Thelma & Louise
if you know how Thelma & Louise ends I don't know if most would describe it as a movie with strong female leads. There are so few classics with women who take on the protagonist’s role. There are even less when discounting rom-coms, dramas and schlocky halloween flicks. I can maybe count on my hands the amount of (good) movies that star a woman, and I can count on a few fingers how many stars two.
Most female led movies I try to engross myself in don’t have the gravity to them that I pine for. Petty dramas, yawn-inducing love stories or adventures with kitty-pool levels of depth are what I tend to come across. That’s fine and all, but as a youngin’ the only Chuck Norris, Dirty Harry, Sean Connery, etc., equivalents that were around were The Bride in Kill Bill and Ellen Ripley from Alien.
Of course there are others (like Fargo’s Marge Gunderson) and if we’re including foreign films the list gets lengthier. But I feel the point still stands, and that's why my biggest take-away from this not-so-sunny road trip picture is the two strong, independent women who cross the Southwest, gunning for Mexico after committing a hasty murder. Though there are other take-aways too, of course— like maybe don’t go committing any hasty murders.
When I mentioned Alien I forgot to say that Thelma & Louise is by the same director (Ridley Scott). Scott is so well known for his sci-fi classics like Blade Runner, that it’s easy to forget Thelma & Louise is his gem because it is not so distant in the future nor in another fantastical dimension. Compare this woman-starring road trip flick to the likes of his other work, and nearly every aspect feels monumentally different.
The colors are sometimes warm and soft, like the deep oranges of the lonely desert sunsets and rises or the flamingo-shaded pinks of Sarandon and Davis’s undertones. Oranges and pinks color the movie in a cast of love and friendship and they coat the audience with a sense of adventurous freedom that can only be found in the great West. The hazy blues and grays that encroach on the film the closer it gets towards its morbid end are uninviting; far from warmth. They take away the comfort of the orange sunsets and rises and replace it with a big, fat, all encompassing reminder that each day Thelma and Louise drive, they also inch closer to their doom.
The colors are captured in cinematography that swirls together genres in a beautiful way. There are the shots that heed the traditional visuals of road-tripping sequences– the wide shots through the blue-tinted windshield of the Thunderbird as a perfect example.
There’s the more western takes, like the scene about three fourths through the movie when Thelma and Louise get pulled over by the State police. As Louise sits in the passenger seat nervously awaiting as the police offer calls for back-up, Thelma sticks a thick revolver through the driver’s window, pointing it at the cop and towering over him as he shrinks back into the car’s shadows.
There are shots that have melodramatic tinges, particularly in close-ups when Thelma is on the phone with her dead-beat husband, and Louise is calling her noncommittal boyfriend. Modern, western, road, drama– some sprinklings of action shots during the iconic car chase. I appreciate the mixing of styles that somehow magically flows like ebbing water, back and forth, forth and back.
And the humor– that’s something that Scott doesn’t usually include so much of in his other hits. Thelma & Louise has its moments of intentional humor, with witty dialogue, but the moments of humor that really shine are not spoken, like every time Thelma puts her blundering, overly cheerful naivety on display. While the movie is doused in funnies, simultaneously there are moments so devoid of humor, and so filled with utter sorrow, that it becomes hard to look at the screen.
So that point I first mentioned, the one that I said was the biggest reason I’m drawn to Thelma & Louise – I’m coming back to it now. This is a great feminist movie, but not for the reasons usually mentioned. Actually, most of those reasons are ones I strongly oppose. When I mention that this movie is a great representation of womanhood, the replies I tend to receive praise the portrayal of Thelma’s assault and the unjust consequences that follow her because of it. Thelma & Louise is a feminist movie because it’s about an assault, and the consequences that trail behind it, I won’t argue that— in fact, I wholeheartedly agree.
But the part that makes it an empowering movie is the fact that the consequences make sense; they are expected. And not in a way worthy of pity either. Those consequences— of legal trouble created by a split-second mistake— are framed as uniquely a women’s issue. But it’s not and what I love about this movie is that it takes a woman’s societal disadvantage– sexual assault and harassment– and it applies a universal result. I.E. You get wrapped up in the wrong kind of guy like Thelma; you end up in a tricky situation. That man shouldn’t have been the immoral skeeze that he was. You should have been wiser though, Louise points out to her younger, far more innocent friend. But Thelma wasn’t wiser, and that little mistake of flirting with the wrong man ends with her on the run for murder.
The reason Thelma & Louise is a feminist movie is not because they drive fast and shoot guns– though that is pretty liberating too. It’s a feminist movie because it shows the audience that reckless women are no different than reckless men. Thelma is naive. She’s flirting with the wrong guy at the wrong moment and it isn’t completely her fault. She’s young and she clearly— based off of her wife-beating slimy salesman of a husband— has a hard time sniffing out bad men with bad intentions. But Louise isn’t young now.
One can tell Louise has been where Thelma is— she even tells her so herself in vague expressions and few words when they're discussing Thelma’s traumatization. Louise has been unintentionally self-destructive. She’s been naive and too cute back in her day. She sees that in Thelma– that air of vivacious life; overly-trusting, painful unawareness about her. Louise has learned that, if you don’t snap out of it in time, it leads you to where she is now: older and wiser but stuck in a life that was led by unwise choices. Louise takes responsibility for where she is. She wants to protect Thelma from that, but it’s too late now. She accepts that her own faults did that to her, no one else’s, and at some point or another in the movie, she teaches Thelma that she has to accept the same. The liberation comes from the fact that the two women are taking responsibility for the bad things that have happened to them, just like strong male leads do all the time.
Photo Credit
"Monument Valley HDR 2" by CJ Isherwood is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.