Rebels on the road, entry 3 of 3: Feminism grafted onto a seeker/refugee movie
This movie’s been famous for—can it be?—more than 20 years, and though I think I saw at least part of it (not when it came out) in a not-long-ago year before looking at it very recently, it is new to me for purposes of discussing it. It is one of director Ridley Scott’s few movies on American Everyman stories—and, as it happens, on deviant persons (see my July 31 and August 3 entries on Matchstick Men)—but it is interesting for a few reasons that have largely to do with its artistic/technical merits and its philosophical angle.
For one thing, it is visually stylish, and otherwise well-produced (including a sort of “romanticizing” and/or “sweetening” way in which music is used), so that the question of whether it is a case of style over substance arises. It is also not quite original—it fits squarely within the road movie tradition, which is so broad as even to include Bob Hope/Bing Crosby works; Leonard Maltin notes its lack of originality. I was reminded by this film of Steven Spielberg’s early effort, The Sugarland Express (1974), which I haven’t seen for some years, and of the Arthur Penn-directed Bonnie and Clyde (1967). You could toss in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). But I think it’s safe to say that originality is not meant to be a standard by which to judge Thelma & Louise (T&L); we can look past the familiarity (as if it were a necessary coat hanger) to see what is actually new, or “contrarian,” about it, and appreciate it on that basis (love it, and on other points be rather unsettled by it).
The main way it has something new to say is in transplanting a feminist viewpoint—embodied in its two main characters, and amusingly expressed in various vignettes and tiny exchanges through the film—to a subtype of the western, the desperado fleeing, trying to reach sanctuary. Screenwriter Callie Khouri is the star behind this, with Ridley Scott lending its talents in terms of marshaling production features and visual beautification to take us through a tour that makes good use of western vistas and even makes stops at banal motels seem like something out of an evocative dream.
(Scott in during-the-movie commentary alludes to the visual stylization as if it’s to buttress the story’s being a portentous last ride by the women—with the story, as Scott says, being a sort of noir, presumably meaning doom-aimed; I can see his point regarding the style, though my own immediate take was that the visual beauty made the story seem like a weird dream, which is almost the same thing.)
Scott’s instinct for making visual beauty in ways that turn up repeatedly in his films is on display here—particularly, light made decorative in a host of ways: diffused through sprinkler water; glinting off swimming pools; led to make night rain look like a delight; color-radiating through a fish tank; glistening on wet pavement; reflected in mirrors; and making outdoors brilliant (though flat) through a window while an interior shot is more “sullenly” dim—a variety of a standard cinematographic technique (and often inevitable due to conditions), actually. (Scott is probably one of the few major directors who gets elated to hear that local rain is in the forecast during his production schedule.)
Some early scenes with Thelma and Louise at a bar on their way to a vacation seemed very MTV-ish to me—with production styling that includes cinematographer’s smoke in the background diffusing light to give depth and differing emphases in a complex interior shot; and a lot of interior shots with colors balanced across the screen, warm colors (reds, yellows) balanced by cool (blues, greens). Who thought stops at bars and diners in the West could look so much the stuff of high-class magazine shoots?
And of course, his team includes composer Hans Zimmer, supplying a sort of smoothed country-and-western score with slide guitar, harmonica, an occasional bit of synthesizer…when source music—or something like it—isn’t used to thread a mood through a scene.
In fact, I found myself on repeated viewings to be admiring this film, as if it were good for a film school class on production design and such things as editing and soundtrack music, but this beautification glosses a story that is in some ways just sad—women who have become desperados (desperadas would be the correct Spanish spelling) starting with the semi-accidental murder by Louise of a loutish man at a bar who was trying to rape Thelma. Their problems compound as they lose money brought by Louise’s boyfriend, and their grasping at sources of help parallel their increasingly seeming to lose a conscience about what they’re doing. This plus the movie’s often-amusing feminist touches make for a sort of diverting romp, but in the end I wonder whether a feminist philosophy is best supported by this kind of story, and not by one where the heroines come to some resolution, or beginning thereof, where they can pursue their independent-minded lives somehow in coordination with (but not with total love of) stultified and sometimes-enlightened society?
Coming to this movie, as I said, basically for the first time, and really only looking hard at Ridley Scott this year for the first time, I will lay out my further discussion this way: (1) how Ridley Scott works and sees himself as a director, and how he approached this movie; (2) the basic framework of the movie, as a kind of “noir” and using some stock elements, to make its more creative or original points, which are related to feminism; and (3) how well this movie holds up with regard to feminism, or its having any sort of wider cultural significance.
1. Scott’s background, and choice of this movie
When I listened to Scott’s during-the-movie commentary, for about the first half of the movie, it affirmed in some ways, and fleshed out in others, my appreciative understanding of him. His impressively visual style derives, not surprisingly, from his having been trained as a designer, when in art school in England
Early in his career, Scott made a movie or show for the BBC, with technical help on the production from his brother Tony; then he found it hard to break into making movies as a career. So he turned to producing television commercials, which (I knew) was Scott’s forte for years before he started directing. Then he directed the feature film The Duellists (1977), which he seems to have developed on his own and which opened the door for him in Hollywood, but apparently studio execs didn’t know how to market it. Then his big break came when he directed Alien (1979), which has long been cited as what put him on the directing map (and actually is accounted a major landmark horror/sci fi film in its own right).
But the time Scott made the also-widely-esteemed Blade Runner (1982), he was about 45. Born in 1937, he is not really of the baby boomer generation. So, by the time he had hit his stride in directing movies in the 1980s, he was both older and well experienced in making TV commercials (he did thousands, I think he said), as well as having been schooled in production design. The result is that he is largely a visually-oriented, production-oriented director who is also confirmed as a craftsman by long experience. He is not, by these and other measures we can ferret out, the type of director—a writer type—who would seize on a story idea for whatever reason it appealed to him and then, in deliberate preproduction, fuss over every word and concept, the way Stanley Kubrick might have, or shape a story for both its overall craft and its literary potential, the way Francis Ford Coppola could be said to have done with his script for Patton (1970), or his work on the scripts for The Godfather (1972) or Apocalypse Now (1979).
But this is not to say Scott is an illiterate as far as the script side of things goes. As he notes in his T&L commentary, he was interested in branching out into a character-driven story, as opposed to what he had been directing for some years (he didn’t want to be “type-cast” as a director). The T&L script, which had been floating around for some years (within his production company, and perhaps outside it as well), appealed to him, and he had long discussions for its writer, Callie Khouri, to understand it enough so that, as he says, once he was dealing with the actors, he could answer all their questions. The net result was that, while some studio execs dismissed the script as about “two bitches in a car,” Scott was poised, once the movie was slotted to be made, to “support the idea of female opportunity” with this film’s theme (this may paraphrase him).
(Side note: I think Scott is to be valued, leaving aside his British “alienation” from the daily-striving, petty details of American life [which may be to any Brit’s credit], for knowing his virtues and bounds as a director—being art/production-oriented—and also being old enough [and somewhat blue-collarish] to bring a wisdom of age and unpretentious social-level origin to his interpretation of stories, which tends to override whatever lack of “hipness” he has about American behavioral or psychological fashion.)
I admit that the strength of T&L, if you leave aside the cliches and other lack of originality, is in the complexity of its script, which allows for showing how Thelma and Louise demonstrate multiple sides of themselves as circumstances bring about, and even in such comic potential as in Thelma’s first seeing Brad Pitt’s armed-robbery drifter demonstrate how he conducts a hold-up, and then later in the movie Thelma, in defense of her and Louise’s interests, uses almost exactly the same “script” he had. So this, giving a solid, detailed framework for production of the movie, and Scott’s proclivities as a production designer, show how this film has its charms in its slick style and smart details.
Apparently production requirements for the supposed Grand Canyon scenes late in the movie—which were filmed in Utah (most of the film was done in California)—were such that studio execs (I assume he meant) were second-guessing Scott in a torrent of thick-headedness; he says he “became a screamer during this movie” when it came to defending what he wanted to do, which of course he justified based on his methods and ideas developed in his long experience beforehand.
2. The story—serving feminist ends
Geena Davis was apparently cast for Thelma before Susan Sarandon was on board. Scott notes Davis’s intelligence, but she was willing to take on the part, and he has felt she was the best actress for “ditsy” Thelma. Sarandon was settled on in view of her style that would lend itself to Louise’s being, earlier in the film, a “leader” and “mother figure,” as Scott puts it. Both affect Western accents—which, among all the actors in this movie, comprise one thing that somewhat grates on me in terms of the “stock” characteristics the movie takes on as a “familiar” framework from which to make its more original mark.
The two actresses are interesting in a surface way. Both are not strikingly beautiful, say, in the way of a Christie Brinkley or others of the model type. But both are attractive in their way; Davis has a sort of broad face with a cleft chin and full lips, and eyes that seem not quite to match her face but can show her potential to articulate character. Sarandon is unusual—whom, alas, I always think of as Janet from The Rocky Horror Picture Show (because of my many, not-always-relished high school viewings of that movie, as many other people have had; Sarandon also admits the permanent way that Rocky Horror has become the primary anchor of her reputation).
Sarandon usually seems to give a sense of being a strong character, and partly it seems a reflection of her big eyes, which indeed in T&L she can widen as to give a sense of fierce intensity, though after she shoots the rapist, her eyes make her look a little like a Halloween mask. A bit earlier in the film, in starting on their trip, Thelma and Louise are dressed up in almost-matching reddish hair, scarves, and stylish sunglasses; the two women seem like two friends out for “a day out for the girls,” but you presume they are also such as you may not want to underestimate if push came to shove with them. Actually, you won’t see how their characters can be (for better or worse) until misfortune sets in.
Louise is a waitress who has a boyfriend, Jimmy, played by Michael Madsen (whose character Scott points out works as a rock star, which would have been a risky choice for Louise, in view of such people’s assumed lack of reliability, and given her past experience with an apparent rape or the like in Texas). Thelma is her friend, a stay-at-home housewife with a rather loutish husband, Darryl, played by Christopher McDonald. Both live somewhere in Arkansas
Things start to go south—figuratively and literally
The story becomes more of a “noir,” as Scott calls it—or, as we can say, a matter of characters on a downward arc of doom—when Thelma and Louise have stopped at a bar, and Thelma starts to loosen up, downing a fair amount of booze (Louise cuts loose a bit and similarly indulges, but not as much). A flirtatious male picks Thelma up; they dance; eventually they end up in boozy/horny mode out in the parking lot. Then the male starts to try to rape her.
Louise appears on the scene with a handgun that Thelma had originally packed in their bags on the thought that there would be crazies, snakes, and bears to deal with—but Thelma had handled it as if it was a tarantula she could barely touch. Louise wields it well enough to make the male let Thelma go. When the male engages in some sharply daring, contemptuous remarks to the women, Louise pulls the trigger—and kills the male. Out of a night of booze, momentary passion, and (as we don’t know at first) Louise’s character “lessons” from having dealt with a horrifically abusive male in the past, comes this moment that is, we might say, fairly tragic in the “Greek tragedy” or “Shakespearean tragedy” sense. A character misstep, not a matter of a gross lack of character or ridiculous mere circumstance, has set of chain of dramatic trouble in motion.
The women choose to flee. At first, Louise is “trying to think” and “doesn’t want to go to jail” and such: they are in a panic…so a fleeing version of their road trip begins, but relatively innocently at first.
The movie becomes a sort of mixed sojourn/escape story, with the two women embracing the destiny of fugitives—Louise is the one who first determines they will drive to Mexico—while seemingly close on their tail, after picking up their trail surprisingly quickly, is a police investigator, Hal, played by Harvey Keitel (and, as Scott notes, with Keitel playing the most sympathetic male in the movie, somewhat against the usual type Keitel plays). Hal seems genuinely concerned for these women, not in a high-handed male chauvinist way, but because he gives them the benefit of the doubt and/or is charmedly mystified by them, and sees them as possibly victimized in the situation. An FBI man (as Scott seems to identify him), Max, played by Stephen Tobolowsky, has become a sort of ad hoc partner with Hal in tracking the women down. Max is a balding man who seems something of a stony geek, and is less sympathetic; so Hal has to assert his control of the “chase tiller” to give these women a bit of a break, while trying with caring determination to bring them to justice.
Interludes-of-sorts with significant others
In a rather touching scene, when the women are camped at a motel, Louise phones her boyfriend Jimmy, in order to get him to send her $6,000 to help with her escape, without telling him exactly what is up. Sarandon’s handling of her mixed appeal for the money and her hesitating to explain why, while breaking down a bit with guilt and sadness, is well done and touching. The Glenn Frey song “Part of You, Part of Me” plays lightly in the background (though as a sort of soundtrack embellishment and not “source music,” because the location this is in isn’t clear—it’s heard in both Louise’s motel room and in Jimmy’s home, and turns louder once we are with Thelma by the pool); a sad of regretful sadness is conveyed nicely with this (while the song itself, to me, is almost too trite).
When Louise and Thelma—accompanied by Brad Pitt’s charming armed-robber drifter, J.D.—arrive at another motel, supposedly in Oklahoma City, where Louise expects to pick up the wired money, Jimmy turns out to be there with it. Jimmy wants to talk to her, and with a sort of gentle male initiative, arranges for a second room to be on his tab to accommodate all involved.
In an interesting, braided pair of sequences, Louise has exchanges with Jimmy, while Thelma—more the wildwoman, and who has already told her selfishly boneheaded husband on the phone what to do with himself—now is having a quick fling with J.D. in her own room.
Jimmy, whose similarity to Elvis Presley is even noted by Scott in his commentary (though Scott seems to see it as part and parcel of Jimmy’s sincere enough approach to being a rock star), tries to get to the bottom of what is up with Louise. At first, upset, he throws furniture around; she is ready to leave. Then he breaks out something meant to bring some reconciliation—an engagement ring. His sense of embarrassed irony and mixed emotions as he offhandedly extends to her the ring is one of the more artful touches to the scene—with him probably feeling that despite their current turbulent emotions, its larger meaning should blessedly supervene and bring about some peace. Louise gives a sort of show of embarrassed forbearance…and she begins to point out how he characteristically breaks out the ring when they are in a situation of drifting apart, or such.
This sort of situation can be handled in a crudely feminist way, maybe a la Nine to Five (1980), where the male chauvinist lout is put in his place in almost a sitcom-ish way. But in T&L, the taste and subtlety with which Louise and Jimmy talk out their situation, despite their not being the stuff of Henry Jamesian fiction, I think is laudable. Jimmy may be a bit of a lug of an Elvis-looking male; and Louise, while ostensibly the strong woman who is not going to be merely his “better half,” talks with him in a manner of respecting enough parity. A sort-of-elegiac scene the following morning, where they speak in a restaurant, is very well handled. Louise essentially gets across that she cannot be with him right now; and he is accepting that they cannot be a couple, and he is appreciating what he is losing in her, while he leaves her the ring as a token of affection. Again, music in the background gives a decorative touch to the poignant scene. I think that, in following whatever feminist agenda could be said to be articulated here, this all is handled pretty well. Jimmy may not be the dream male for every woman, but he has some class and good taste (unlike Thelma’s Darryl, who seems to have his comic potential as a world-class boob played up).
It is after this situation, with Louise and Jimmy delicately parting ways, that the story develops in such a way that it ends up in high gear with the women more confirmed than ever as fugitives who might resort to any means to get away, and not caring anymore. When Thelma turns up in the restaurant after Jimmy has left, and she shows the excited-eyed Dionysian aftereffects of a wild night with the armed robber, she seems “liberated” in her own way. But quickly—what about the money in the room? They both scurry back. The money is gone—the armed robber had stolen it. Louise breaks down, in despair now: their last ticket to freedom, gone. But now Thelma will take control; she’ll come up with a resolution.
The third act settles in
And it is when, back on the road, Thelma holds up a convenience store using the bold tactics her armed-robber friend had showed her.
The rest of the movie is about these women more confirmed as outlaws, seemingly grimly satisfied with that because, as Scott points out in a different context, things are simpler for them once their legal status has turned a certain unambiguous way.
And they can engage in such “wish fulfillment” as, when they finally persuade a sexist truck driver to pull over, bluffing him with the idea he might get himself a fling—he with his mud flaps with a silver female silhouette and his grossly wagging tongue out his truck window—they give him what for: they blow up his truck with a gun, make him feel like he might be next….
I’ve sketched this detailed odyssey-of-sorts in what some may feel is a deficient way, but suffice it to say that, if this sort of thing appeals, it’s a movie to be watched for its details, its visual beauty, its vignettes. You’ll be entertained by plenty of those.
The one nagging question remains—especially in light of what Thelma and Louise’s ultimate destiny is, with Harvey Keitel’s kindly Hal on their tail, near the end in a hovering helicopter, amid scads of trailing police vehicles—what kind of service this story really does to the cause of feminism.
3. What kind of feminist message, overall?
This film won an Oscar for best original screenplay. (Carolyn Ann Khouri, born in 1954, won several awards for this screenplay from different bodies, according to her Wikipedia bio.) Her second produced screenplay, for 1995’s Something to Talk About, did not receive the same accolades. Her directorial debut was with Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (2002), for which she was writer, director, and producer.
Meanwhile, Sarandon and Davis were both nominated for Oscars for Best Actress, but they lost to Jodie Foster for her work in The Silence of the Lambs.
A very recent blog entry under the aegis of the magazine The Atlantic, from someone who was all of nine when T&L was released, voices praise for the film as the last great feminist film. Can that be?
The famous shot of Thelma and Louise, in their trusty Thunderbird, sailing out into midair in a what-the-hell try at last escape—though, since they are supposedly at the rim of the Grand Canyon, this is truly a last escape for them—is famous, as both an emblem of the film and, one would suppose, a key to its meaning. But are we to take this doom-laden film as giving a positive voice to feminism? Or is it inadvertently a concession to despair?
I had originally started formulating a big set of ideas, and had a constructive wish, to sum things up here, but I will try to keep it relatively simple, because I can maybe better address the “big questions of feminism” somewhere else, if and when I’m ready. For years I never cared to get into the “war of the sexes,” which on a historical level, after heating up from a low simmer as the ’60s went on, first kept a rolling boil in the 1970s. For years my view with respect to women was to be concrete, good-faith, respective of novelty, and cognizant of the rich complexity of human relations. Plus, I think if there’s been any area of life where an ideological approach seems stillborn, it is in male–female relations.
To me today, after having experienced a wealth of different things, in the workplace and otherwise, that could give me copious grounds for making empirically valid conclusions, I would say that a rigorously ideological feminist philosophy is not for me, and moreover seems “objectively” wrongheaded, similar to communism, in the sense that it is a rigid orthodoxy that in some way does not accord with aspects of human nature and tradition that have long nurtured Western society in the past and have continued to do so, despite fashions of behavior and self-awareness in recent decades. I don’t think I am a conservative regarding women—at least not entirely—but I think a kind of stock feminism is something like communism was for me and other Americans in the 1970s, a sort of intellectual chewing gum, something that seemed reasonable at the time (and for a short period), and appealed to our growing minds and willingness to hope and work for greater justice in the world.
Interestingly, one article of feminist thinking that I actually did a college term paper on in 1984, the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI), was a sort of philosophical red herring (or virtual failure) that both gave me some food for thought that developed slowly afterward, and accorded with what I think I already instinctively knew or suspected. The BSRI was developed by social psychologist Sandra Bem and first introduced, I think, in 1974. By the early 1980s, there were many critical studies of it in psychological journals. I picked as my assignment, in an independent-study class where this was one pre-set option of a kind, to do a literature review of available critical studies of the BSRI. (Amusingly, the Wikipedia article on the BSRI, which is very sketchy, describes it in terms of supporting measurement of the two different sex roles. This is a significant retreat from its 1970s angle, which centered on promoting “androgyny” as the ideal sex role.)
Though it’s been years since I last looked at this paper, and maybe I would second-guess bits of it now, I think I remember enough of it to affirm the likely validity of what it said, which really just derived from what the studies it reviewed found. On every measure (or almost every), the BSRI did not measure what it purported to, which was predicated on the postulated idea that an “androgynous” personality type was ideal, or healithiest, combining both male and female traits. Standard female and male personalities no longer were ideal, the test implied; something between them was. The test claimed to measure how much an individual showed an androgynous personality.
But it did this with a checklist, from which the subject checked items off, comprising standard male and female traits. Some kind of built-in calculation derived an “androgyny” score from this. But if I recall rightly, among the test’s numerous flaws, the individual traits didn’t serve the test’s aims well because, on a surface level, some or many really revealed desirable traits, independently of the issue of androgyny. (This sort of thing generally has to do in part with a test’s “face validity.” It may also have to do with people checking off traits in accordance with a bias to appearing more how they wanted to be seen, not how they really were.) Further, not all traits equally correlated statistically with the supposed “ideal” of androgyny. I think there was some statistical problem with how individual traits that were supposedly “male” or “female” correlated with the respective genders looked at as “constructs,” and perhaps how this related to an idea of healthiness.
Some of the specific studies (again, I’m going on memory), and the whole set taken in the aggregate, suggested the BSRI was wrongheaded in abstract conception and highly flawed in execution. It was a failure, if not a simple fraud. It reflected wishful thinking, one might have said, on the part of its feminist designer. There was no such thing as “androgyny” as an ideal sex-role condition—especially if measuring it (and the meaning of it) was derived largely from what were considered “typical” if not “desirable” male and female roles.
Part of what I took away from this term paper was that males and females have fundamentally different roles in our society. Whether you see this as rooted in “natural law” or “religious fundamentals,” or as a matter of long-ingrained habit, or as arising otherwise, the overwhelming evidence, over the long term in recent decades, and even considering history over the centuries and millennia, is that males and females have “inherently” different talents, proclivities, and roles to play. The nurturing role of a mother can be done by certain males who have some talent for it and work to make it happen (though maybe not fully well). But as a general matter, the role is essential not only to human development but is seen in some long-ensconced form in the animal world. And females tend much more often to perform this task, as if they have the natural talent for it (though not all are equally good). The same sort of role defense can be made about males with their action-oriented, work-directed behavior, and their capacities for this. (This strikes me as I edit it as a lot of pompous kind of discussion. I think it’s a natural response to a certain kind of feminist cant that manages to float around….)
As a less definitional matter, I’ve often thought in recent years that whenever women talk as if they wish they had more of men’s freedoms, or what seem to be men’s privileges, they don’t realize that men typically are subject to isolation, alienation, and humiliation—not least from their work lives—that women, especially in their more delineated areas of life, are not subject to. Everyone can try out “the other sex’s” life if they want, but the general divergence between sex roles means each has its pros and cons, and does not mean that one is inherently better, or more genuine, or more blessed with freedom and respect. Life is more complex than that.
And so I would say that when it comes to “the feminist temper,” I think feminist issues and ideals are part of a loose array of trying to work out justice for, or amelioration of, fairly localized problems, and is a sum of not-rigidly totalistic behavior. It is very much in flux, contains experimental aspects, varies widely by different individuals, is subject on a broader level to historical changes, and at very least should give food for honest thought—for members of both sexes. But it should not be considered some “binding social institution that demands that women get all equal X, Y, and Z in our time,” and if there seems to be some sliding backward, “Well, then, won’t things ever change? I thought we’d already made progress,” etc., etc.
Some of the millenarian simple-mindedness of this is shown in something I read recently—in The New York Times, no surprise—where it was wondered who was going to take over for Gloria Steinem as a “leader” for women. Leader? What, are all women one big body of proletariat that needs a Fearless Leader to show the way to march “with bold curiosity for the adventure ahead,” to echo Dr. Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick’s movie? Do all women think the same? The answer is obvious.
All this said, when I consider what end Thelma and Louise come to, I wonder, Are these women such feminist heroines as they seem often to be (if in a sort of experimental, “let’s spit in the eye of The Man”) earlier in the movie? Is their rebellious drive off the cliff supposed to say how strong they are, how devoted to an ideal of freedom? Or does it mean simply despair? That (as the film overall says) “the feminist project” has no way to win satisfaction in this world?
