Thelma and Louise (1991)
Last week in class we discussed who should be allowed to make art about certain topics. A straight man directing a lesbian romance? It’s complicated. Today we’ll examine one of the most unflinchingly feminist features in film history — Thelma and Louise, directed by Ridley Scott, who was coming off a three movie run of commercial and critical success, and written by Callie Khouri, who would win an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. So how did the straight, white, and crucially, male director pull off such an authentically feminist film?
The first immediately notable aspect of Thelma and Louise is that both of our main protagonists are women. As Josh Hall points out, “In 2016… women account for just 22 per cent of the protagonists and 34 per cent of the major characters in the top 100 grossing films”. For whatever reason you want to come up with, women to this day aren’t getting the screen time and roles that they did in T&L. Ridley Scott was no stranger to directing badass women in lead roles, 12 years earlier he made the choice to cast Sigourney Weaver in Alien, instead of another musclebound male protagonist. Thelma and Louise are similarly badass women here, and their characterization goes much deeper than most female characters in film. Thelma is a naïve but adventurous airhead housewife, her friend Louise is a worldly, no-nonsense, diner waitress. Compare the tenacity and courage in those two characters to the males of the film. Their husbands are dumb jerks, Thelma’s would-be rapist is a rapist, Brad Pitt is a sleazy thief, and Harvey Keitel is outsmarted and powerless for most of the movie. And of course there’s the truck driver, a parodical pig who serves as an exaggerated punching bag for the worst kind of men in the world.
So what is the purpose in crafting such strong female leads in a movie full of terrible awful men? Well, it’s an attempt to portray something women everywhere feel (I presume). Megan Garber for The Atlantic writes, “What is Thelma & Louise, if not a parable of two women, navigating a world that was not built for them?”. This is the world women find themselves in, from real life to the Hollywood screen; Khouri and Scott recognize this and try to tell an empowering story that’s true to the lived experience of women around the world. The most glaring example comes after the attempted rape and subsequent murder that sets the film in motion. The mantra “No one would believe us” is first spoken, and repeats throughout the film. It’s a sad fact that even to this day, women face a different level of scrutiny when it comes to accusations like this, and back then women felt like they could never come forward with something like this. So now, Thelma and Louise are out of options, flee the country or imprisonment.
This escape or submit mentality is what drives the film, and what makes it’s ending so satisfying. Because it’s not just the country they’re fleeing, it’s their jerk husbands, the truck drivers, the scummy con men that make their lives hell throughout the movie. They’re escaping a system of patriarchy, and the only way out is liberation. That’s what the movie’s conclusion seems to hint at: death before dishonor. Even at the steep end of a cliff, women have to keep moving forward, to go back is to accept subjugation. This is the most feminist message of the movie, not blowing up some dumb guy’s truck — although the visual there is perhaps more empowering. This leap off the edge isn’t just breaking a glass ceiling, it’s choosing to leave the building altogether. This is why a movie like Thelma and Louise could only have been written by a woman. Callie Khouri works in little satirical nods to the real oppression of women, most notably in Christopher McDonald’s hilarious performance as Darryl, Thelma’s husband. Thelma and Louise is more than just authentically feminist, it’s radically so. From Louise rejecting marriage to their descent into the Grand Canyon, Khouri writes this story with a message: never surrender.
