Thelma & Louise: On crime and female friendships

TW: Sexual assault, (gun) violence

For my first post, allow me to geek out about this classic, way ahead of its time, still wildly relevant, refreshing film for the next 1800 words or so. Ridley Scott's Thelma & Louise (1991) is a feminist road movie following two friends whose innocent trip to a mountain cabin leads them down a path of crime, sinking deeper and deeper in the spiral as time goes on. There will be a few spoilers here for the beginning of the plot, but I'll keep the rest a mystery so that, when you'll inevitably be convinced to watch it, you'll still be on the edge of your seat as the story continues.

The plot

We meet the two protagonists early in the opening scene of the film. Louise (Susan Sarandon) calls her friend Thelma (Geena Davis) to confirm their plans of spending the weekend at a cabin a few hours away. Thelma seems nervous. She hasn't asked her husband yet if she could go, and you know how he is. "Thelma, for Christ's sake", says Louise. "Is he your husband or your father?"

A few hours later, they hit the road, the car filled to the brim with more supplies than they could ever need for a two-day trip.

"How come Darryl let you go?", asks Louise.

"Cause I didn't ask him."

Louise bursts out laughing. "Shit, Thelma, he's gonna kill you."

"Well, he'd never let me go. He never lets me do one goddamn things that's any fun. All he wants me to do is hang around the house the whole time while he's out doin' God only knows what."

"Well, you get what you settle for."

"I left him a note. I left him stuff to microwave."

Cackles ensue over the poor, clueless husband, and a sense of freedom is immediately felt between the two women, leaving their restricting lives and identities behind for just a little while. They stop at a linedancing bar to grab a bite to eat, and to have a few drinks. Thelma is set on having fun this weekend. So when a man, Harlan, buys her shots of tequila and asks her to dance, she says yes. After a few songs she starts to feel lightheaded and her dance partner takes her outside. Louise comes back from the bathroom to find Thelma gone. She starts to look for her. They still have quite the trip ahead after all. Outside, Harlan tells Thelma that he really wants to kiss her. She says no. The dancing's been fun but she's married. It's not a good idea. That's okay, he says, he's married, too. Come one, just a little kiss. He does not wait for her answer. As he slowly pulls up her dress, she tells him to stop and pushes him back. "Hey, I don't want to hurt you", he tells her right before he slaps her in the face, turns her around and bends her over the hood of the car. All she can do is scream as he assaults her. Then suddenly, a pistol is raised to Harlan's neck. It's Louise.

"You let her go, you fucking asshole, or I'm gonna splatter your ugly face all over this nice car."

"Alright, hey, let's calm down. We were just havin' a little fun, that's all."

"Looks like you got a real fucked-up idea of fun. In the future, when a woman's cryin' like that, she isn't having any fun."

As they start to walk away, Harlan yells: "Bitch! I should've gone ahead and fucked her."

"What did you say?!"

"I said 'suck my cock'."

Louise points the gun at his chest and pulls the trigger. Harlan slides down the hood of the car and falls to the ground, lifeless. Panic sets in, both women in shock over the scene before their eyes. It's clear they need to get out of here, and fast. But then what? Go to the police? No one will buy that it was self defense, Louise snaps at Thelma. Dozens of people saw you happily dancing with him all night. Who's going the believe he raped you? That's not the kind of world we live in. They decide to run. Head to Mexico. Stay on the road and put distance between them and that place as fast as possible. Along the way they resort to more criminal activity, at first out of desperation, later also out of enjoyment and indifference to the consequences. They're in deep shit already anyway. The authorities are on their heels. What difference does it make anymore?

Analysis

For me, at its core, this movie is a coming-of-age story. A journey of self-discovery. Thelma especially breaks free from expectations she has been bent under her entire life. She starts the movie as a housewife, making coffee in the morning for her dismissive husband, putting on his watch for him before he heads out the door. It's clear this is not her desired life but she feels stuck in the situation, having been married to him since age 18. Her newfound identity as a criminal is liberating. Through her new experiences and the choices she makes, she is finally getting to know herself beyond her role as a daughter or a wife. After keeping a police officer at gunpoint and locking him in the trunk of his car, with the poise and confidence of a well-seasoned robber, she starts laughing uncontrollably, completely in awe of herself.

"I guess I went a little crazy huh?", she asks Louise.

"Nah, you've always been crazy. This is just the first chance you've had to really express yourself."

There is a common phrase in modern-day feminism: not only supporting women's rights, but also women's wrongs. This might just be a funny saying used to sarcastically convey complete, perhaps undeserved, blanket-support for women for whatever cause there may be, but I take it to hold more meaning. For so long in media, female characters have been - if I put it politely - incredibly lazily written. They lack substance beyond their connection to a male character. And if they do have an ounce of personality, they have not been allowed to be even morally grey, let alone immoral. They have to be pleasant. Pleasing. Or they're used as a punchline. The nagging wife, the dumb blonde, vindictive only out of jealousy for another, prettier, woman. For so long the great, emotionally complex villains, antagonists, or morally dubious characters in films have overwhelmingly been men. And it's about time we add women to that list. Because women fuck up. We can be selfish, make bad decisions, hurt people. And in showing those sides of female characters, they feel infinitely more believable and real to me.

You're rooting for Thelma and Louise and their destructive decisions, because you empathize with them. You see the hand they were dealt in life and the hardships that they went through to end up where they are. As a woman, you understand their frustrations and their anger. And you are rooting for their friendship. Each scene brings them closer together, aligns their destinies further. There is a deep connection between them that is very rare to see on screen, especially between two adult female characters. It's a friendship rooted in mutual respect, care, and concern. They may blow up at each other and they may not always agree on the best course of action, but that is moot in the grand scheme of things. They're in this together and they are committed to each other until the end.

Male characters

Critical reception was overwhelmingly positive upon its release, but there was one thing mainly male critics took issue with: the male characters. In Thelma & Louise, men are often portrayed as one-dimensional personas, highlighting the uglier sides of masculinity. For example, Thelma's husband caring more about a football game than the wellbeing of his wife. A truck driver hurling obscenities at the women, making sexual gestures with his hands and his tongue. They're shallow caricatures. In that sense you could say that Thelma & Louise is a gender-swapped version of the classic buddy film, which are movies with a plot centered around the friendship between the two main characters, more often than not two men, who embark on some sort of mission together. Think The Blues Brothers (1980), 21 Jump Street (2012), or, yes, the masterful Shrek (2001). However, in this version, it is two women who take the lead, who are given complex backstories, wholistic personalities and interesting character arcs, whereas the supporting characters, in this case the men, remain superficial and contribute very little to the course of the narrative.

Susan Sarandon was later interviewed(1) on the impact of Thelma & Louise. She says it's funny how they didn't set out to make a feminist movie, but that it turned into one upon release. The pushback took her by surprise.

“It never had occurred to me that we were kind of inadvertently backing into an area that was so sensitive to so many white males of a certain age. Especially something about giving women the power of in some way determining their own destiny and not settling was really bothersome to a lot of people. It never occurred to me that it would upset people to have women in those parts.”

Not much has changed on this front since the 90s. I remember the criticism of the 2016 reboot of Ghostbusters, or of the 2019 Captain Marvel, the first female-led film of the Marvel universe. Both productions received so-called 'review bombs' on grassroots film critic platforms such as Rotten Tomatoes in anticipation of their releases. Mainly male users of the platform were uncomfortable with an all-female cast and let this chauvinism fuel their desire to create a negative reception. It seems as though, when women are portrayed in ways previously only embodied by men, or vice versa, it creates anxiety. It doesn't hold up to our internalized cultural norms. To this day it's still challenging to find the support and bandwidth to produce a movie with an (almost) all-female cast, due to perceived lack of viewer interest. Change of socially constructed thinking just takes time, I suppose. 30+ years have not done it quite yet, but Thelma & Louise sure did set the tone.

Wild Night

I leave you with the song of the soundtrack that has been on repeat ever since I rewatched the film for this post. A cover of a Van Morrison song, but, in my humble opinion, better than the original.

Reference list

(1) https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/gossip/la-et-mg-susan-sarandon-thelma-louise-national-film-registry-20161214-story.html