Thelma & Louise (Preview)
Reviewed by Megan Feeney

Produced by Dean O’Brien and Callie Khouri; directed by Ridley Scott; screenplay by Callie Khouri; cinematography by Adrian Biddle; edited by Thom Noble; production design by Norris Spencer; music by Hans Zimmer; starring Susan Sarandon, Geena Davis, Harvey Keitel, Christopher McDonald, and Michael Madsen. 4K UHD + Blu-ray, color, 130 min., 1991. A Criterion Collection release.

As The Criterion Collection’s new 4K UHD + Blu-Ray edition argues persuasively, with its painstaking digital restoration and smartly compiled special-edition features, Thelma & Louise (1991) still matters. More than thirty years later, the film’s payphones and squad cars may look like dusty relics, but its filmmaking and its feminism feel as vital as ever. The former is a cause for celebration, even as the latter is disheartening. To date, the film’s titular protagonists remain suspended in that famous freeze-frame ending and in cultural relevance, in their fight to move forward—even if that means driving over a cliff—in that teal Thunderbird, a strikingly ambivalent metaphor for liberation, from the control of men, misogyny, and the constrictive gender norms that would fence them in.

In fact, so iconic (and deadly serious) is Thelma & Louise’s ending, that it’s easy to forget the propulsion and pleasure of the two hours that precede it. The film is a glorious genre mash-up, mixing the buddy comedy, the road movie, the detective story, and ultimately the Western, which it bends to fit its female outlaws, as film critic Jessica Kiang explains in her excellent short essay in the Blu-Ray’s booklet. Thelma & Louise tells the story of a frazzled housewife and an uptight waitress, occupations emblematic “of traditional femininity,” as Kiang explains. They are, respectively, Thelma Dickinson (Geena Davis) and Louise Sawyer (Susan Sarandon), surnames whose gestures to canonical American literature cannot be accidental, their “lighting out” westward to escape the confines and injustices of civilization part of a grand national tradition. Though their ambition is modest at first, just a girls’ weekend getaway in their home state of Arkansas, the epic and violent turn their journey will take is hinted at by the phallic symbols they pack at the last minute (not to mention Louise’s cigarettes and her beloved Thunderbird convertible). Thelma grabs the gun and fishing pole of her caddish husband Daryl (Chris MacDonald), neither of which the women know how to use. But, as Louise quips of fishing, “Daryl does it, how hard can it be?”

Louise and Thelma are about to find out just how hard it is for women to wrest agency from patriarchy. On their first stop, at the Silver Bullet Bar, as they begin to let down their hair and kick up their heels, a predatory “cowboy” named Harlan (Timothy Carhart) swoops in on Thelma, woozy on Wild Turkey, and, after much dancing with her, attempts to rape her in the bar’s dark parking lot. He is dissuaded only at the point of a gun, unsteadily held and then impulsively discharged by Louise, even though Harlan’s physical assault has at that point downgraded to a verbal one (a significant hurdle to any justifiable homicide defense Louise might claim). The power of this scene—and the varied responses to the film’s power, often along gender lines—is suggested in the two audio commentaries included on Criterion’s Blu-Ray. Whereas director Ridley Scott talks over the scene (about partnering with actors and fire-arms protocols on sets), screenwriter Callie Khouri, Davis, and Sarandon, watching together, seem genuinely pained by it and rendered speechless. After Harlan is shot, Khouri recalls her first public screening at Cannes, where she was “disturbed” that people applauded his demise. She hadn’t intended a celebration of heroic revenge, but a lament about shared trauma and structural determinism. Sarandon adds that she certainly intended, in her performance, for Louise to radiate regret and the foreknowledge of dreadful consequences.

After all, as we later learn, Louise shoots Harlan because, as a sexual assault survivor herself, she has been “triggered” by the attempted rape, and her mistake will prove fatal. Henceforth, Louise and Thelma will have to run, convinced that “The Law” will not be sympathetic to their defense, and not because of the hurdle noted above, but rather because women’s accusations of (date) rape are so readily dismissed. No one will “believe that,” Louise yells at Thelma, “We don’t live in that kind of world!” Thelma had been too flirty and gotten too drunk; she’d been asking for it, people would say…

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Megan Feeney has a PhD in American studies from the University of Minnesota and is author of Hollywood in Havana: US Cinema and Revolutionary Nationalism in Cuba before 1959.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLVIII, No. 4