be doomed in the film in terms of the “freedom” they seek, but there
is no question they choose their fate.