Viking Night: Thelma & Louise
By Bruce Hall
January 10, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Everyone's favorite female felons indeed came to us from the mind of the same man who gave us those chest bursting space bugs and Rutger Hauer's mopey, murderous man-machine. To faithful patrons of this site that is probably not news, but to the average movie goer it might come as a shock. It shouldn't; many of the modern era's most revered filmmakers have something out of the box on their resume, with mixed results. George Lucas chose to produce Howard the Duck, for some reason. Steven Spielberg directed 1941, which was...not good. And most recently, Martin Scorsese took a break from gangsters shooting each other in the face to create Hugo, a charming and poignant window into his own childhood.
Thelma & Louise is Ridley Scott's left turn – an odd, fun little film full of flaky little quirks that have kept movie buffs in a state of debate for 20 years. And it was a mainstream phenomenon; it remains an indelible part of American pop culture to this day. Even people who've never seen this movie know what it's about and how it ends. In fact, before I even get into what I think of it, I'll concede that once a story becomes legend, whether you like it or not is beside the point. It's bigger than life, longer than time – an achievement by virtue of its very existence.
You wouldn't gather this from the first few minutes of the film. Louise Sawyer (Susan Sarandon) is a durable, world weary waitress at a roadside diner. She seems to enjoy her job, or at least be happily resigned to it. She has a boyfriend named Jimmy (Michael Madsen) whom she seems to appreciate, but there's a wall between them. Louise has some baggage but she carries it like a pro, and Jimmy follows behind, ready to pick up anything that hits the ground. It's not a bad life but everyone needs a vacation, and Louise has one planned with her best friend Thelma.
Thelma (Geena Davis) is a ditzy rural homemaker, trapped in an oppressive marriage to an aggressive redneck named Darryl (Christopher McDonald). She receives a heaping helping of verbal abuse from Darryl from the moment he wakes up in the morning, and endures it in the good natured, oblivious way she seems to endure everything. When Louise calls her about a planned trip to the mountains, it doesn't take long to see who wears the pants in their relationship. Louise's assertiveness seems to be compensation for whatever burden she's carrying around. Thelma comes across like a silly little girl who thinks that ignoring pain is the way to cure it.
It's an obvious plot point, but the movie spends the next 129 minutes hitting you over the head with it anyway. I'm going to go ahead and warn you – Thelma & Louise is a very forgiving story that is not above spelling things out in broad, conspicuous strokes. Even if you've recently HAD a stroke, you won't have any trouble deciding who's who and where everything stands. Thelma and Darryl are only on screen together once, and you almost expect them to turn to the camera and say:
“I'm Darryl, and I'm an abusive asshole who cheats on his beautiful, doting wife because, well, I'm an asshole!”
“I'm Thelma, and I'm a beautiful doting wife. I married the wrong guy because I was young and stupid and I'm still toughing it out, because I'm not that young anymore, but I sure am stupid!”
The whole movie is like this, and you'll find your eyes rolling around in your head often. But to its credit, Thelma & Louise is wonderfully cast, particularly the two leads. The script is filled with witty, memorable dialogue and it only takes itself seriously when it has to. One of those moments occurs early in the film when Thelma and Louise set off on their impromptu vacation. They're headed to a friend's mountain cabin for a weekend of fun, fishing and girl talk. Thelma conspicuously packs a pistol into their luggage, all but turning to the camera and saying “This here's a gun. It's gonna be important later.”
Which turns out to be true. The girls stop off for a quick drink at a local honky tonk, and Thelma, against the advice of her friend, falls into the clutches of the town lech, Harlan Puckett (Timothy Carhart). Harlan plies Thelma with drinks, dance, and the kind of sparking banter that could only come out of the mouth of a married man. Next thing you know he has the poor girl in the parking lot, up against a car, ready to have his way with her. Up to now the movie has been a lark, but the brakes are quickly applied as Thelma realizes what's happening to her and attempts to stop it. Harlan beats her badly and is only thwarted when Louise appears and puts a bullet in his heart.
This here's a gun. It's gonna be important later.
The exact circumstances of the shooting are such that Louise feels uncomfortable going to the police. By her reckoning, people will assume that Thelma was “asking for it” after letting a clearly horny man buy her drinks and tell her jokes all night long. If this seems unnecessarily cynical, I can think of a real life case off the top of my head where a woman wound up dead in Central Park because there was no Louise on hand to save her – and the press made the rapist out to be the victim. Regardless of how prevalent you feel gender inequity remains in our society, you can't deny that these things DO happen.
Besides, if they 'd gone to the police, there'd be no movie!
The girls decide to go on the lam, and head for Mexico. This is where whatever logic was present in the film begins to break down, and you have to either accept it or not. What I mean is that Thelma & Louise begins to foreshadow its protagonists' eventual fate at a very early point in the story. And if you're familiar with the ending, you might assume that the whole script was written with that very conclusion in mind. Like a Greek tragedy or a Shakespearean drama, you can see it coming a mile away and every improbable plot contrivance seems tooled to facilitate it.
It's no secret that Thelma is an idiot. While she certainly did not deserve Harlan Puckett, it becomes increasingly difficult to feel sorry for her past that point. That's because the whole story almost entirely depends on her making a series of such impossibly boneheaded decisions that you almost want to throw up. And while we could debate whether or not Louise's initial decision to avoid the police was the right one, she at first seems to have her head on straight. But it isn't long before she inexplicably puts their fate entirely in Thelma's hands at a critical point in the movie. She even goes so far as to verbally emphasize, as she walks out of frame, how important it is that Thelma not screw things up.
So of course, Thelma screw things up.
The story comes perilously close to undermining any sympathy we might have for the girls by so thoroughly underscoring their stupidity. But this is mitigated somewhat by the fact that the majority of the male characters are cartoonish, disgusting louts. Not only do Thelma and Louise live in a world where everything event is a deus ex machina, but everyone – and I mean everyone - with a “Y” chromosome is an ape. The only exceptions are Louise's boyfriend Jimmy, and Detective Hal Slocumb (Harvey Keitel), the police detective who is on their trail. Both men are critical to the story, because they are central to some of it's most dubious contrivances.
Jimmy is abiding and understanding to the point of seeming daft. Slocumb is the worst cop in the world, developing an almost maternal interest in the plight of two murder suspects he's never met, goldbricking with them over the phone, letting them in on the details of his case and all but adopting them as his own children. It's as though Callie Khouri's script wants us to believe there's only two kinds of men in the world - pigs, and the ones who will watch Oprah with you and paint your toenails whole you share a good cry together.
It's utterly preposterous.
But if you step back and look objectively, Thelma & Louise is a largely symbolic story. It rains a lot in this world, but either intentionally or because they filmed in a place where the sky sputters fifteen inches a year, they hauled in water machines. The net effect renders every storm a sunshower, implying that proverbial silver lining your mother always told you about. As the women hustle from Arkansas toward Mexico in their convertible, they make the puzzling decision to avoid passing through Texas. Ostensibly, this is because Louise's dark past lurks there. But it also allows them to pass through New Mexico and Arizona, and the sweeping desert vistas there lend the movie the majestic, open feel of a John Ford western.
Rather than film at dawn or dusk, Ridley Scott plants giant spotlights in the desert to unnaturally accentuate the rock formations at night, and the light effects most films use to film car interiors at night are highly exaggerated here. As the two fugitives resort to robbery and violence to sustain themselves, they stop being women and become giants, from the way they act to the way the scenes are filmed. Everything about Thelma & Louise is larger than life hyperbole, like the tall tales your grandfather once told you. This isn't a movie, it's a fable. It's a ballad. It's doesn't quite venture into Raising Arizona territory, but there's no way you should mistake this movie for anything but allegory.
Thelma and Louise are living representations of the need to take your life into your own hands and stop letting events around you dictate who you are and what your fate will be. The implication is that if we fail to meet the future head on, it will come looking for you, and you might not like what it brings with it. Louise allowed a tragedy in her past to prevent her from taking her relationship with Jimmy where they both wanted it to go. Thelma let her fear of failure make her weak and submissive. And when the future came looking for them, it wasn't what they wanted or expected. But in the movie's famous, final climactic scene, for the first time in their lives, both women are truly masters of their domain.