Thelma & Louise Live!: The Cultural Afterlife of an American Film 9780292794658

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T H E L M A & LO U I S E L I V E !

THELMA & LOUISE LIVE!

The Cultural Afterlife of an American Film Edited by

B E R N I E C OO K

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS

AUSTIN

Copyright © 2007 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2007 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 www.utexas.edu/utpress/about/bpermission.html ∞ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r1997) (Permanence of Paper).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Thelma & Louise live! : the cultural afterlife of an American film / edited by Bernie Cook. — 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-292-71465-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-292-71466-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Thelma & Louise (Motion picture) I. Cook, Bernie, 1968– II. Title: Thelma & Louise live! pn1997.t427t44 2007 791.43' 72—dc22 2007005589

For Jen, Lucy, and Emmett

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 “I Can See Clearly Now” Bernie Cook 1

“Something’s Crossed Over in Me” 7 New Ways of Seeing Thelma & Louise Bernie Cook

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Getting Hysterical 43 Thelma & Louise and Laughter Victoria Sturtevant

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Hearing Thelma & Louise 65 Active Reading of the Hybrid Pop Score Claudia Gorbman

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Interplaying Identities 91 Acting and the Building Blocks of Character in Thelma & Louise Susan Knobloch

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An Outlaw-Couple-on-the-Run Film for the 1990s 122 J. David Slocum

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“What All the Fuss Is About” 146 Making Brad Pitt in Thelma & Louise Cynthia Fuchs

7 Interview with Callie Khouri, December 19, 2002 168 Bernie Cook

APPENDIX I

Commentaries 191

Toxic Feminism on the Big Screen | John Leo 191 Gender Bender | Richard Schickel 193 Is This What Feminism Is All About? | Margaret Carlson 201 APPENDIX II

Filmographies 205

Callie Khouri 205 Ridley Scott 206

Selected Bibliography 213 Contributors 217 Index 219

viii Contents

AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

This book would not have been possible without the support and encouragement of Andy Horton of the University of Oklahoma, who commissioned an earlier version of this anthology and helped it find a home at the University of Texas Press. I also thank Callie Khouri for discussing the genesis of Thelma & Louise and for agreeing to be interviewed for this volume. I thank my contributors for sharing their insights into Thelma & Louise and for their patient support of this project. I thank editor Jim Burr and the sta≠ at the University of Texas Press for their enthusiasm and professionalism. At Georgetown University, I have benefited from the generosity of many colleagues, especially John Glavin, Steve Wurtzler, and Lalitha Gopalan. I thank Jane McAuli≠e, Dean of Georgetown College, and my colleagues in the Dean’s O∞ce for their interest in the project and for their support of my scholarship. Gavin Ho≠mann served as my research assistant on the anthology, discovering critical evidence of audience response to the film, capturing and preparing most of the illustrations, and continuing to work even after the end of his assistantship. Finally, I thank my family. My parents, Bernard and Rosemary, and my sister, Jennifer, nurtured my love of film from the beginning. My wife, Jen, is my best editor and my favorite filmgoing companion, as in 1991 when together we saw Thelma & Louise in its initial theatrical release. My children, Lucy and Emmett, inspire everything I do.

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T H E L M A & LO U I S E L I V E !

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INTRODUCTION

“I Can See Clearly Now”

Bernie Cook

“Thelma & Louise Live” Fifteen years after its initial release, Thelma & Louise (1991) remains culturally resonant and politically potent. A bumper sticker still in circulation in 2006 proclaims, “Thelma & Louise Live,” asserting that the characters survive in cultural memory despite their textual demise and, further, that the film remains a dynamic intertext, generating new meanings as new viewers encounter it in new contexts. As this anthology argues, the film is profoundly polyphonic, both textually and contextually, o≠ering viewers ways of crossing gender and identity, of gaining insight into the interrelations of gender and violence. Thelma & Louise’s legacies are multiple and complex, extending into production, promotion, reception, and also “realworld” discourse on women, men, violence, and power. Although the characters may not have survived their final flight, Thelma & Louise lives on in unusual places. Extracinematically, Thelma & Louise has been used as a statement of female empowerment and self-assertion and also as a warning of the perceived dangers of female access to violence. In 2001, two female fans of professional football at a Baltimore Ravens NFL game wore purple jerseys with “Thelma” and “Louise” embroidered on their backs. The large majority of fans at the game were male, many of whom wore jerseys with the names of favorite players, such as linebacker Ray Lewis, renowned for his violent tackles on the field of play and notorious for his acquittal from charges that he murdered three men after a Super Bowl party. Professional football exemplifies the American tendency to normalize masculine violence into sport, legal permissiveness, and invisible systems of control of gendered bodies. Thus, within the context of football as symbolic and literal arena of male violence, the two female fans’ choice of “Thelma” and “Louise” resonates with political meaning, as well as personal

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significance. These women used the film to assert identification with strong female characters who accessed violence as a tool for survival within a patriarchal society. In this world of normalized male violence, the original release of Thelma & Louise was extremely controversial, asserting that violent agency was not exclusively a male privilege. By representing women as both victims and agents of violence, Thelma & Louise broke radical new ground in mainstream American representation, profoundly threatening masculinist critics who objected to its breach of the norm of violence as male privilege.

“I Can See Clearly Now” Thelma & Louise also lives on through scholarship and research. By late 1991, both Film Quarterly and Cineaste published scholarly fora featuring short reflections on the film’s meaning and significance, including articles by Carol Clover, Marsha Kinder, and Elayne Rapping, among others. In 1993, Film Theory Goes to the Movies, an anthology of theoretically inflected criticism of contemporary film, featured essays on Thelma & Louise by Cathy Griggers and Sharon Willis. In 2000, the British Film Institute published Marita Sturken’s monograph on Thelma & Louise as an edition of its “Film Classics” series. Outside of film studies, in Critical Studies in Mass Communication (1999), Brenda Cooper published a study of gendered reception of Thelma & Louise in which she employed the methodology of relevance theory. In 2001, Tiina Vares published a study of women’s

Thelma and Louise “keep going” over the edge of the Grand Canyon. Frame capture.

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reception of Thelma & Louise in Feminist Media Studies. Thelma & Louise has received significant, but hardly exhaustive, scholarly attention. This volume seeks to complement existing scholarship on Thelma & Louise, to break new ground in understandings of the film, and to pioneer productive new critical and theoretical approaches in film studies. The contributors approach the film from di≠erent locations, employing diverse methodologies to understand the film and its impact. The chapters are linked by a shared concern with the film’s social meanings, meanings sought through attention to gender as performance and to audience response to performance of the relations between gender, identity, and power. The essays in this anthology propose to see Thelma & Louise clearly, in new ways. In the first chapter, I argue that Thelma & Louise provided female and male viewers with possibilities of seeing film in new ways. Through analysis of the film’s production, promotion, and reception, I contend that Thelma & Louise provided textual opportunities for both male and female viewers to engage female experiences of gendered violence from within a series of contexts. By examining the responses of historical viewers to Thelma & Louise, I suggest that film reception itself is fluid and complex and that viewers have opportunities to learn about gendered experience through identification and connection, to see familiar experience from new perspectives, to learn and to change. Some viewers found Thelma & Louise challenging because of its mixture of tones. Victoria Sturtevant examines Thelma & Louise through the lens of comedy theory, seeking to understand the film’s radical combination of laughter and violence. Sturtevant argues that the film’s emphasis on female laughter provided women viewers with opportunities to experience release from social containment while simultaneously threatening some male viewers with its potential to disrupt patriarchal containment. Whereas Sturtevant employs performance theory to understand the comedic elements of Thelma & Louise, Susan Knobloch seeks to theorize performance in the film through careful attention to acting as a specific cinematic discourse. Through close analysis of ways in which actors signify via physical action, Knobloch argues that Thelma and Louise, as performed by Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon, demonstrate the possibilities of multivoiced, multibodied “composite subjects.” Knobloch argues that, at the level of performance, Thelma & Louise articulates new opportunities for fluid identities within, if not across, gender. “I Can See Clearly Now”

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Thelma & Louise appealed to many viewers because of its exuberant, commentative sound track and its recasting of generic expectations. Sharing Knobloch’s attention to the details of film signification, Claudia Gorbman analyzes sound and music in Thelma & Louise. Gorbman argues that Thelma & Louise featured a hybrid score combining Hans Zimmer’s instrumental score with eighteen pop songs, resulting in a complex intertextual soundscape that profoundly shaped the film’s possible meanings. Through a series of case studies analyzing the use of specific pop songs in the film, including Marianne Faithfull’s version of “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan” and Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now,” Gorbman proposes that the film’s hybrid score invites viewers to engage in more active readings, enabling complex possibilities for identification on both aural and visual registers. When MGM/UA released Thelma & Louise in 1991, the studio produced promotional trailers that alternately marketed the film as a road movie, a buddy movie, a female friendship film/melodrama, a comedy, and an action movie. David Slocum engages the film’s complex generic status, focusing upon its dual status as a road movie and a lovers-on-the-run movie. Slocum produces a social history of the road film, arguing that the genre’s consistent social concerns have been with violence, containment, critique of dominant orders, and the possibilities and limits of freedom. Slocum links Thelma & Louise to Bonnie and Clyde (1967), both road and run films featuring outlaw “couples.” Slocum reads Thelma & Louise’s cultural politics at the beginning of the 1990s against Bonnie and Clyde’s cultural politics at the end of the 1960s, understanding Thelma & Louise as counter to Reaganera entertainment by restaging a version of 1960s critical liberalism. While helping the careers of Sarandon and Davis, Thelma & Louise introduced audiences to another star, Brad Pitt. Cindy Fuchs examines the meaning of the making of Brad Pitt, first by Thelma & Louise and later by the accumulation of his film roles and extracinematic exploits. Fuchs uses her analysis of the formation of Pitt’s star image to explore a historical shift in thinking about masculinity, changing structures of sexualization and objectification, and female agency and volition. In addition to the six essays, this anthology includes a new interview with screenwriter Callie Khouri, who won an Academy Award for writing Thelma & Louise, her first screenplay. In this interview, Khouri discusses the film’s production, addressing director Ridley Scott’s choices in adapting her screenplay. She talks about the intertextual influences that shaped her 4

Bernie Cook

creative process and about the film’s reception and afterlife. As a screenwriter and director, Khouri shares important insights about the gender politics of film production in Los Angeles and about the film’s relations to feminism. In a final section, this volume includes three commentaries written about Thelma & Louise in 1991. Writing in U.S. News & World Report, John Leo o≠ered the strongest attack on the film, condemning Thelma & Louise as “toxic feminism on the big screen” (June 10, 1991). Free from the reviewer’s responsibility to engage the film’s specificity, Leo instead represented those most threatened by the film, men and (some) women who understood violent agency as a male prerogative. Leo’s commentary fed the controversy over the film, and, in response, Time published a cover story, entitled “Why Thelma and Louise Strike a Nerve” (June 24, 1991). In a piece entitled “Gender Bender,” Richard Schickel reviews journalistic response to the film during its first month of release, o≠ering a valuable summary of aspects of the film’s initial reception. In the same issue, Margaret Carlson critiques the film for fatalism, while also appreciating the film’s virtues. Carlson articulates another important response to the film, ambivalence by female viewers about the ending. From within the heat of a raging controversy, these critics and commentators may not have seen the film as clearly as scholars working from the remove of a decade and a half. Nevertheless, these articles provide evidence of the strong and significant response to Thelma & Louise at its time of release and testify to the film’s importance.

Thelma and Louise clasp hands, reaching a decision not to surrender. Frame capture.

“I Can See Clearly Now”

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This anthology seeks to understand the social meanings of that response, helping the film to live on through scholarship, teaching, and spirited discussion.

Bibliography Carlson, Margaret. “Is This What Feminism Is All About?” Time, June 24, 1991, 57. Cooper, Barbara. “The Relevancy and Gender Identity in Spectators’ Interpretations of Thelma & Louise.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 16 (1999): 20–41. Clover, Carol. “Crossing Over.” Film Quarterly 45:2 (Winter 1991–1992): 22. Griggers, Cathy. “Thelma and Louise and the Cultural Generation of the New ButchFemme.” In Film Theory Goes to the Movies, ed. Jim Collins, Hilary Radner, and Ava Preacher Collins. New York: Routledge, 1993, 129–141. Kinder, Marsha. “Thelma & Louise and Messidor as Feminist Road Movies.” Film Quarterly 45:2 (Winter 1991–1992): 30–31. Leo, John. “Toxic Feminism on the Big Screen.” U.S. News & World Report, June 10, 1991, 20. Rapping, Elayne. “Feminism Gets the Hollywood Treatment.” Cineaste 18:4 (December 1991): 30. Schickel, Richard. “Gender Bender.” Time, June 24, 1991, 52–56. Sturken, Marita. Thelma & Louise. London: BFI, 2000. Vares, Tiina. “Framing ‘Killer Women’ Films: Audience Use of Genre.” Feminist Media Studies 2:2 (2002): 213–229. Willis, Sharon. “Hardware and Hardbodies, What Do Women Want?” In Film Theory Goes to the Movies, ed. Jim Collins, Hilary Radner, and Ava Preacher Collins. New York: Routledge, 1993, 120–128.

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“ S O M E T H I N G ’ S C R O S S E D OV E R I N M E ”

New Ways of Seeing Thelma & Louise

Bernie Cook

“Part of Me, Part of You” Toward the conclusion of Thelma & Louise, Thelma (Geena Davis) explains to Louise (Susan Sarandon) that she will not surrender to police, that surrender is not an option because of a new sense of self. She explains, “Something has crossed over in me. I can’t go back.” True to the conventions of the road movie, Thelma has been changed by her experiences on the road. Screenwriter Callie Khouri has structured the film to provoke change in both of her main characters, and at this final juncture both characters have shifted from initial fixity (imprisonment in rigid, narrow gender and class roles) to dynamic hybridity: each now incorporates an aspect of the other, and both women have adopted signs (costume) and postures (bodily comportment) associated with male outlaws. Not only have they crossed each other (Thelma becoming more assertive, Louise less rigid and controlled), but also they have crossed over the barriers marking conventional gender roles in American generic cinema. Though decidedly not “free”—the road is full of peril and threat and containment—the road has enabled them mobility of identity, a mobility that is confusing but ultimately, crucially, meaningful. Thelma and Louise are willing to die rather than surrender this hard-won mobility of self. In this chapter, I argue that Thelma & Louise provides viewers with opportunities to embrace a similar mobility through the act of reception. Indeed, I argue that the film’s social significance (its claim to lasting importance) is tied to the text’s openness to investment and identification with the complex, hybrid subjectivities of the two female protagonists. In response to critics, both male and female, who lamented the film’s portrayal

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Thelma confides in Louise that “something has crossed over” in her. Frame capture.

Louise agrees that they cannot go back. Frame capture.

of its male characters, Davis argued that critics who thought the film was unfair to men were identifying with the wrong characters. Indeed, most professional critics and pundits assumed that viewers were limited to identification (at any level, from empathy to fantasy) with characters of the same gender.1 Instead, I argue that Thelma & Louise enabled a range of viewers to access the main character’s mobile subjectivities, to cross over the divide of gender to more fluid, dynamic possibilities, where female and male viewers can take up a complex range of positions relative to the social categories of femininity and masculinity.

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“The Most Talked About Film of 1991!” In a promotional video prepared for video retailers, seeking to attract orders for Thelma & Louise’s VHS rollout in 1992, MGM/UA proclaimed the film to be “the most talked about film of 1991.” Reception Theory has long held that the social meaning of film—the uses made of a film by its audience—is produced through the encounters between texts and audiences in contexts. The frequency of these encounters can be di∞cult to measure, but one indicator of engagement between audience and film is box o∞ce. Another important indicator is press coverage, and a third is discursive controversy. Thelma & Louise was a box o∞ce hit (relative to expectations) that generated considerable press coverage, creating sustained discursive controversy. Film historians often look to budget and box o∞ce figures to assess studio expectations for a film and extrapolate audience interest. In the case of Thelma & Louise, budget and box o∞ce figures reveal a complex constellation of expectations (by filmmakers, distributor, and audience) and significant interest. Mimi Polk and Ridley Scott produced Thelma & Louise for a budget of $16.5 million. Screenwriter Callie Khouri had first attempted to develop the film independently with producer Amanda Temple, seeking financing of about $1 million. The final cost of Scott and Polk’s production suggests that the film was budgeted far in excess of an “independent film,” circa 1991.2 The average cost of the top thirty grossing films of 1991 was $37 million.3 Thus, while not an independent film, Thelma & Louise was budgeted at less than half of the average, which suggests that MGM/UA executives did not feel that the film, even with Scott at the helm, had blockbuster potential. The film received a mid-level budget, befitting a character-driven film, featuring two female actresses not yet stars, and initially marketed largely to a female audience. Despite this narrow vision of the film’s appeal, Thelma & Louise found a wide audience. In its theatrical release, Thelma & Louise earned $45.4 million in U.S. domestic gross income, or nearly three times its production cost. Although this figure was far less than the $205 earned by Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Tri-Star), the top-grossing film of 1991, Thelma & Louise nonetheless became one of the top-grossing films of the year, despite significantly less promotion than the top films. Moreover, Thelma & Louise’s surprising success suggests that the film’s appeal, and its impact, exceeded MGM/UA’s e≠orts to fix the film’s meanings and identify and package the “Something’s Crossed Over in Me”

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film’s audience. It is important to note that the film’s earnings demonstrate that the film had a wider appeal, attracting multiple audiences and diverse viewers. The film also attracted multiple and diverse reviewers. Returning to MGM/UA’s claim that Thelma & Louise was the “most talked about film of 1991,” the intensity and variety of response to the film in print and other media suggests more about audience engagement with the film than do box o∞ce figures. When film scholars discuss “viewer response,” most often they theorize the possible spectators addressed by a film text or attempt to construct the available schema for interpretation by analyzing popular reviews. In the case of Thelma & Louise, it is possible to focus upon the significant critical, journalistic, and scholarly response to the film, but it is also possible to examine evidence of the responses of actual viewers. For example, viewer response was captured via the studio’s audience testing, via letters about individual experiences of the film written to the editors of masscirculation magazines such as Time and Newsweek and via Internet fan activity, including 14,088 user ratings posted to the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) website as of February 6, 2004. These discrete viewer responses occurred within a broader context of sustained critical commentary generated by a range of journalistic and scholarly writers. In addition to being reviewed widely by professional film critics, Thelma & Louise was assessed by a range of political pundits and was featured on the cover of magazines from Time to Sight and Sound. Attention to the film extended to scholarly publications, as both Film Quarterly and Cineaste collected the responses of a range of scholars into special sections. The film’s social meanings were made and remade within and between these contexts, generating a complicated and fluid field of discourse.

“Two bitches in a car. I don’t get it.” To fully appreciate the surprising success of Thelma & Louise, as well as to understand the unexpectedly heated and extended discursive controversy over the film, one needs to examine the horizon of expectations generated by the film’s production, distribution, and reception. The film’s impact was shaped by its production and promotion, the generic contexts in which it was produced and consumed, and the extracinematic context of gender politics in the late 1980s and early 1990s, often referred to as “the gender wars,” in which any viewer was situated, conscious or not. In The Range of Inter10

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pretation and elsewhere, Wolfgang Iser has argued that such contexts, or horizons, not only define expectations, but also shape the possibilities for meaning of a cultural text such as a film. Thus, if Thelma & Louise o≠ers viewers new possibilities for seeing and identifying with female characters who demonstrate violent agency, the new possibilities are shaped by the complex constellations of film, context, intertext, and audience. In this sense, “Thelma & Louise” references this broadest set of incrustations, not simply the film, but also the film in contexts. When MGM/UA released a second, deluxe DVD package for Thelma & Louise in February 2003, the package included a “making of ” documentary short entitled Thelma & Louise: The Last Journey, a seeming attempt to close down some of the film’s ambiguity and openness. Produced for Ridley Scott’s Scott Free Productions, this “documentary” is really another iteration of the film’s promotion, working to define the film’s meanings and importance for future viewers/DVD consumers. It is not surprising that Scott is featured prominently. Holding a fat cigar throughout his interviews, performing a stereotype of Hollywood masculinity, Scott tells tales about the di∞culties securing studio financing for the film, tales that invariably locate him as protagonist and protector of the film. In one such tale, Scott talks about the failure of a male studio executive to understand the film, a tale intended to locate Scott as a member of the “boys’ club,” but to di≠erentiate him as especially sensitive and visionary. According to Scott, the unnamed studio executive complained about the screenplay: “Two bitches in a car. I don’t get it.” According to screenwriter Callie Khouri, many in Hollywood did not “get” her script, failing to see the appeal of a film built around two female friends on the run from patriarchal authority. The executive’s easy slide from women to “bitches” suggests that the film’s expressionistic rendering of a masculine world of phallic threat to women could serve as metaphor for the entertainment industry’s gender politics. The executive’s casual misogyny also suggests a profound misunderstanding of the complexity of audience response and audience desire. As a male viewer, he seems to say, “I have no interest in women characters, especially in women characters who are violent agents.” Such women are a threat that must be contained and rejected. The mobility suggested by “car,” hints at the threat as a challenge to male privilege. This executive does not want to understand the appeal of a film that allows women degrees of movement and agency. The suggestion of “Something’s Crossed Over in Me”

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Ridley Scott on the set with cigar. Frame capture, Thelma & Louise: The Last Journey.

anger in his response (“bitches”) also links to the repressive male violence dramatized in the film. Recall, Harlan (Timothy Carhart), who assaults Thelma, and the truck driver (Marco St. John), who harasses the women, both use “bitches” as a prominent epithet to mark the women’s threat, as when the truck driver labels the pair “bitches from hell.” Finally, the executive’s tone of anger and incomprehension presages the response of conservative pundits, mostly male, who attacked the film upon its release as dangerous and threatening.

“Callie Khouri’s Thelma & Louise” After some convincing by producing partner Mimi Polk, Scott did finally “get” the film. In two ways: he came to understand the screenplay as appealing, both to him and potentially to audiences, and he acquired an option on the screenplay, getting it for his production company. Initially, Scott intended only to produce the film, but after having di∞culty attracting the right director (apparently, creative talent was not immune to the executive’s worldview) he considered directing the film himself. Seemingly, such an 12

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arrangement would result in a collision of sensibilities. As of 1990, Scott was well known as a visual stylist. Having first emerged as a director of television commercials in Britain (most famously the Apple Computer “1984” advertisement that ran prominently during the Super Bowl), Scott had made his film reputation creating dark, gorgeous surfaces in a cycle of films, all linked to visual and thematic revisions of film noir: Alien (1979), Blade Runner (1982), Someone to Watch Over Me (1987), and Black Rain (1989). In an interview, Khouri suggested that her vision for the film was simpler, less ornate than Scott’s work to date. When Khouri and Temple had initial di∞culty generating serious interest in the screenplay, Khouri began to contemplate directing it herself, albeit on a small budget (less than $1 million). That dream ended with Scott’s interest. As a prominent director with his own production company, Scott was able to turn his commitment to the screenplay into significant financing, ending Khouri’s hopes for an independent production by promising to get the film made. So is Thelma & Louise a “Ridley Scott Film”? The designation of authorship is significant because viewers (and readers) approach a film through the intertexts of a filmmaker’s previous work. Since the emergence of celebrity directors in the 1950s (i.e., Hitchcock), star directors generate complex sign systems of meaning like those of star performers. Thus, the viewer of Thelma & Louise in 1991 might approach the film through some understanding of Scott’s previous work; the cine-literate viewer might bring specific expectations for form and theme: rich surfaces, burnished images, generic hybridity (noir in space in Alien or future noir in Blade Runner), some play with gender (casting of Sigourney Weaver as Ripley; the androgyny of Sean Young), otherwise adherence to familiar masculinist gender tropes. Because Thelma & Louise was Khouri’s first screenplay, viewers in 1991 would not have had any intertexts with which to engage the film (except her emerging biography as a newcomer, “first-timer”; this understanding of Khouri no doubt shaped her successful Oscar campaign). Going forward, however, as Scott and Khouri continue to produce work and generate intertextual meanings, the designation becomes more meaningful. Labeling the film “Callie Khouri’s Thelma & Louise” suggests a di≠erent interpretation of the film, one that emphasizes Khouri’s role as creator of female roles and recreator of generic expectations. In fact, some criticism of Thelma & Louise has understood the film to represent a clash of sensibilities between Khouri’s feminism and Scott’s “Something’s Crossed Over in Me”

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Callie Khouri, Academy Award winner, Best Original Screenplay, 1992. Frame capture. Thelma & Louise: The Last Journey.

masculinist polish. Instead, I see the film as a complex integration of contributions and meanings. Khouri created the characters, revealing them through incident and dialogue, and shaped the contours of the narrative, crucially providing both the conflict and the resolution. Khouri created the scene outside of the Silver Bullet roadhouse, where Thelma is assaulted by Harlan and Louise shoots him, and she created the conclusion, where the female friends decide to “keep going,” driving over the edge of the Grand Canyon into freedom and/or death. Scott realized these written moments through casting, collaboration, and direction. Scott and Polk assembled the creative team to turn Khouri’s idea into moving images, hiring cinematographer Adrian Biddle to create the film’s look of western landscape and polished metal and composer Hans Zimmer to create the score, with its strong western motifs supplied by harmonica and guitar. Scott and others provide the film with a more expansive scope, visually opening the film to take advantage of the sweep of the American West, situating the personal development of the characters into the visual iconography of the American cinema and history. In Thelma & Louise: The Last Journey and in interviews, 14

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Khouri has indicated that Scott added the phallic motifs (recurrent shiny tanker trucks, crop dusters, and so forth), and Susan Sarandon has suggested that the challenge/opportunity posed by the scene in which Thelma and Louise blow up the tanker was “why Ridley wanted to do the movie.” Although Khouri and Sarandon seem to suggest that Scott was less interested in the small, human scale of the women’s relationship, the filmed version benefits from the integration of contributions, providing viewers with a wider range of points of entry and identification than would have been possible if the film were the product of Khouri or Scott alone.

“Somebody said get a life . . . so they did” As Tony Bennett has argued from the perspective of British Cultural Studies, audiences encounter texts already within contexts. Drawing upon the social semiotics of Pierre Macherey, Bennett o≠ers the analogy of barnacles on rocks by the seashore: where once a rock may have existed independent of the barnacles, the shape of the shore is now rock plus barnacles. Thus, cultural texts, as complex systems of meaning, become encrusted with other ancillary systems, shaping the possible meanings of the agglomeration. In the case of feature film, an individual film becomes encrusted with the systems of promotion. Viewers always encounter films through the context of promotion, a semiotic practice that seeks to shape understandings and possible responses to the film. In the case of Thelma & Louise, MGM/UA did not fully understand the film’s potential meanings and thus attempted several distinct promotional appeals, interpreting the film in di≠erent ways for di≠erent audiences. These promotional interpretations were more contradictory than polyphonic. By budgeting Thelma & Louise at $16.5 million, half the average amount for a major studio release, MGM/UA suggested that it was hedging its bets at the production stage, not financing the film for maximum commercial success. Like the unnamed executive who did not “get” the screenplay, MGM/UA seemed to not quite understand Thelma & Louise. This confusion resulted in a di≠use promotional campaign that contributed to shock and surprise over the film’s representation of violence and female agency. MGM/UA prepared viewers for several di≠erent films or experiences of the film, but not the film that generated the strong response in 1991 and following. Part of the strength of audience and critical response must be understood as produced by the disjunction between the promotional “Something’s Crossed Over in Me”

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meanings circulated through print advertisements, trailers, and a music video. The most important print advertisement for Thelma & Louise was the one-sheet lobby poster, an organization of the film’s meanings through the graphic arrangement of image and text, also used as the dominant image in newspaper advertisements for the film. The original poster for Thelma & Louise emphasizes female friendship, the possibilities of the open road, and the appeal of the landscape and associated myths and meanings of the American West. The poster addresses an audience with interest in female friendship, female melodrama, the road movie, the Western, and the buddy comedy. The image is composed of two prominent elements: a highway and western landscape in the background and an image of the main characters and text credits in the foreground. The background contains a full-color image of an empty two-lane blacktop road, emerging from the bottom center of the poster and leading toward an image of Monument Valley, a horizon of mesas and rocks across the lowest quarter of the image. The road runs perpendicular to the horizon, veering left before the mesas. The dominant colors of the lower portion are tans and reds. The upper three-quarters of the background features bright blue sky with white clouds in three horizontal strata, which suggest freedom, release, perhaps spirituality. The foreground superimposes credits over the road and the flat desert before the mesas. The film’s title is located just above the tops of the mesas, in bottom center, in the largest type on the poster. The names are represented in a notched typeface, suggesting a rough-hewn wanted poster, hinting at the women’s status with respect to the law. Above the title, Scott’s name appears, asserting authorship: “A Ridley Scott Film” (Khouri’s name is included in the mass of credits beneath the title). Above the above-thetitle credit is the film’s first tag line: “Somebody said get a life . . . so they did.” Featured in small font, the tag is not visually prominent. Rather, the tag seems appended as an attempt to o≠er yet another interpretation of the film, MGM/UA’s kitchen sink approach. The line adopts contemporary slang (“get a life”) and o≠ers a twist: “get a life” is often o≠ered dismissively, but the tag suggests that Thelma and Louise took the admonition as a literal call to change their lives. Thus, though diminished visually, the tag line nonetheless adds further emphasis to themes of freedom, change, and

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Promotional one-sheet poster. MGM/UA.

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agency. It is important to bear in mind that the tag line hides the film’s surprising conclusion: the women do not “get a life,” but rather choose a death. The most prominent image in the poster is a Polaroid photo of Louise (Sarandon) on the left and Thelma (Davis) on the right. This photo image dominates the top half of the total image, drawing the viewers’ eyes toward the faces. The photo is tilted toward the top left, signaling casualness, nonnormative behavior, and the film’s ending, thus hinting at loss: the photo blows out of the falling car; the film dissolves from a freeze-frame on the Thunderbird hurtling over the canyon’s edge to this photo image, superimposing an image of female friendship over the viewer’s imagination of their painful death. The photo itself features a close-up on the women’s faces, tightly framed from chin to forehead. Sarandon’s face is in upper left, with sunglasses and the suggestion of a headscarf. Her mouth is open, as if she is speaking. Davis’s face is in lower right, smiling, exposing her teeth. Her eyes and hair are uncovered. The angle on the faces (amplified by the tilt of the photo on the poster) suggests that Louise was holding a Polaroid camera, taking a self-portrait of the friends. Within the film’s narrative, this photo was produced at the outset of their weekend trip. The photo’s content suggests female bonding, fun, and excitement, but also Louise’s repression (glasses and scarf bind her and close her o≠ ). Louise’s control of the camera suggests her character’s superior experience and leadership, while Thelma’s open smile suggests naiveté and desire for pleasure. The photo provides an appealing, intimate view of two attractive, alive women. Taken as a whole, the image makes several arguments about the film’s meanings, seeking to both attract potential viewers and to prepare those viewers to consume the film in a meaningful way. Overall, the background suggests destination, while the foreground suggests the excitement of anticipation of the road trip. The road connotes freedom and possibility, with sublimated hints of constraint and danger. The landscape and skyscape o≠er openness, seeming availability, the absence of civilization, and so hides the histories of the West in favor of the familiar fantasies of the West as an unoccupied place of self-creation for Anglo tourists (like their imagination of their destination, Mexico). The photo suggests most prominently pleasure, fun, and friendship, though the additional mediation of the photo within the poster hints at the past, at memory or even loss. In sum, the image is positive, promising viewers fun, openness, and adventure, with only a hint of danger, threat, and loss. Thus, viewers and critics were prepared by 18

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the poster for a film without its crucial elements of sexual assault, murder, flight from (male) authority, female violent agency, capture, and suicide.

Silver Naked Ladies (with Guns) After the film’s release generated such strong response, MGM/UA reorganized the promotional interpretation of the film’s meanings. In 1997, MGM (renamed) released the first DVD edition of Thelma & Louise, the cover replicating the one-sheet image, but dropping the tag line “get a life,” and the back of the case featuring a large image of a smiling Brad Pitt over which was superimposed the description and credits. In 2003, MGM released a “special edition” DVD with new features and distinctly new packaging. Whereas the one sheet and original DVD cover featured an image of the women prior to their road trip and pretransformation, the key image on the special edition DVD is selected from the film’s final act, posttransformation, when the women confront the leering truck driver who had harassed them throughout their journey. Where the Polaroid photo was an extreme close-up of the women’s faces, the new cover featured the women in medium long shot, with their full bodies visible, standing on the seats of Louise’s convertible, facing back over the trunk.

Image of Thelma and Louise chosen for “special edition” DVD cover. Still photo courtesy of Jerry Ohlinger’s, New York.

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In the new image, Sarandon stands in the left half of the frame, with her hair down, full of unruly curls, a bandanna tied around her neck in place of sunglasses or scarf. She wears a simple white tank top with blue jeans and a western belt and boots. Sarandon holds the pistol taken from the highway patrolman in her left hand, her arm hanging at her side. Her right leg is bent, with her boot on the trunk of the car. She looks across the image, slightly toward the right of the frame, with the hint of a smile, her steady gaze o≠ering a challenge to the viewer. On the right, Davis stands in the front passenger seat, arms slightly akimbo, her hands on her hips. Davis wears dark sunglasses, her head tilted slightly back, chin up, more aggressive than Sarandon. She has on a black T-shirt with the sleeves cut o≠, emblazoned with a grinning skull wearing sunglasses and a mesh cap with a Confederate cross. Below the skull appear the words, “Drivin’ my life away.” Davis also wears blue jeans, but without a belt. Both women are tanned, seemingly comfortable with the heat and elements of the western landscape, and their sleeveless shirts emphasize their strong-armed readiness. The entire image is saturated with light, overexposed and washed-out, and faux graininess has been added to simulate a distressed photograph and film frame. This simulation of image as artifact recalls the freeze-frame that concludes Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), an image of the two outlaws charging out of hiding to meet the gunfire of the Bolivian Army. Critics and scholars have linked Thelma & Louise’s final freeze-frame to the concluding moment of the earlier film. In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the final frame begins in color, before fading to sepia, which suggests a transformation from history to historical memory to myth. Where Thelma & Louise seems to quote the earlier freeze-frame, and to draw upon some of its connotations (outlaw buddies/couple, the final death of heroes not represented, the final transformation or apotheosis into memory/myth), the new DVD packaging seems to want to fix this connection, quoting the quotation and adding the artificial aging to cement Thelma & Louise in the pantheon of “classic” buddy movies, a lucrative association for the repackaging (coincident with MGM’s inclusion of the film in an MGM “classics” promotion). Created twelve years after the film’s release, the new special edition DVD packaging suggests that a particular interpretation of the film has come to dominate, or at least that MGM has settled upon a preferred interpretation 20

Bernie Cook

Final freeze-frame of Butch and Sundance. Frame capture, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

that the studio would like to dominate understandings of the film. While the original one sheet was a tease, attracting audiences with a suggestion of the film’s possibilities, the special edition DVD image seems directed toward confirmed fans already familiar with the film’s text and contexts. The special edition cover replaces the original interpretation of the film o≠ered through the one sheet, emphasizing that the women have become outlaws, potent agents fully capable of avenging the wrongs done to them. The image suggests violence, through the placement of the gun and through each woman’s defiant posture and aggressive look. As noted, this image is linked to the moment in the film’s narrative when the women confront the truck driver. Thus, the image also suggests the film’s most spectacular moment, the explosion of the tanker truck. Again, Sarandon has suggested in interviews that Scott wanted to do the film primarily because of this scene and the opportunity to film the explosion. Sarandon’s comment intimated that Scott’s sensibility tended toward the aesthetics of the action film, with an emphasis on explosion and spectacularity, perhaps at the expense of characterization, depth, and development. The special edition cover o≠ers as the dominant (re)interpretation of the film an emphasis on women outlaws, characters conventionally at odds with the law and dependent upon violence and mobility. The special edition cover, however, promotes an understanding of the film linked to the sort of violence that produces a spectacular explosion, not the violence of sexual assault, self-defense, or murder. The range of promotional images created by MGM to promote the film over time (from 1991, 1998, and 2003) sought to flatten the film’s complex“Something’s Crossed Over in Me”

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ity, distorting the film’s range of meanings to sell the film to segmented audiences. None of the promotional images address the film’s pivotal acts of violence: Harlan assaulting Thelma and Louise shooting Harlan. Instead, the first image suggests freedom and opportunity (with a hint of repression to be cast o≠ ), and the second image suggests freedom, agency, “sexiness,” and co-opted Western and buddy movie conventions. The second image works to construct them as doubly “hot”: they have shed clothing due to the climate of the American West, becoming tanned, tousled, taut, thus representing the sort of female sexuality often used by commercial directors (like Scott) to sell blue jeans. Neither image suggests the costs associated with sexual assault and violent response to rape and abuse. Indeed, by constructing Sarandon and Davis as “sexy/hot” (via costume, lighting, hair and makeup, posture, and so forth), MGM’s new key image threatens the film’s core concern with sexual violence against women. Many critics of Thelma & Louise argue that Thelma’s sexual adventure with J. D. (Brad Pitt) occurs too soon after Harlan’s assault on her, that the seemingly brief interval belittles the significance of the damage done to her. The cover of the new deluxe DVD goes further, recasting the women as alluring outlaws, seemingly reinserting them into a regime of visual objectification and availability in contrast to the film’s textual movement toward subjectivity and agency. The new cover comes close to positioning the women as suitable for a truck mud flap, silver naked ladies with guns, visual adornments for patriarchal packaging of a film about women’s experiences. Yet, as with any cultural texts, promotional material cannot fix dominant meanings. The DVD cover suggests opportunities for interpretation that open up the film to multiple readings rather than close down around a narrow range of preferred meanings. Despite MGM’s preference that the film now be understood as an action film/buddy movie (with “hot” female stars), other possible interpretations emerge from the promotion. In particular, the special edition cover enables readings of the film as staging performances of gender and gendered violence. As noted, the special edition cover is linked to a moment in the film’s narrative, the destruction of the tanker. In this scene in the film, Thelma and Louise self-consciously perform an exaggerated version of female sexual availability to ensnare the truck driver (Marco St. John) who had harassed them verbally throughout the film. Thelma and Louise put on and play up a constructed sexuality appealing to the trucker’s fantasy of women excited by abuse and anxious for anonymous 22

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sex. Once the trucker has pulled o≠ the road, left his truck, and approached them, Thelma and Louise drop the first performance, seeking to shock and shame him through a second performance as vengeful female outlaws. In this new guise, they teach him a “lesson,” by shooting, and exploding, his gas rig, deflating the violent sexual fantasy undergirding his masculine prerogative, but also replacing the first fantasy with hints of another, as they shift from submissive to dominant. Thus, in the scene from which the DVD cover is excerpted, the women perform both an exaggerated version of female “sexiness,” in answer to male fantasy of female submissiveness and availability, and an exaggerated version of female potency, perhaps in answer to other fantasies of being dominated. The image contains an additional performative aspect, one that opens more space for readings of the film emphasizing gender as constructed and performed. The cover image is not a frame capture. Instead, it is a staged promotional still. As a still, it is posed, frozen, created and not an organic part of the film. The space opened by awareness of the “image as still” creates distance from narrative and character. Rather than seeing this image as the “natural” transformation of the women as a consequence of the liberating possibilities of the road, viewers are confronted by its constructedness: a promotional photographer constructs two female actresses performing two female characters who are, in turn, performing a male fantasy of female sexuality incorporating significant elements of the performance of masculinity. As gender theorist Judith Halberstam has argued in Female Masculinity, the signs signifying masculinity are cultural and separable from human biological sexuality. Thus, masculinity as cultural construct can be performed regardless of the biological status of the performer. The multiple levels of performance active in the DVD cover image suggest the wide array of possibilities for hybrid identity and mobile identification opened up by the film. Thus, although MGM may have sought to abstract an image of the female stars to suggest “sexiness” appealing to “masculine” heterosexual viewers, the image itself suggests a wider range of possible positions and thus a more variable array of social meanings. This wider array of positions and meanings seems to have threatened the most vociferous critics of the film. In the film, after exuberant expressions of agency and mobility, the women are driven to their deaths, hunted to the brink by social forces invested in the maintenance of fixed gender roles. Beyond the film, some critics sought to delimit the film’s potential by strongly “Something’s Crossed Over in Me”

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rejecting its seriousness, its legitimacy, and its meaningfulness, whereas others sought to amplify the film’s possibilities.

“I ain’t apologizing for shit” After inviting the trucker o≠ the road and down from his rig, Thelma and Louise attempt to “teach him a lesson” about civility and respect toward women. They insist that his tongue wagging and epithets are neither welcome nor appealing. Seeking to rupture his fantasy, in which he could harass women into acquiescence to roadside sex, Thelma and Louise remind him that they are subjects, not objects, not silver naked ladies, but mothers, sisters, and wives. Before resorting to violence, they encourage him to repent, asking him to apologize for his behavior. Instead, he reacts with defensive anger, insisting, “I ain’t apologizing for shit.” Antagonized further by his response, Louise pulls her gun, vowing to “make him sorry.” She and Thelma then shoot the tanker truck, causing a massive explosion. As noted, the film’s release resulted in a similar detonation in the mainstream press. Not only film critics and scholars, but also columnists and editorialists, sought to respond to the film and its social meanings. In light of the film’s modest support and expectations, these readings, often seemingly polarized into critiques or defenses of the film, seemed to respond not only to the film text, but also to the context in which it was released. Again, the trucker scene itself seems suggestive of this context. In the scene, two women use traditionally masculine tools of violence to exact a spectacular retribution on a man who has harassed them verbally and visually through-

Trucker (Marco St. John) berates Thelma and Louise as “bitches from hell.”

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out their journey. Although some critics understood the scene as hyperbolic, even dangerous, from another view, it is possible to read the scene as a satiric extrapolation of the “gender wars” dominating public discourse in 1991 and 1992, during the film’s production and release.4 In 1991, as Thelma & Louise was in preproduction, journalist Susan Faludi published Backlash, an analysis of political, social, economic, and cultural e≠orts to reverse women’s social gains. Written for a broad, popular audience, Backlash became a best seller and served as a lightning rod for discussion of gender bias and gender equality. Faludi argues that various forms of “backlash” have answered women’s social gains, eroding actual protections and promoting cultural meanings opposed to greater gender equality. According to Faludi, the most e≠ective rhetorical strategy in this e≠ort has been to blame women’s problems on the liberation movement itself, thus camouflaging e≠orts to roll back women’s gains as progress for women.5 Also in 1991, the American Association of University Women (AAUW) issued a report entitled Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America. Founded in 1881 and boasting 100,000 members nationwide, the Washington, D.C.–based AAUW focuses upon public policy questions relating to education and gender equity, regularly funding research into these issues. Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America reported the results of a national poll of students ages nine to fifteen, arguing that existing educational systems discouraged girls from academic success, especially in math and science. The report warned that these findings augured “devastating consequences for the future of girls and the future of the nation.” By employing such charged rhetoric, the AAUW sought to move their issue to the center of the congressional agenda. In 1992, after Thelma & Louise had ended its theatrical run, the AAUW followed with another report, commissioned by the AAUW Educational Foundation and developed by the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, entitled How Schools Shortchange Girls. The report argued that girls in American primary and secondary schools received an education inferior to that received by boys. The report identified areas of “gender bias” in American education, concluding that girls were held back from their full potential by a system that is more interested in male achievement. As with the 1991 report, How Schools Shortchange Girls was crafted and promoted as a public policy tool, designed both to persuade and to pressure Congress “Something’s Crossed Over in Me”

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to take steps to change public education to promote the AAUW’s vision of gender equity. Eventually, the AAUW succeeded in lobbying for the adoption of the Gender Equity in Education Act (1994). In response to the AAUW’s reports and rhetoric, conservative politicians and journalists mounted a public-relations o≠ensive to shift the terms of argument. The conflict over gender equity and education policy in 1991 and 1992 marked a significant battle in the “gender wars” of the period and paralleled the controversy over response to Thelma & Louise. The debate over the AAUW reports not only provided access to the context in which the film was produced and released, a context in which experts argued over gender equity and power, and in which women and men struggled to find common ground for discussion (“I ain’t apologizing for shit”), but also involved some of the same commentators, employing the same discourse and thus revealing political investments crossing issues and debates. For example, in response to How Schools Shortchange Girls, U.S. News & World Report published a series of news articles and viewpoints challenging the AAUW’s finding and recommendations. In 1992, John Leo, a writer for the magazine’s “Outlook” section, devoted two consecutive columns to attacking the report, later returning to reprise his criticism in 1994 and 1999. Leo employed two strategies, both involving a polarizing prioritization of male perspective: first, he argued that the problem was not gender bias itself, but criticism of gender bias by feminist critics; second, he argued against pushing the “bias-victimization button” for girls, while at the same time claiming victimhood for boys. In “Sexism in the Schoolhouse,” Leo inverted the report’s finding to argue that boys were being penalized “simply” for being boys (“at all levels, boys are typically more restive and unruly in class”) while suggesting that girls may be less interested in learning math and science (“Boys keep outscoring girls. No one knows for sure why this is happening. It may be that boys tend to show heavier interest in abstract matters. Whatever the reason . . .”) (March 9, 1992). He concluded by flipping the AAUW’s contentions on their head, positing that “fringe feminist ideas” might victimize the academic performance of boys by unfairly shifting more resources toward girls. In a 1999 column returning to the debate, Leo made clear his objective: “the educational status of boys is the real problem” (February 22, 1999). In “Bias, Bias Everywhere,” Leo complained of the corrosive e≠ects of paying too much attention to gender bias, arguing that “bias politics polarize, focusing almost entirely on complaint, attack 26

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and publicity” (March 16, 1992). By accusing his opponents of bias, extremism, and ideology, Leo sought to obscure his own prioritization of a status quo of male privilege. When Thelma & Louise was released in 1991, the battle lines in the “gender wars” seemed to be rigidly drawn, with progressive “feminists” and conservative “masculinists” (part of their hegemony involves the di∞culty in naming them) struggling over power via discourse and representation. As in the case study of response to the AAUW reports, critics and pundits seemed arrayed in opposition to competing perspectives. Common ground seemed elusive as proponents sought victory, refusing to apologize “for shit” or to negotiate mutual understandings. Critical and editorial response to Thelma & Louise conformed to this pattern. Although the majority of reviews of the film were positive, a majority of opinion pieces were negative, which suggests an opposition between liberal film critics and conservative pundits.6 Leo’s U.S. News & World Report essay “Toxic Feminism on the Big Screen” produced the most vitriolic attack on the film, recalling in tone and ideology his pieces on education policy (July 10, 1991). Response to the film was already politicized prior to release, extending preexisting debates. The social struggle over the film’s meaning in print media intersected struggles over gender equity and education policy occurring at the time of the film’s production and release. In both cases, gender was the most salient di≠erence structuring this opposition. Critics and pundits who favored the patriarchal status quo, where men enjoyed priority access to power and privilege, hated the film and denounced the AAUW reports. Critics and pundits who opposed the patriarchal status quo, who sought to end male primacy in favor of more equal access, loved the film and supported the findings of the AAUW reports. At first glance, the politics of response to Thelma & Louise were polarized along gender lines: with men (and women who supported “traditional” patriarchy) against the film and women (and men who supported “equal rights”) for the film.

“Look at Me, I’m Louise”: Gender as Performance and Construct Although Thelma & Louise is often talked about in terms of stark gender binaries, the film itself repeatedly emphasizes that gender is a social construct, performed and not essential, opening possibilities for mobile identification. For example, in the opening scenes, Louise is shown first in a tight, white waitress uniform, a garment in its shape emphasizing the con“Something’s Crossed Over in Me”

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tours of her body and in its color and style stressing her economic position as a service employee. After making arrangements by phone with Thelma for a weekend getaway, Louise trades her uniform for another costume, a prim western shirt, pants, a headscarf, and sunglasses. In both scenes, Louise’s hair is carefully (rigidly) pulled back from her face, her makeup carefully applied, and her clothing clean and well starched. The composition of each scene centers Louise in the frame, emphasizing the similarity of these outfits and suggesting that neither is “natural” but rather that each is equally a costume. These early scenes make clear that Louise’s existence as a woman is carefully constructed to fit within rigid parameters; both her work life and her home life seem similar. Having internalized social gender expectations, Louise employs repressive self-control to build herself as multiple versions of a single, self-supporting woman without advantages of education or class. Thelma plays with this construction in an early scene in the car, when she admires herself in a mirror, posing with a cigarette, pretending to be Louise: “Look at me, I’m Louise.” In later scenes, long after shooting Harlan, Louise begins to relax her self-construction of gender. This process involves a stripping away and a letting loose. Each gesture again emphasizes the artificial and constructed nature of gender. For example, as Louise waits in the Thunderbird for Thelma (Louise is unaware that Thelma is robbing a convenience store), she looks through the glass window of a beauty salon at an older woman (see p. 87). By linking Louise’s eyeline to the older woman’s, the shot seems to suggest that Louise is looking into a mirror, at her future self. In response, Louise reaches for her lipstick, a conventional gesture involving the cosmetic application of femininity, peering into the rearview mirror to aid her rebuilding in response to the threat of age to the feminine beauty of youth (especially poignant for a character in her early forties, a decade older than Thelma). Significantly, Louise acknowledges the motivation behind this impulse, stopping instead to toss the lipstick from the car. The film emphasizes at the levels of character, plot, and in the visual register of representation that femininity is construct, not essence. It is important to note that, as Louise and Thelma continue their visual, stylistic, and gestural transformation away from their construction in the early scenes, they do not move away from a construct toward an essence. At the same time as the women cast o≠ symbols of conventional femininity, they take up symbols stereotypically associated with lower-class, white masculinity. 28

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Thelma exchanges her housedress for a sleeveless black T-shirt emblazoned with a skull and a Confederate flag cap, proclaiming its wearer’s intention: “Driving my life away.” She later adds the mesh-backed ball cap worn by the truck driver. By rhyming and equating these outfits, the film emphasizes that they are equally costumes. Thelma does not simply shed her previous, artificial self to assume some newer, authentic self. Rather, she (and Louise) gives up a compulsory, unreflective performance of gender for a more playful, self-conscious performance of genders. By the scene in which Thelma proclaims that “something has crossed over” in her, she and Louise have taken greater control of their performance of gender, forging a new, hybrid construction and drawing upon conventions of both masculinity and femininity. Through their transformation, Thelma and Louise reveal and revel in the performance of both femininity and masculinity. The film prepares viewers to understand their eventual transformation by emphasizing from the outset that masculinity also involves a performance of gender. Much criticism of Thelma & Louise has been directed toward the film’s representation of male characters. John Leo, Robert Novak, and Sheila Benson attacked the film for what they perceived to be poisonous portrayals of men in the film. These critics accused the film of “male bashing,” pointing to some broadly drawn performances that emphasized less attractive aspects of masculinity. In its more sophisticated forms, the criticism also noted that the male characters were denied the growth or transformation allowed to Thelma and Louise. The anxiety raised by these representations, however, also suggests a deep discomfort among many viewers, male and female, over the film’s explicit suggestion that masculinity was as much a performance as femininity. For example, Christopher McDonald’s portrayal of Darryl, Thelma’s chauvinistic husband, suggests that masculinity is a construct in need of constant maintenance and repair, much like the exterior of Darryl and Thelma’s house. Indeed, in the first scene between Darryl and Thelma, Darryl exhibits intense concern for his appearance, ignoring her o≠er of breakfast while examining his carefully feathered hair and neat mustache in a mirror, putting on a wrist chain and a necklace. Darryl’s vanity is obvious and comic in its baldness, but the very obviousness makes clear that the conventional traits and signs read as masculine are put on, not natural. Rather than reading Darryl as conventionally feminine—that is, as overly “Something’s Crossed Over in Me”

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invested in self-image and the perception of that image by others—the scene suggests that he is only an extreme version of conventional masculinity, one that shows the seams normally hidden in a slicker version. To emphasize the point, the film o≠ers another version of masculinity in the character of J. D. (Brad Pitt), slicker than Darryl, but no less constructed. When first revealed, J. D. is shown lounging by the side of the road, waiting for a ride. His nonchalance is carefully studied, and his cowboy hat, sleeveless white T-shirt, tight blue jeans, and western boots signify another familiar construction of masculinity, the Western rebel. Intertextually referencing their early work in television advertising, Ridley Scott and Adrian Biddle light and shoot Pitt as if he were in a Calvin Klein advertisement. The male model is another version of masculinity that reveals its own construction: it exists only in representation. As performed by Pitt, J. D. is a composite of other cinematic male characters, including, prominently, James Dean in Giant (1956). In his cool di≠erence from Darryl, in his relative success as a masculine type, J. D. suggests that Darryl is not an aberration but that masculinity in its various versions is another gender construction. Michael Madsen’s performance as Jimmy, Louise’s boyfriend, further suggests masculinity as performance, as he seeks to channel a brooding version of a lesser Elvis Presley. Timothy Carhart first performs Harlan as a “funny guy,” then as a vicious rapist. Even Harvey Keitel creates distance from any sense of “naturalness” with his awkward attempt at a male Southern accent. Thelma & Louise not only makes clear that genders are performed, through examples of female characters performing femininity and male characters performing masculinity, but also o≠ers examples of performance of gender across biology, where women perform masculinity. For example, after Thelma’s night with J. D., followed by his theft of Louise’s savings, Thelma robs a convenience store to secure money for her continued flight from male authority. As Louise waits in the car, Thelma enters the convenience store and commences her robbery, drawing upon J. D.’s performance of his distinctive style of roadside banditry, a performance witnessed by viewers in the earlier seduction scene in Thelma’s room. In the scene, Davis performs Thelma performing Pitt performing J. D. performing a version of himself. This complex relay of performance within performance is accentuated by its framing. The viewer sees the robbery on a black and white surveillance camera tape, watching along with Darryl, Hal, Max, and other po30

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licemen. The surveillance camera mediates the performance, further denaturalizing the version of masculinity performed by Thelma. Halberstam has argued that masculinity as a social category is separable from biology and sexuality, and that women (as much as men) are able to perform “female masculinity,” a knowing performance of a conventional version of masculinity (1). The film suggests first that J. D. performs “male masculinity” in telling his story to Thelma—he puts on an exaggerated version of masculinity, rather than revealing his “true self ”—and second that Thelma performs “female masculinity” in robbing the store by acting “like a man.” In another example, Thelma and Louise perform an array of gender positions when they confront the trucker. As described above, after enduring repeated harassment on the road, the women decide to teach the trucker “a lesson.” First, they perform a version of his fantasy of femininity, coming on to him, acting flirtatious and receptive to his clumsy suggestions of sex. In a high angle, the camera approximates the trucker’s perspective looking down at the women in the convertible, noticing as they smile and display their bodies and suggesting that they pull o≠ the road. Privy to Thelma and Louise’s interiority, however, the viewer understands this performance of femininity as inauthentic, a performance used for the purpose of entrapment. Once they have pulled over, the women criticize the trucker for his lewd behavior, seeking to instruct and reform him. He rejects this e≠ort, but not before the women make explicit this next level of performance of femininity: they appeal to him suggesting their similarity to his mother, sister, wife, or daughter. After cycling through exaggerated female sexual availability and exaggerated female social responsibility (women as guarantor of the family unit), the women adopt a composite pose, joining the violent agency conventionally associated with masculinity and the moral outrage conventionally associated with femininity. In this hybrid guise, they shoot and explode his gas tanker. Thus, even though Thelma & Louise has been understood in mainstream criticism and scholarship as an update of a familiar formula (a female buddy film), the film o≠ers opportunities for more radical readings. Through its emphasis on performance, the film stages and restages gender play, continually subverting any understanding of gender as essence. As Thelma suggests, the two female protagonists “cross over” gender categories, both shedding and adopting the conventions of both femininity and “Something’s Crossed Over in Me”

31

masculinity as necessary on their journey away from gender repression and toward self-discovery; however, the film also makes clear the limits and constraints on more mobile identity. The women are faced with external and internal threats and challenges throughout the film. The film’s conclusion, regardless of interpretation, suggests a spatial, cultural, and social limit to their freedom of exploration and self-determination. With the ending as limit, the film nonetheless o≠ers possibilities for viewers to take a range of gender positions in response. Historical evidence of viewer response to Thelma & Louise, in 1991 and after, suggests that male and female viewers found new possibilities for understanding and interpretation through engagement with the opportunities structured by the film text, in contextual and intertextual frames. During the 1970s and early 1980s, spectator theory in film studies would not have admitted the possibility of viewers identifying with characters across gender. In her seminal 1975 article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey argued that narrative cinema in a patriarchal society was structured according to the desires of sadistic males, relegating women viewers to the position of spectacle (to be looked at-ness) or masochistically peering through the male gaze at the female body. This proposition was highly influential over the next decades, even though Mulvey sought to refine her ideas in 1981 with “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946).” Subsequently, various scholars working within feminist film theory took up the possibilities of film spectatorship, though most of this work remained deeply indebted to Mulvey’s original argument and thus approached, but did not embrace, fully mobile identifications and pleasures. In 1982, in “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator,” building upon Mulvey’s revision of her original formulation, Mary Ann Doane focused on the performance of femininity as opening some possibilities for female viewers, who nonetheless remained caught in the sadistic/ masochistic constellation. In 1984, in “When the Woman Looks,” Linda Williams proposed similarities and a∞nities between female spectators and masculine monsters in the horror film, hinting at possibilities for cross gender connection. In The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (1988), Tania Modleski proposed a theory of “double identification,” whereby male viewers could relate to characters of both sexes, opening up new possibilities for some viewers. 32

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By the 1990s, film scholars had reworked the original propositions of spectator theory, suggesting more fluid possibilities for reception. In Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (1991), Miriam Hansen suggested that historical spectatorship has always been a messy matter, involving movement between positions and perspectives. In Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992), Carol Clover analyzed the contemporary “slasher films,” a subgenre of the horror film, observing that slasher films work to engage the viewer in the plight of the victim-hero, often the “last girl,” a female protagonist who is both victim and agent of violence (like Thelma and Louise): “No one who has read “Red Riding Hood’ to a small boy or attended a viewing of, say, Deliverance (an all-male story that women find as gripping as men do)—or, more recently, Alien and Aliens, with whose space-age female Rambo, herself a Final Girl, male viewers seem to engage with ease—can doubt the phenomenon of cross-gender identification” (46). For Clover, “gender is less a wall than a permeable membrane” (46). Taking up Clover’s challenge to rethink the possibilities of reception, and influenced by the gender theory of Judith Butler and Marjory Garber, Rhona Berenstein went further in her reading of audience response to classical horror film, proposing a new theory of reception, “spectatorship as drag.” Berenstein o≠ered a theory of spectatorship as a mode of performance, based upon the argument that “film patrons often engage in and exhibit a more mobile range of social behaviors and identifications than they would in the remainder of their everyday lives” (37). Berenstein drew upon Judith Mayne’s concept of the theater as “safe space” for fantasy and identification to suggest a model of reception as play, motivated by desire for pleasure and signification. I believe that Berenstein’s theory of spectatorship as involving a mobile range of social behaviors and identifications helps to explain the social meaning of audience response to Thelma & Louise. Evidence of historical responses by actual viewers can be found in nontraditional places, including letters to major magazines and posting to electronic databases. This evidence of viewer response suggests that viewers of Thelma & Louise enjoyed opportunities to cross gender identity toward identification and understanding.

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Letters and Postings Letters written in response to reviews, feature articles, or viewpoints on Thelma & Louise represent a range of perspectives on the film. In a sample of twenty-one letters written to Time, U.S. News & World Report, and Newsweek, sixteen were written by women and five by men, seemingly confirming assumptions that the film was most relevant to female viewers and contributing to the perception that response to the film was polarized by gender. Identifiable connections across gender, however, belie these assumptions. For example, in response to a Time cover story entitled “Why Thelma & Louise Strikes a Nerve,” Steve Sullivan of Falls Church, Virginia, indicated a profound connection with the film, which he saw three times during its first weeks of release (July 15, 1991). Sullivan revealed that the film was relevant to him as a man because of its representation of “two fascinating women who undergo a galvanizing journey of self-discovery.” Even though their journey is not his own, Sullivan reported that the film changed his perspective: “Each time I see it, I feel the same sense of wonder.” Seemingly, Sullivan, as a male viewer, was able to connect with the experiences of female characters, to identify with their struggle for “self-discovery,” leaving the theater with changed perspectives. Sullivan’s letter suggests that spectatorship may not be bound and determined by gender polarities. As he notes, Thelma & Louise has “much to o≠er both women and men.” Sullivan’s letter is not simply an aberration, an atypical expression from a “sensitive” male. Also important to note is the fact that Sullivan’s response is echoed by other viewers, both male and female. In the same issue of Time, Mary C. Helf, of Bedminster, Pennsylvania, also professed that the film profoundly altered her perspective, corroborating Sullivan’s argument that the film’s e≠ect crossed gender: “I am a di≠erent person since I saw this film” (July 15, 1991). In U.S. News & World Report, in response to John Leo’s virulent criticism of the film, Daniel Blickman, of Salt Lake City, Utah, a Professor of Classics at Brigham Young University, argued that Leo refused to engage with the film on its terms and that the film encourages viewers of both genders to identify with Thelma and Louise. Blickman stated, “We are meant to sympathize with Louise’s shooting of a man, since we understand later that it is in part a reaction to an unpunished assault on herself ” (July 1, 1991). O≠ered by a professional philologist, Blickman’s use of the first-per-

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Time cover, June 24, 1991. Frame capture, Thelma & Louise: The Last Journey.

son plural pronoun “we” suggests that he proposes the possibility for common readings by viewers across gender.7 Other letter writers recognized the film as providing mobile perspectives and possibilities for play with identity. In Newsweek, Barbara Clark, of Concord, Massachusetts, understood the film to provide a screen for fantasy and role playing: “Most of us express such sentiments in the therapist’s o∞ce” (July 8, 1991). Also in Newsweek, Anne Jennings, of Berkeley, California, argued that the film played with cinematic point of view to represent men and patriarchy from women’s points of view: Thelma & Louise “shows

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men from a woman’s point of view, not women from a man’s point of view” (July 8, 1991). Further, she argued, the film allowed viewers access to women’s subjective experience: “It shows what freedom can mean for women.” Taken as evidence of historical viewer response, by nonprofessional writers (albeit mediated for publication), these letters suggest that the film’s representation of gender performance was met by audience response that was itself performative and mobile. Sullivan and Blickman share Jennings’ insight that the film’s meaning is generated through its representation of the experiences of its female protagonists. These male viewers found access to female subjectivity to be enlightening, just as many female viewers did. The letters suggest that a range of viewers, female and male, could access and appreciate the film’s perspectives. Jennings quoted Davis: “If you’re feeling threatened, you’re identifying with the wrong character” (July 8, 1991). These letters, as evidence, suggest that the film made it possible for both female and male viewers to identify with the “correct” characters, Thelma and Louise. In addition to the letters published in national magazines, further evidence of individual viewer response to Thelma & Louise is available electronically on the Web. The Internet Movie Database (www.IMDB.com), a commercial database owned by Amazon.com containing information about hundreds of thousands of films, provides its users with opportunities to rate films and to post reviews. As of February 6, 2004, 14,088 users had rated Thelma & Louise, giving the film an average rating of 7.2 on a 10-point scale.8 It is surprising that nearly 7,000 of the IMDB users who rated the film identified themselves as men, while only nearly 2,000 identified themselves as women (presumably, gender-neutral e-mail addresses were not tracked as male or female). Although the film received a lower rating from male users (7.2 from men and 7.7 from women), and, though many male users posted negative comments, many other men posted positive responses to the film. In these positive responses, male filmgoers revealed reasons for liking the film, reasons that connected with the letters written by male and female viewers to national magazines in 1991. Like the letters cited above, the positive IMDB user comments emphasize two primary themes: (1) freedom from repression and (2) female point of view (especially of men and of patriarchy). Both female and male posters indicated that the film’s use of point of view helped viewers understand and empathize with Thelma and Louise, promoting greater identification with 36

Bernie Cook

the central characters. For example, “Rob,” from Sydney, Australia, argues that the film “should be compulsory viewing for all males” because it “expresses the inner feelings of any woman who has ever been abused by us males” (January 20, 2002). Although warned by a female friend that “men wouldn’t like it,” Rob resonated with the women’s perspectives, distinct from his own, but sharing “the yearning we all have to be free of the restraints of society and its institutions” (January 20, 2002). “Jason C. Atwood,” from Su≠olk, Virginia, also mentioned the film’s representation of female perspective: Thelma & Louise created “a first-person feminist formula into a mainstream movie” that was “risky” but that paid o≠ “fantastically” (March 16, 1999). For Jason, the focalization of perspective through two female protagonists, each of whom demonstrates violent agency, is so radical that he mistakes it for “first-person”—which suggests the closeness and connection felt by a male viewer for female protagonists. Another IMDB user, “TxMike,” from Houston, Texas, asserted that Thelma & Louise is “NOT a feminist movie, as many believe”; rather, he understands the film to be “a metaphor for any of us, male or female, who somehow feel repressed and want to just be free to rebel against the ‘norms’ imposed on us” (August 11, 2003). Several IMDB users identified themselves as gay men, and these posters found specific, historical points of connection from which to identify with the female characters and female posters. “Gene Bivins” (no location provided) contextualized the strong negative responses of critics such as John Leo or IMDB users such as “Myfoot” and “Spider-Lou” in terms of sexuality and race as well as gender: “It’s probably inevitable that the people who like this movie the least are straight white men. They’re simply too used to being the kings of the world to feel much sympathy for women who have to deal with their dominance” (July 23, 2003). Bivins was able to view the film through a “sympathetic subjectivity” informed by his own domination by the straight, white “kings of the world,” finding much in common with the female protagonists. Similarly, another self-identified gay male poster, “HCG714,” writing from “a movie theater” in Bradenton, Florida, felt solidarity with Thelma and Louise because of his lived experience with gender and sexuality. “Thelma & Louise said what gay men/woamn [sic] were afraid to say, but it took shape and force, these silent voices through film & in to the world” (no date). These gay male viewers resonated with the film’s representation of the female experience of heterosexist patriarchal domination and with the performative aspects of the film and its reception. Like “Something’s Crossed Over in Me”

37

Thelma and Louise, Bivins and HCG714, as gay men, were used to performing gender conventions to pass and avoid domination. Their postings also suggest the stakes raised by the film, o≠ering insight into the reasons for the fierce controversy over the film’s social meanings. I o≠er these examples to suggest the range of options for actual viewers, male and female, to make meanings of Thelma & Louise, without being completely bound by rigid gender polarities. Of course, some of these postings risk doing violence to the specificity of the protagonists’ experience. Contrary to “Anonymous from NY,” a female IMDB user who suggests that “gender doesn’t matter,” gender does matter, both within the diegesis and in the world (December 9, 1998). In the film, Thelma and Louise were repressed, harassed, beaten, raped, and pursued by men because of their gender. The women choose death over capture because of their gender and because of the gendered system controlling their world. Without losing the specific histories of gendered identity, however, these IMDB postings, along with the letters to the magazines, suggest that male and female viewers may be able to identify with one another across gender, learning about other gendered experiences in the process, and contributing new perspectives to gender relations in the future. If many female viewers understood Thelma and Louise as relevant, familiar, like themselves, thus “getting” the film, I argue that male viewers could also “get” the film by identifying with the two women’s experience of gender under patriarchy. This male viewer identification with female protagonists does not involve the sloughing o≠ of gender for an impossible

Louise overpowers Harlan, stopping his assault of Thelma. Frame capture.

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Bernie Cook

state of undi≠erentiated “humanity.” Rather, it involves recognition of a bond, of a shared experience, under gender, under patriarchy. Letters and Internet postings show that male viewers found the women’s journey toward a greater mobility of identity to be moving, significant, and relevant. Thus, I argue that the film’s real import lies in its ability to promote new ways of seeing, not in the ways in which it confirms old, established polarities and binaries. The film o≠ers another way, from “war” as the dominant metaphor for gender relations, to understanding and to possibilities for a negotiated peace.

Notes 1. This argument will be familiar to scholars of film reception who followed the theories and debates of psychoanalytic spectator theory in the 1970s and 1980s. Davis repeated her statement in the promotional documentary Thelma & Louise: The Last Journey (2003). 2. Stephen Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape (Miramax 1989), produced for $1.2 million, is usually cited as the benchmark for the resurgent “indie film” of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and John Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood (Columbia 1991), produced for $6 million, was the lowest budgeted of the top-grossing films of 1991. Yet, though budgeted significantly higher than Boyz N the Hood, Thelma & Louise was not financed according to the expectations for a typical big-budget studio blockbuster. 3. The Internet Movie Database Professional service (accessed February 6, 2004) provides budget figures for fourteen of the top thirty grossing films of 1991, including both Thelma & Louise and Boyz N the Hood. The average represents these fourteen films. 4. The term “gender wars” gained currency in the 1980s, often used to describe an ongoing conflict between political advocacy groups over questions of gender equity, gender bias, and the possibilities for systemic redress. After defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1981, feminist advocacy groups sought to expand women’s social gains while the Reagan presidency sought to shrink government through cutting social programs, cuts that disproportionately a≠ected impoverished women, often the heads of single-parent households. The “Reagan Revolution” also espoused a brand of social conservatism that sought to link women’s social gains with women’s dissatisfaction over their opportunities, seeking to cast “liberated women” as conflicted and deeply unhappy and to propose a “return” to “traditional” gender roles, where women held primary responsibility for procreation, child rearing, and household maintenance. 5. In The Remasculinization of America (1989), Susan Je≠ords has argued that cultural products, especially film, became a prime site for the dramatization of “backlash.”

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6. Positive reviews included Janet Maslin, New York Times; Richard Schickel, Time; Jack Kroll, Newsweek; and Brad Johnson, Macleans. Negative viewpoints included John Leo, U.S. News & World Report; John Simon, National Review; Fred Bruning, Macleans; Margaret Carlson, Time; and Sheila Benson, Los Angeles Times. 7. Admittedly, male and female viewers do not experience the same changes; however, because the changes are anchored in the opportunities provided by the text for contextual and intertextual activation, they are not wholly dissimilar. 8. Note that the IMDB User Comments board reflects response to the film from a contextual remove. The earliest posted comments were from 1998, seven years after the film’s release. Thus, the IMDB board reflects contemporary readings of the film, readings that necessarily involve intertextual connection to subsequent films.

Bibliography American Association of University Women Education Foundation. Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America. Washington, D.C.: American Association of University Women, 1991. American Association of University Women Education Foundation. How Schools Shortchange Girls. Washington, D.C.: American Association of University Women, 1992. Anonymous from NY. “A Movie About Optimism and Freedom.” Online posting. December 9, 1998. IMDB.com. Accessed October 7, 2003, http://imdb.com. Atwood, Jason C. “Feminist Road Classic Carries Full Tank of Gas.” Online posting. March 16, 1999. IMDB.com. Accessed October 7, 2003, http://imdb.com. Bennett, Tony. “Text and Social Process: The Case of James Bond.” Screen Education 41 (Winter/Spring 1982): 3–14. Benson, Sheila. “True or False: Thelma & Louise Just Good Ol’ Boys?” Los Angeles Times, May 31, 1991, F1. Berenstein, Rhona J. Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality, and Spectatorship in Classic Horror Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Blickman, Daniel. Letter to the Editor. U.S. News & World Report, July 1, 1991, 6. Bivins, Gene. “It’s Payback Time.” Online posting. July 23, 2003. IMDB.com. Accessed October 7, 2003, http://imdb.com. Bruning, Fred. “A Lousy Deal for Women—and Men.” Macleans, August 12, 1991, 9. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Carlson, Margaret. “Is This What Feminism Is All About?” Time, June 24, 1991, 57. Clark, Barbara. Letter to the Editor. Newsweek, July 8, 1991, 11. Clover, Carol. “Crossing Over.” Film Quarterly 45:2 (Winter 1991–1992): 22. Clover, Carol. Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992.

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Cooper, Barbara. “The Relevancy and Gender Identity in Spectators’ Interpretations of Thelma & Louise.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 16 (1999): 20–41. Doane, Mary Ann. “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator.” Screen 23: 3–4 (Fall 1982): 74–87. Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women. New York: Crown, 1991. Griggers, Cathy. “Thelma and Louise and the Cultural Generation of the New ButchFemme.” In Film Theory Goes to the Movies, ed. Jim Collins, Hilary Radner, and Ava Preacher Collins. New York: Routledge, 1993, 129–141. Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998. Hansen, Miriam. Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in the American Silent Film. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991. HCG714. “The Movie That Defined: 1991!” Online posting. No date. IMDB.com. Accessed October 7, 2003, http://imdb.com. Helf, Mary. Letter to the Editor. Time, July, 15, 1991, 12. IMDB.com. 2003. The Internet Movie Database. Accessed October 7, 2003, http:// imdb.com. Iser, Wolfgang. The Range of Interpretation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Je≠ords, Susan. The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Jennings, Anne. Letter to the Editor. Newsweek, July 8, 1991, 12. Johnson, Brian D. “Feminists in the Fast Lane.” Macleans, May 27, 1991, 64–65. Khouri, Callie. Telephone interview. December 19, 2002. Kinder, Marsha. “Thelma & Louise and Messidor as Feminist Road Movies.” Film Quarterly 45:2 (Winter 1991–1992): 30–31. Kroll, Jack. “Back on the Road Again.” Newsweek, May 27, 1991, 61–63. Leo, John. “Toxic Feminism on the Big Screen.” U.S. News & World Report, June 10, 1991, 20. Macherey, Pierre. Red Letters 5 (Summer 1977): 7. Maslin, Janet. “On the Run with 2 Buddies and a Gun.” New York Times, May 24, 1991, C1. Mayne, Judith. Cinema and Spectatorship. New York: Routledge, 1993. Modleski, Tania. The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory. New York: Metheun, 1988. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989, 14–26. Novak, Robert. “Thelma & Louise.” People, June 10, 1991. Rapping, Elayne. “Feminism Gets the Hollywood Treatment.” Cineaste 18:4 (December 1991): 30. Shapiro, Lauren. “Women Who Kill Too Much.” Newsweek, June 17, 1991, 63.

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Schickel, Richard. “A Postcard from the Edge.” Time, May 27, 1991, 64. Schickel, Richard. “Gender Bender.” Time, June 24, 1991, 52–56. Scott, Ridley. Director’s commentary, Thelma & Louise DVD. MGM/UA, 2003. Stacey, Jackie. Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship. New York: Routledge, 1994. Sturken, Marita. Thelma & Louise. London: BFI, 2000. Sullivan, Steve. Letter to the Editor. Time, July 15, 1991, 12. Thelma & Louise: The Last Journey. Dir. Charles de Lauzirika. Scott Free Productions. MGM, 2003. TxMike. “What? You want to go to Mexico from Oklahoma, but you don’t want to go through Texas?” Online posting. August 11, 2003. IMDB.com. Accessed October 7, 2003, http://imdb.com. Vares, Tiina. “Framing ‘Killer Women’ Films: Audience Use of Genre.” Feminist Media Studies 2:2 (2002): 213–229. Williams, Linda. “When the Woman Looks.” In Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams. Frederick, Md.: AFI Monograph Series, University Publications of America, 1984, 83–99. Willis, Sharon. “Hardware and Hardbodies, What Do Women Want?” In Film Theory Goes to the Movies, ed. Jim Collins, Hilary Radner, and Ava Preacher Collins. New York: Routledge, 1993, 120–128.

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2

G E T T I N G H YS T E R I C A L

Thelma & Louise and Laughter

Victoria Sturtevant

It is my intention in this chapter to deal with Thelma & Louise through the lens of comedy theory, though that is not quite the same thing as labeling the film a comedy. The brutal sexual assault at the film’s core stands as a constant reminder that the issues that confront the women in this film are real, dangerous, consequential, and unfunny. In light of the many generic analyses of the film, including those in this volume, however, I think it is safe to argue that Thelma & Louise defies narrow generic categorization. It is, at its heart, not exactly nongeneric, but multigeneric. The “road movie” has always relied upon the wit and liberation of its principal couple, whether a heterosexual one like Bonnie and Clyde or a homosocial pairing like Butch and Sundance. Their picaresque comic adventures are set to the tune of a run from the law. There is an element of the Keystone Kops (or even Bob Hope and Bing Crosby) in all films about being on the run, a fact that also links this film to such other genre-benders as Some Like It Hot (1959) or Wild at Heart (1990). Even while belonging to the chase genre, though, Thelma & Louise provides a scathing parody of its testosteronesoaked conventions. In becoming outlaws, Thelma and Louise certainly write themselves into the mythology of the American West, but they simultaneously mock that mythology, as surely as Thelma’s “Driving My Life Away” T-shirt mocks the enormity even of the self-destructive myth they live out. Peter Chumo (1994) has argued that Thelma & Louise also draws from the tradition of screwball comedies, which often involve journeys from here to there, from oppression to liberation, from repression to a sexually expressive form of wit, and even from marriage to remarriage (in the tradition outlined by Stanley Cavell [1991]). If there is a “remarriage” in this film, it is 43

certainly in the women’s abdication of Thelma’s pathetically bullying husband and Louise’s moody, noncommittal boyfriend, and their rea∞rmation of the bond that binds the women together. The final kiss seals that more vital relationship. Cathy Griggers has written persuasively about Thelma & Louise as a journey from a femme social identity to a butch one, a kind of lesbian transformation myth that leads up to the kiss as well as the abyss, an aspect of the film that many heterosexual critics tend to downplay. Griggers views the film through the useful critical lens of “camp,” a social attitude invented by gay subcultures that subverts “the dominant, straight discourse of naturalism or realism from which queer subjects are typically excluded” (1993, 132). The generic influences in Thelma & Louise, then, reach into comedy from a number of directions. It parodies the men-and-cars conventions of the road movie, invites a certain campish wink at heterosexuality, ends with something like a marriage (the kiss), and travels something like an upward a≠ective journey (albeit a lethal one). What, then, does a look at the film’s comedy have to contribute to discussions of Thelma & Louise? Comedy is at its heart inscrutable. There is no computer program that can produce jokes (or good ones), no theorist who has yet adequately explained what makes us laugh. And what makes me laugh may be very di≠erent indeed from what makes you laugh, a point made eminently clear by many popular commentators’ decidedly humorless responses to the film. At their most basic level, however, the comic aspects of Thelma & Louise do two things. First, they centralize women as the film’s audience. To laugh at the jokes in Thelma & Louise is to a certain ex-

Women’s laughter on the road. Frame capture.

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tent to laugh at men (men like Thelma’s husband). By laughing, the spectator becomes physically complicit with a feminist worldview; the laughter is an acquiescence to seeing the world through Thelma and Louise’s mocking eyes. Second, the comic aspects of Thelma & Louise provide sympathetic audiences a brief physical experience of joy, akin to Thelma’s first orgasm or a ride in an open convertible. Laughter is an antidote to su≠ering, or at least a salve. It is a way for the film generously to give the spectator a little dose of physical bliss. The ways that this film channels these a≠ective experiences of pleasure will be as important to my analysis as intellectual interpretations of the film’s content. At a deeper level, the comedy of Thelma & Louise foregrounds the issue of “hysteria” as a pivotal site of feminist reclamations of the body. The dual meaning of hysteria is key here. Hysteria was historically regarded as a specifically feminine mental disorder, caused by an imbalance in the uterus. Colloquially, the word “hysterical” has of course come to designate any outof-control emotional state, especially extremes of joy or sorrow, or more commonly a mixture of the two, as is often the case in this film. Because of its historical root, the notion of hysteria is most commonly used in relation to women, and is never far removed from the accusation that women are innately irrational, through a natural condition of the female body (though the term “PMS” has relocated the contemporary terms of this discourse). Ironically, the kinds of losses of control described by the concept of hysteria contradict the daily necessity that women remain very much in control of their bodies and emotions to avoid precisely the kinds of dangers faced by Thelma and Louise on the open road: rape, theft, and exploitation. Far from the natural condition of women’s lives, the model of feminine hysteria is in fact an accusation that serves to silence women and gives masculine authority the green light to ignore women’s voices and their emotions. It is a classic double bind. Women who maintain control over their bodies and voices to dispel the accusation that they are acting hysterical are giving in to social repression. Women who are emotionally expressive face the probability of being labeled irrational and hysterical. The movie struck a nerve with popular audiences that still resonates a little painfully precisely because it self-consciously (and sometimes heavyhandedly) ruptures conventional systems of social control over women, including the proscription of behavior that could be labeled hysterical. If the accusation of hysteria has its roots in distrust of the female body and its susGetting Hysterical

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Embrace at the end of the line (“between laughter and tears”). Frame capture.

picious uterus, then reclamations of women’s emotional lives, especially the excesses, must also address the body. In the case of Thelma & Louise, the film actively insists on the women’s right to pleasurable embodiment (drunkenness, sexuality, Twizzlers) while divorcing performances of gender from the physical fact of sex. The women enact a range of gendered behaviors in their travels, from conventional femininity to parodic masculine aggression. In this film, gender becomes a form of comic play, a choice that undermines the apparently natural connections between female bodies and emotional excesses. They thereby find the license to act hysterical, to laugh hysterically, and hence to open up that term to criticism and debate. Rather than a simple economy of jokes and pleasures, then, each of the following sections will deal in comedy’s double binds. Like the film’s flyaway ending, each comic moment is a conscious refusal of the gravity that pulls inevitably on the women’s freedoms. Victory is tinged with desperation, and pleasure has steep costs. Regarding the film through the eyes of comedy theory cannot wish away the rape and the pursuit that structure the film’s narrative. Indeed, they bring these elements of the chase into sharper focus, demonstrating the ambivalent relationships between control and release, freedom and entrapment, and laughter and tears.

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Theory Most contemporary comedy theory draws from the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian literary theorist who coined the term “carnivalesque.” Bakhtin argues that in feudal cultures the yearly carnival created a kind of a≠ective haven for the peasant population to laugh at the conditions of their own oppression. At carnival, rules are eased, hierarchies are leveled or upended, and laughter becomes a tool of social (dis)order: Laughter is essentially not an external but an interior form of truth: it cannot be transformed into seriousness without destroying and distorting the very contents of the truth that it unveils. Laughter liberates not only from external censorship but first of all from the great interior censor; it liberates from the fear that developed in man [sic] during thousands of years: fear of the sacred, of prohibitions, of the past, of power. ([1968] 1984, 94)

Bakhtin has been rightly criticized for being both too romantic and too vague in his celebration of the power of carnival (and carnival’s o≠spring, “carnivalesque” or comic modes of entertainment). However, his emphasis on comedy not only as an intellectual form of liberation (as in the sly social satire of the educated classes), but also, more importantly, as an a≠ective one has been key to his influence on later theorists. For Bakhtin, laughter is the physical manifestation of liberation, a point that is eminently realized in Thelma & Louise. Richard Dyer applies a similar point specifically to Hollywood filmmaking in “Entertainment and Utopia.” Dyer argues that Hollywood entertainment does not create ideological road maps that o≠er audiences actual models of how to behave. Instead, the joy of entertainment is more like an a≠ective treasure map, showing us not necessarily how to become free and happy, but rather what freedom might feel like (1992, 18). This model is especially useful in looking at the a≠ective excesses of Thelma & Louise, a film that (despite some popular critics’ insistence to the contrary) does not insist in a literal way that women should take up arms against their oppressors, or go out and “get laid properly” as Thelma does, but one that shows women what it might feel like to laugh explosively, to laugh in such a way as to experience that laughter as freedom. Sharon Willis has argued that commentators who saw the film as a justification of violence or self-destruction missed the extent to which the film is a fantasmatic journey rather than a

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naturalistic one (121). Identification in this film is not literal and behavioral, but exists on the level of emotional a≠ect. Bakhtin’s other major contribution to contemporary thinking about comedy was his theorization of the relationship between the physical body and laughter. According to Bakhtin, carnivalesque humor relies upon an equalization of the classes through an appeal to the physical embodiment of all people. In particular, Bakhtin emphasizes a region of the body, which he calls the “lower bodily stratum,” the site of our physical functions that are hidden from polite daily social interaction (24–30). For Bakhtin, the lower body is a rich source of the carnivalesque laughter that upends those social structures that maintain propriety, hierarchy, and inequality. Under this model, jokes involving rear ends, urination, genitalia, big feet, and so forth are not juvenile and shameful, but richly expressive of a social world in which the body is celebrated rather than hidden, and bodily functions equalize all people for a short liminal time of carnivalesque celebration. It is important to note that this form of comedy involves reversals of social norms—the display of things that are ordinarily hidden and the connection of ideas that are ordinarily separate. Kathleen Rowe draws upon Bakhtin in arguing that the “genres of laughter” are a pivotal site of women’s rage, a healthy and productive mechanism of social change. Rowe points out that women in comedy can participate in a logic of reversals, akin to the feudal peasants’ limited experiences of reversal in the atmosphere of carnival. During the chaos of the carnivalesque moment, inversions of social role create a world where women, constrained perhaps most of all by the social labors of propriety, can become “unruly”: angry, loud, sexually aggressive, or physically exuberant, all behaviors outside the boundaries of feminine compliance, especially the social rules that encourage women to keep their bodies under constant control (legs crossed, voices low, and so forth). They thereby show the artificiality of those rules through their easy dismissal and give women vital access to those physical and emotional excesses ordinarily forbidden to them under the cultural warnings against hysterical behavior (1995, 4). In light of Rowe’s analysis, Thelma & Louise’s play with the phallic logic of the car and the gun form the core of a kind of gender reversal, less extreme, but of the same ilk as male comics’ performances of drag. The masculinization of Thelma and Louise is accompanied by a feminization of Thelma’s husband Darryl, who is transformed into a housewife of sorts, 48

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picking up beer bottles left around his house by the FBI agents. These reversals are at the heart of the film’s comedy; it is a kind of drag show. This gender reversal o≠ers women spectators both a certain surrogate freedom from the constrictions of femininity and the direct a≠ective joys of laughter. Judith Butler argues that all gender is a form of drag, a costume and set of behaviors put on and performed in social contexts. Butler points out that what we think of as conventional parodic drag performances destabilize the apparent naturalness of gender identity and sex role. She does not see male drag queens as performing a parody of women. Rather, “the parody,” she writes, “is of the very notion of an original” in the world of gender identity, where women too are performing femininity (1990, 138). Drag, then, opens up a rich world not only of mocking the opposite sex (whatever one might consider to be “opposite” of oneself ), but also of mocking the fictive connection of gender and sex—a more productive and consequential form of social comedy. Rowe also bases her theorizing of unruly womanhood around Bakhtin’s notion of comic ambivalence. That is, even for Bakhtin, the carnival is not all proletarian revolt and liberation, but a deeply complex liminal merging of corporeal realities: death and life, the scatological and the sexual, the grotesque and the sublime. The mixture of revulsion and pleasure that Bakhtin sees in carnivalesque humor forms the core of this ambivalence. Such a sense of the complexity of laughter informs Kathleen Rowe’s rereading of Bakhtin. According to Rowe, in relaxing social rules and strictures, the carnival clearly holds as much social danger for women as potential liberation, a di≠erent kind of ambivalence (44). And indeed, Thelma and Louise’s stop at the roadside bar shows the extent to which a carnival environment of celebration can soon turn dangerous, for women in particular. In most of the women’s stops along the road, their experiences of pleasure are marked by masculine threats—Harlan’s attempted rape and J. D.’s theft of the money being the clearest examples. Thelma & Louise, then, does not blindly celebrate pleasure, but places it in the context of the dangers women face in pursuing their own pleasures. It is a complex film: rather than a simplistic exploration of the road as a site of carnivalesque freedom, it o≠ers a lesson in the double binds associated with control and its loss, ambivalence, trauma, and pleasure. Finally, comedy scholar Frances Gray has argued that, although it is perhaps a simplistic way to approach the genre, it is important to bear in mind Getting Hysterical

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the ways that laughter can be a tool of social power—despite its utopian impulses—defining who is in and who is out, who is normal and who is laughable. Gray argues that, because joking and laughter are forms of power, certain habits of social thought have developed over the course of centuries that deny or belittle women’s participation in comic modes of discourse by denigrating comic women as loud, frigid, naïve, merely quaint, or faintly hysterical. One such strategy is to block women’s access to comic power simply by labeling women’s humor as angry or aggressive rather than funny. Gray uses the bra-burning protests of the 1970s as an example, when feminist demonstrators made the cathartic, witty, and quite memorable choice to burn bras as public theater. Gray argues, “burning a bra isn’t a bit of tooearnest fanaticism but a rather elegant joke” (1994, 12). Indeed, if popular culture can misread bra burning as excessively aggressive and humorless feminism, it is no wonder that there is a strong level of public discomfort with Thelma and Louise, who burn a tanker. As so many earlier writers have pointed out, they choose to shoot the tanker instead of the trucker, a choice that walks a careful line between respect for human life and the expression of female rage. That line traces the parameter of a joke, one of the film’s most exhilarating laughs. The fact that the tanker burning is a joke does not make it benign or less aggressive. To burn the tanker and laugh at its destruction makes this moment more outrageous, and ultimately more aggressive within the film’s world of nightmare and fantasy. The burning tanker becomes an apt metaphor for the explosive passion of their journey through a landscape that provokes and justifies hysterical responses.

Comic Models Thelma & Louise begins with a cynical joke, a shot of Louise chiding several young women that they should not smoke, because it “ruins your sex drive,” followed by a shot of Louise herself smoking. Like this joke, which sets the tone for the rest of the film, Thelma & Louise includes a number of implicit invitations to treat it as comedy, beginning with the title. At the most basic level, the script in which the title is generally printed, especially the ampersand, conveys a sense of lightness, and gives the two women’s names the quality of a team, like Lucy and Ethel, Laverne and Shirley, or Patsy and Edina, who are themselves modeled partly on earlier comic pairs such as Laurel and Hardy and Abbott and Costello (Sturken 2000, 23). The names themselves are old-fashioned and a little dowdy, again speaking to this tra50

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dition of women comic pairs, and particularly the generations that produced women named “Ethel” or “Laverne,” names that are jokes in and of themselves. The fact that both of the women are redheads brings up an inevitable comparison to Lucille Ball, the godmother of contemporary comic actresses (Willis 1993, 126). Thelma’s manic home life and her childlike relationship to her husband further the connection with Lucy. One of the most compelling comic pleasures of Thelma & Louise is in the way it skirts a connection to more conventional feminine genres like melodrama and romance. Unlike many kinds of slapstick comedy, the laughter provoked by Thelma & Louise is based in an intense identification with the two heroines. The film does not rely on the kinds of distancing devices that populate the works of such comics as Charlie Chaplin, who sticks to long shots most often so the audience has the kind of objective distance it needs to laugh when he falls down. In Thelma & Louise, the comedy serves the women’s pleasure. When the two women make the choice not to turn themselves into the police, they are at the crossroads not only of their human journeys, but also of their film’s generic position. If they go back home to

Louise smoking, stunting her sex drive. Still photo courtesy of Jerry Ohlinger’s, New York.

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family and police and imprisonment, their story becomes melodrama. They would no longer be in a rousing feminist action comedy, but rather a movie of the week, or a more upscale version of it like 1988’s harrowing The Accused. In making this decision, they explicitly reject melodrama: Louise argues, “I don’t want to end up on the damn Geraldo show.” The association of melodrama with daytime television is important—it connects the boredom and entrapment of Thelma’s housewife lifestyle to the ordinary species of “chick flick” melodrama. The weepie movie centralizes women and addresses them directly, often alienating male audiences through sentimentality and narrative development based on the kinds of intense identification that are also present in Thelma & Louise. Films that centralize women’s experiences, however, have been ghettoized in the melodrama, teaching women the passive model of emotional release through tears rather than the more aggressive release of laughter. The feminine genre of melodrama is here wittily assigned to the film’s male characters when the FBI agents sit around Thelma and Darryl’s house watching An A≠air to Remember (1957). Manohla Dargis has pointed out that, in contrast to the conventional road movie, Thelma and Louise travel the American landscape following “the will to pleasure, not to power” (1993, 92). It is that pleasure, that a≠ective experience of freedom and laughter that informs the film’s most utopian moments. Indeed, Thelma’s big first orgasm takes place o≠-screen; what gives the moment its impact is the revelation of the hickey to Louise the next day. Their shared laughter is the source of the audience’s pleasure, an emotional and physical release defined by and shared among women. Just as important, that laughter is immediately followed by the painful realization that J. D. has absconded with Louise’s life savings. Comedy is, as always, ambivalent, but its ambivalence brings us closer to the two heroines, instead of creating distance between the audience’s experiences of pleasure and the characters’ experiences of pain. As is appropriate for a comedy, Thelma & Louise has a “happy” ending: the heroines’ final journey moves only upward, never down into the canyon below. Director Ridley Scott actually arranged a (surely expensive) long helicopter shot of the car falling down into the canyon below. Ultimately, however, Scott chose not to use that take, but ended the women’s journey with the upward motion of flight, rather than the downward fall into tragedy (Scott, Thelma & Louise DVD commentary). Perversely, the Grand Canyon finale of Thelma & Louise has always reminded me of the painted canyon 52

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Thelma “crazy” after a night of sex with J. D. Frame capture.

settings of the Road Runner cartoons. The women hover in the air the way Wile E. Coyote would if he only had the courage not to look down. B. B. King’s “Better Not Look Down” on the soundtrack a∞rms this rather peculiar connection. Louise’s last name, Sawyer, also recalls Tom Sawyer—a reference that describes not only the life-changing journey that she undertakes, but also labels her a trickster, a deceiver like Twain’s most famous character. Both Tom Sawyer and the coyote (Wile E. Coyote is an indirect descendant of Native American folklore) are trickster figures, cultural antiheroes who achieve their ends through wit and deception. The term “trickster,” coined by Daniel Brinton’s 1968 study of Native American myth, but now widely used in folklore and anthropology, is a common feature of the mythologies of many cultures (Landay 1998, 2). Like the American South’s Br’er Rabbit, the trickster tends to achieve his ends by using a dupe’s greed or gullibility against him. Br’er Rabbit convinces the fox to let him out of the bag he is trapped in by promising the bag is full of food. Tom Sawyer convinces a dull-witted playmate to finish his chores for him by pretending that whitewashing the garden fence is a treat rather than drudgery. The dupes are taken in only because they want to get something for nothing. When Thelma and Louise lure the trucker o≠ the highway by seeming to o≠er a sexual tryst, they are participating in the tradition of the comic trickster. Lori Landay has traced the role of the female trickster through twentieth-century American culture in Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women. Landay argues that the trickster is a particularly useful model for women’s Getting Hysterical

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Thelma and Louise as trickster figures, luring truck driver to a lesson. Frame capture.

appropriations of comedy because women have historically been excluded from legitimate forms of power and have had to use wit and trickery to achieve their goals, especially the feminine deceptions associated with beauty, seduction, and the appearance of harmlessness (2–3). Like Scheherazade, saving her life through an unending story, or (perhaps more germane to the trucker incident) like the Bible’s Judith leading the drunken Holofernes into her tent only to cut his head o≠, a woman’s access to power often depends on her ability to keep her wits about her. Indeed, in its refusal to conclude the narrative, in its deferral of closure by the quick return to earlier, happier moments in the journey, the film’s freeze-frame ending recalls Scheherazade. It is a visual pun, a literalization of the concept of a cli≠hanger, which promises an ending that never materializes. This device also recalls the old Pearl White serials, which often ended in these moments of danger only to reveal in the next installment that the heroine had escaped from the car only seconds before it plunged o≠ the cli≠. The film is a trickster’s game, which defies the downward pull of narrative closure.

Drag Women comics in some way always already violate the rules of conventional femininity through their enactment of physical clumsiness or slapstick violence or aggressive verbal wit, but these transgressions are often tempered by a self-constructed pose of childishness or neurosis. Thelma’s performances of an exaggerated incompetence at everyday tasks o≠er an attack on 54

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the contained lifestyle of the Lucille Ball–style unhappy housewife, but also play into a cultural infantilization of women. Like a naughty child, Thelma keeps secrets, sneaking away for her rendezvous with Louise, sneaking bites of a candy bar she keeps in the freezer, sipping from her surreptitious baby bottles of Wild Turkey and the gun she slips into her handbag with two fingers held far away from her body like something that smells very bad or might burn her fingers. Her body has the gangly lack of control of a child, someone who is trying to placate adults while still experiencing the joys of physical freedom. In the beginning of the film, Thelma shows some of the same signs of arrested development that have tended to accrue to women comics like Ball, Gracie Allen, and Goldie Hawn, women whose childishness masks the social criticism and sometimes the rage of the comedy they perform. She puts her feet up on Louise’s dashboard as they begin their journey and is promptly scolded. She looks in the rearview mirror and pretends to smoke, imitating Louise. When she gets up in the roadhouse to dance, she does a little skip of pleasure on the way to the floor. When she wants to pick up J. D. from the side of the road, she gives a little puppy whimper. Her husband’s authority and Louise’s protectiveness combine to keep Thelma physically subdued and her frenetic body betrays her rebellion only in slightly infantile, secretive ways. After the murder, the women make a brief stop at a diner to compose themselves, where the radio is playing the country ballad “I Don’t Want to Play House.” The song seems to take a direct shot at Thelma, who has both been interrupted in her world of “play” by the reality of sexual assault and murder, and who has left behind her childish home life, where Darryl does not want to have children “because he’s still too much of a kid himself.” Significantly, Thelma loses this infantile quality as she adopts a more masculine posture, attire, and style of performance—but she turns the world of drag into a new and newly liberating form of play. Although many critics have discussed at length the women’s gradual abandonment of feminine signifiers and their adoption of specifically masculine objects and garments to replace them (Louise throws her lipstick in the dirt, for example), these moments are rarely given the full camp import of drag. Whereas male performances of drag have been perhaps the single most reliable laugh-getter of the twentieth century, from Fatty Arbuckle to Some Like It Hot to Monty Python to The Birdcage (1996), women’s use of male clothing in comedy has a sketchier history. These comic opportunities, Getting Hysterical

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“I’m Louise.” Frame capture.

while rich with meaning, have been extremely limited to the very occasional—The Danger Girl (1916), Sylvia Scarlet (1935), or Victor/Victoria (1982)—or sitcom performance—both Lucy and Roseanne Barr appeared in drag on their domestic comedies. More intriguing, although men in dresses nearly always connote hilarity, women in drag are more often doing heavy drama, as in Yentl (1983) or Boys Don’t Cry (1999). Even in the comic masterpiece Sullivan’s Travels (1941), Veronica Lake’s performance as a boy is more adorable than riotously funny. Judith Halberstam has argued that male impersonation is rarely as “camp” as female impersonation, precisely because masculinity, particularly white heterosexual male masculinity, has aggressively defined itself as “natural” and thereby nonperformative. Halberstam notes that, “because camp is predicated on exposing and exploiting the theatricality of gender, it tends to be the genre for an outrageous performance of femininity (by men or women) rather than outrageous performances of masculinity” (1998, 237). That is, a successfully comic performance of male drag must break down the apparent naturalness of male masculinity and point up the extent to which it is a constructed and performed set of norms and behaviors, a process at odds with the dominant cultural view that masculinity is biological, unconstructed, and therefore unperformable. As Thelma and Louise adopt their male drag late in the film, they selfconsciously treat masculinity precisely as an “outrageous performance,” to be adopted at will. Though their jeans and T-shirts might properly be called “androgynous” (and at certain moments their images take on a fetishized tomboy Daisy Duke femininity), I would argue that in a number of ways the 56

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film carefully codes their attire as specifically masculine and specifically performative. For instance, they acquire many of their clothes and gestures from men. Louise trades her jewelry for an old man’s hat, while Thelma steals a hat from the trucker whose rig they destroy. When Louise asks Thelma, “Where’d you learn to shoot like that?” she replies, “O≠ the TV,” crediting the very male culture of myth-making gun violence with her ability to create an outrageous performance with firearms. They take the police o∞cer’s sunglasses and gun. When Thelma robs the convenience store, she adopts the posture and script taught to her by J. D.’s demonstration of his robbery skills. While in the motel J. D. had used the feminine hair dryer as his gun, but Thelma accepts the full masculine signification of her real gun, the gun that she was hardly willing to touch when she was wearing a skirt. These women learn to perform masculinity precisely as a set of outrageous behaviors and borrowed or stolen clothing (eschewing the feminine activity of shopping for clothes, they simply acquire theirs along the way in a more “natural” way), all garnered from men. Indeed, once she is in jeans and torn denim shirt, Thelma puts her feet up on the dash without earning Louise’s reprimand. Her little girl comic performance has been replaced with a performance of masculine entitlement, spreading out in the space of the car. Partly because Thelma has always lived in a world of make-believe and play, her performance of outrageous masculinity is more playful than Louise’s, a comic parody of a gun-toting outlaw.

Men The portrayals of the various male bu≠oons who populate the film’s landscape have been a sore spot with the film’s critics since the time of its release. When Richard Johnson argued that the film was burdened by “pathetic stereotypes of testosterone-crazed behavior,” he surely meant the film’s three primary bu≠oons: the police o∞cer whom the fugitives lock in his own trunk, the truck driver himself who makes obscene gestures at the two women, and Thelma’s boorish husband Darryl (quoted in Schickel 1991, 52). These portraits of obnoxious men are not so much stereotypes, which are designed to establish control over a class of people through narrow generalization, as parodies, which exaggerate behaviors for comic e≠ect. Like stereotypes, however, these comic portraits are exercises of power, drawing lines between insiders and outsiders, jokers and butts of the joke. Among Thelma & Louise’s most radical pleasures is the invitation not Getting Hysterical

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only to laugh with women as women, but also to laugh at men. The portrayals of the cop, the trucker, and Darryl are each elegantly drawn cartoons that use caricature and parody to further centralize women’s experiences. The attendant character of J. D., a joker and trickster like Thelma and Louise, occupies a more villainous space in the narrative. He provides a foil to the bu≠oons and teaches Thelma the trickster’s life. All four of these men foreground the issue of performance in gender identity. Each puts on a form of masculine privilege that falls through at some point in the film, undermining the apparent naturalness of masculinity as clearly as Thelma and Louise’s use of drag destabilizes that identity. These men are all, to some degree, male impersonators. The sequence with the film’s first bu≠oon, the arrogant police o∞cer who tries to ticket Thelma and Louise for speeding only to wind up locked in his own trunk at the wrong end of his own gun, can be read as a parody of the police o∞cer who approaches Marion Crane’s parked car in Psycho (1960), another film about a woman on the road to escape her crime. The cop is dressed, posed, and shot with the same soulnessness—all glasses and hat, no face—with which Hitchcock imbued his policeman. The armed man confronts Marion with her guilty conscience. Though she knows he doesn’t know what she’s done, he does know she’s acting “funny.” Her body language allows the patriarchal authority to see right through her.

Highway patrol officer (Mort Mills) from Psycho (1960). Frame capture.

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In Thelma & Louise, the policeman is the same machine-like emblem of patriarchy’s lethal authority: “My God, he’s a Nazi,” Louise exclaims as he approaches the car. As in Psycho, his features are so disguised by the costume and rigid facial expression of his profession that it would be a challenge to recognize the actor in another role. And as in Psycho, the women adopt hideously placating smiles when confronted, pretty but not seductive, childlike and insincere, the smiles of women who have spent a lifetime cajoling masculine authority in one way or another. But Thelma and Louise exact Marion’s revenge by pulling a gun on him and transforming this machine into a whimpering jelly, pleading for his life. When he is deprived of his beer, his glasses, his gun, his belt, his keys, and his dignity, the cop becomes the butt of the joke. The stripping bare of his masculinity, the most aggressive such sequence in the film because this “Nazi” has the most to lose, is the ultimate comic reversal. It enacts not only Marion Crane’s revenge on the police o∞cer, but also that of female spectators on the genre of films that warn women against the dangers of the open road. Likewise, it shows the soulless o∞cial masculinity of the police o∞cer to be a pose, a performance self-consciously attached to the props of his job and his perceived right to bully the women. In taking away these props, the parody both mocks this masculine performance and strips bare the seeming naturalness of uniformed male authority in general. The trucker is a the most cartoonish of the film’s bu≠oons, a fact that does not strike me as out of sync with the rest of the film’s humor, in light of the Road Runner backdrop and the extent to which the scene taps into an inflated set of women’s frustrations at being aggressively propositioned on the road. The encounters with the trucker begin, in fact, with Thelma and Louise driving by the truck’s mud flaps and commenting on the cartoonish image of a big-breasted woman leaning back on her arms in sexual invitation. This familiar icon points out how commonplace and obnoxious an occurrence it is for women to be confronted with this vision of their place on the American road, a metallic embellishment to the power of the masculine truck: the silver woman is two-dimensional, disproportionate, and passive. The film’s caricature of the trucker, then, is a clear response to that icon, a reflection of his own narrow-mindedness. The truck driver is as out of proportion as the woman on the mud flaps, an icon of piggish behavior turned into something like an actual pig, with a

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voice to match. When he emerges from the truck, condoms in hand, to meet with Thelma and Louise by the side of the road, a brief shot of the truck’s hubcap shows a distorted reflection of the man doing a little dance of sexual anticipation as he approaches the women. This distortion is a kind of answer to the woman on the mud flap, an entrapping caricature. Because it is a caricature, the trucker’s performance of a particularly moronic form of lecherous aggression withholds the semblance of realism or naturalism (a sore spot with many critics unable, as Willis points out, to reconcile the film’s realism with its departures into fantasy) (121). Ultimately, this funhouse mirror masculinity is again a kind of drag, an outrageous performance designed to highlight and destabilize masculine entitlement on the highway. Christopher McDonald, the actor playing the film’s third bu≠oon, Thelma’s husband Darryl, put on forty pounds for the role and added in bits of business to further humiliate his character, such as the scene where he steps in his own pizza while speaking to Detective Slocombe (Keitel). As the bu≠oon with the largest role, played by an actor who relished the opportunity to play this character for laughs, the humiliation of Darryl is a joke that recurs throughout the film to enact an ongoing deflation of masculine authority in the household. Darryl undergoes a gradual transformation from football-watching, pizza box–misplacing, arrogant husband to hausfrau, serving iced tea on the patio and playing hostess to a house full of federal agents—wearing a bathrobe and scolding the men to wipe their feet before they come in out of the rain. This transformation is in some ways an answer to the gradual masculinization of Thelma and Louise. It is a form of drag that undermines the naturalness of gender and foregrounds the film’s carnivalesque play of costumes and especially reversals. Darryl becomes the literal “butt” of the joke when Thelma compares his rear end with J. D.’s: “Darryl don’t have a cute butt. You could park a car in the shadow of his ass.” The mocking of Darryl is implicitly linked to the role of J. D. in a number of important ways. Thelma first meets J. D. when she stumbles out of a phone booth after a conversation with her husband. In the car, their first conversation is about Darryl, and Thelma comes to see his shortcomings more clearly than she had before: “He is an asshole—most of the time I just let it slide” she admits, seemingly for the first time. J. D. removes her wedding ring in the course of a goofy hand-slapping game before their sexual interlude.

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Darryl’s foil, the trickster J. D. is a figure of both pleasure and pain, a figure of comic ambivalence. He robs stores, lies about being a student, and steals Louise’s savings. He is a male trickster, someone typically outside the law and the culture of marriage and family but who retains certain male privileges—mobility, physical confidence, and snide humor. At the police station, where he confronts the “insider” authority of Slocumbe and the FBI agent, he deflects their questions with sarcasm and mocks the homosocial pairing of the o∞cers. J. D. o≠ers to “just step out of the room” to give them some privacy. This attempt to undermine the o∞cial power of the law by rupturing the heterosexual privilege of his interrogators earns J. D. a brief session alone with Slocumbe, who smacks him in the head with his own cowboy hat, pressures him to take his feet o≠ the table, and threatens him with a lifetime of legal surveillance if he will not help bring Thelma and Louise in safely. These three threats to J. D.’s performance of outsider masculinity—his costume, his slack posture, and his freedom—serve to break down that performance and replace the swaggering young drifter with a sheepish kid. The fact that it took a male authority figure, a law enforcement o∞cer, to enact this transformation does somewhat undermine its e≠ectiveness as a revelation of masculinity as outrageous performance. In this moment, the conventional white male hierarchy is reestablished, where the figure of legal legitimacy can trump the outlaw, who has only his smart mouth to defend himself. The seeming “naturalness” of Slocumbe’s performance as paternalistic authority figure is never broken down, making him the male figure most commentators cling to as a representative of sympathetic male decency, rather than a “stereotype” like the film’s other men. Harvey Keitel’s more naturalized performance as Slocumbe provides an unfortunate anchor away from which the more rebellious and comic visions of masculinity radiate and to which they all ultimately answer. Our last glimpse of the male trickster, however, gives him the last word. For all the comparisons between J. D. and Darryl, the film permits only one confrontation between the two, when J. D. is brought into the police station and passes Darryl waiting on a bench. J. D. taunts Thelma’s husband with the comment “I like your wife” and a lewd thrusting gesture. A gesture of this kind is repeated three times in the film—once when J. D. is leaving the motel and knows Thelma is watching him in the rearview mirror, once when he is taunting Darryl, and once when the trucker exits his cab. The

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dance is a carnivalesque moment of masculine performance, one that puts male sexuality self-consciously and parodically on display. In this film, it is the men who enact a mating dance, who preen and wiggle, and who put on masculine sexuality as a performance and as a joke.

Conclusions: Getting Hysterical Toward the end of the film, Thelma begins to get genuinely hysterical, overcome with laughter at the memory of Louise’s murder of Harlan. “He sure wasn’t expecting that,” Thelma cackles, in the grip of a teary sort of laughter, “Suck my dick—boom.” Louise scolds her by insisting the murder is “not funny.” Thelma quickly composes herself again. The film is finally an exercise in control, being in control and being out of control productively and on one’s own time. Thelma & Louise lets its heroines and audiences get a little hysterical during their journey but redefines the notion of what it means to be out of control through the safe identification of their relationship to one another. Indeed, one of the most strikingly repeated words in Thelma & Louise might be “crazy” and its synonyms. When Thelma comes down to breakfast after her night with J. D., her hair is a rat’s nest, her body language is languorous and goofy, and her face is aglow with her secret. She asks Louise if she seems “di≠erent,” to which Louise replies, “Yeah, now that you mention it, you seem like you’re crazy or you’re on drugs.” The freedom of laughter and joy are without another label, another referent in the women’s lives. Insanity becomes the alternative to a sanity lived in misery. When Thelma stands up in the convertible to celebrate her first successful armed robbery, Louise says with admiring skepticism “You are disturbed.” “Yeah— I believe I am,” Thelma replies, with a joker’s confident tone. The trucker hollers at them, “You women are crazy,” to which Louise shouts back, “You got that right.” And near the end of their adventures, Thelma turns to Louise to ask, “I guess I went a little crazy, huh?” Louise answers her, “No, you’ve always been crazy. This is just the first chance you’ve had to really express yourself.” And here Louise touches on the vital point. Though it uses the mundane and familiar devices of cops and robbers and sexy cowboys and the open road to give these women characters a chance to express themselves, Thelma & Louise touches a far deeper chord than would be possible with only guns but no laughter. The radical combination of laughter and violence gives the film its critical edge. It is an acid backlash at male violence, but it 62

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“A powerful physical impression of what freedom would feel like.” Frame capture.

is also, in Frances Gray’s words, “a rather elegant joke.” The power of Thelma & Louise lies partly in its violent outbursts at patriarchal control. More vitally, though, that power lies in its revelations that patriarchy’s rules are not only intolerable but also outrageous, laughable. The car flying through the air at the conclusion again provides a necessary metaphor for the film’s refusal to look downward. The women’s choice to “keep going” is a defiant rejection of the o∞cers’ order to “freeze,” to become inert and inactive—precisely the kind of sane and rational behavior that represents genuine self-destruction. Instead, the women continue their journey past the edge of the cli≠, past the conventional boundaries of narrative or realism. It is a sublimely hysterical choice. Although it does not deny the existence of gravity, in the end, Thelma & Louise does provide a powerful physical impression of what freedom would feel like if freedom were not delineated by the double bind of hysteria and danger—and it would feel like flying.

Bibliography Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984 [1968]. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Chumo, Peter N., II. “At the Generic Crossroads with Thelma and Louise.” Post Script 13:2, 1994, 3–13.

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Cavell, Stanley. Pursuits of Happiness. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991. Dargis, Manohla. “Thelma & Louise and the Tradition of the Male Road Movie.” In Women and Film: A Sight and Sound Reader, ed. Pam Cook and Phillip Dodd. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993, 86–92. Dyer, Richard. “Entertainment and Utopia.” In Only Entertainment. London: Routledge, 1992, 17–34. Gray, Frances. Women and Laughter. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994. Griggers, Cathy. “Thelma and Louise and the Cultural Generation of the New ButchFemme.” In Film Theory Goes to the Movies, ed. Jim Collins, Hilary Radner, and Ava Preacher Collins. New York: Routledge, 1993, 129–141. Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998. Landay, Lori. Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women: The Female Trickster in American Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. Rowe, Kathleen. The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995. Schickel, Richard. “Gender Bender.” Time, June 24, 1991, 63. Scott, Ridley. Director’s commentary. Thelma & Louise DVD. MGM/UA, 2003. Sturken, Marita. Thelma & Louise. London: BFI, 2000. Willis, Sharon. “Hardware and Hardbodies, What Do Women Want?” In Film Theory Goes to the Movies, ed. Jim Collins, Hilary Radner, and Ava Preacher Collins. New York: Routledge, 1993, 120–128.

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3

H E A R I N G T H E L M A & LO U I S E

Active Reading of the Hybrid Pop Score

Claudia Gorbman

Like Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Jonathan Demme, and George Lucas, the best known among New Hollywood’s directors for being musicminded, Ridley Scott takes extraordinary care with music in his films. Thelma & Louise is one of his most remarkable achievements, its musical soundtrack elaborated in collaboration with composer Hans Zimmer and music supervisor Kathy Nelson. Zimmer’s moody instrumental music features electric and slide guitar, harmonica, and other acoustic and electronic sounds that help set the contemporary western atmosphere of this saga of two women on the lam. The film’s eighteen songs range from soul and reggae to roots-rock and country, from the 1970s to 1990, further defining the protagonists and their world. One feature that distinguishes Thelma & Louise is the often uncannily close synching of the songs and their lyrics with the scenes they accompany. By means of their titles, lyrics, style, and/or performers, the songs invite a more active reading than orchestral underscoring: they define action, setting, and character, they engage references, parallelism, and metaphors, and sometimes they elaborate complex structures of point of view. Thelma & Louise makes full use of viewers’ associations of songs with their original cultural contexts; and, even more important, it engages the songs in filmtextual environments that carve out new frontiers of narrative and social meaning. This film has a hybrid score: it consists of a combination of instrumental scoring and pop-song scoring. “For the most part,” writes Je≠ Smith, “the use of pop music conforms to the same sorts of dramatic functions served by orchestral scores; it underlines character traits, suggests elements of character development or point of view, reinforces aspects of the film’s set65

ting, and supports the film’s structure by bridging spatial and temporal gaps between sequences” (Smith 2001, 414). Whereas Smith’s assertion of the overlap in function between orchestral and pop scoring provides a useful critical framework, this essay on Thelma & Louise, like the work of Anahid Kassabian and much of Smith’s own, focuses largely on di≠erences in e≠ects of songs and instrumental scoring. First, however, how does the experiencing of song scoring di≠er from the experience of classical orchestral underscoring?

Nondiegetic Song Scoring By 1935, shortly after the dawn of the sound era, two types of music prevailed in popular movies: orchestral background scoring and diegetic musical numbers (as in musicals). Scoring is nondiegetic, understood as originating in a source outside the world of the film’s characters. (While the cowboy rides through the sagebrush in a Western, an orchestra plays nondiegetically; neither is there an orchestra on the plains nor does the cowboy supposedly hear this music.) Musical numbers, on the other hand, are diegetic, that is, they arise from the narrative space. Beginning in the late 1960s on a large scale, the growing interconnectedness of the music and film industries and the success of such song-filled movies as The Graduate (1967) and Easy Rider (1969) had established the new paradigm of song scoring.1 In song scoring, nondiegetic recorded songs accompany screen events: Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sounds of Silence” is heard as The Graduate’s Benjamin navigates his generational anomie, Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” is a backdrop for the lives of inner-city high school kids in Dangerous Minds (1995), Doors songs provide accompaniment to the Vietnam War in Apocalypse Now (1979) and Forrest Gump (1991). What follows is a brief rundown of some significant ways the pop-song score di≠ers from the two more traditional forms of film music.

Split Focus The aesthetic of orchestral underscoring or background scoring assumes film narration to be a unified discourse. The music has as its purpose to clarify and reinforce the viewer’s understanding of characters, emotions, and events. Its form is generally subordinated to story action—meaning that far from the strict formal logic of most “free-standing” music (for example, concerto or popular song), this film music is relatively elastic, full of 66

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“The Sounds of Silence.” Frame capture, The Graduate (1967).

devices that allow it to accommodate to the unmusical rhythms of action on the screen.2 John Williams’s atonal cue for the first shark attack in Jaws (1975) synchronizes almost as closely as sound e≠ects to the rapidly unfolding action: a high, sustained, dissonant chord suggests the victim’s quickly dawning realization that she has been bitten; busy, fast passages mirror the furious activity of her being dragged this way and that through the surf by the unseen shark. Williams heightens the impression of chaos by the rapid accumulation of instrumental colors, from the score’s trademark string basses to a xylophone, whose percussive flourishes underline the strangeness and rapidity of the massacre of the girl. On the other hand, the nondiegetic song, by its nature, resists incorporation into the changeable rhythm of the narrative. The popular song typically has a strong meter and form of its own, highly unlikely to shape itself to every turn of a movie scene. Further, songs have lyrics, inviting attention to an entire separate discourse than that of the onscreen story. In diegetic musical numbers, the song is performed onscreen and has no competition for the viewer’s attention, but in song scoring the lyrics of a song may be heard in addition to dialogue. At the end of The Bodyguard (1992), Whitney Houston’s rendition of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” continues over a speech at a convention where security man Costner has moved on to a new assignment. We listen to bits of the speech, but we mostly attend to the song, an anthem to love. Although the bodyguard is silent and inconspicuous in his new job, the song suggests that he is awash in romantic longing for the woman he has had to leave. Hearing Thelma & Louise

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Heterogeneity Traditional film music—the orchestral score on one hand, the musical number on the other—lends formal unity to the film. Bernard Herrmann’s string orchestra in Psycho (1960) and Irving Berlin’s witty songs in Top Hat (1935) contribute to unifying their respective films through tonal relationships, musical themes, and/or consistent style and orchestration. Song scoring, on the other hand, does not necessarily subscribe to an aesthetic of stylistic and formal consistency. Contemporary popular films typically have hybrid compilation scores—combining nondiegetic instrumental scoring and songs—and those songs may be performed by a variety of artists in a broad range of traditions. Dead Man Walking (1995) features artists as diverse as country legend Johnny Cash, the Pakistani Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and poet-rocker Patti Smith, while Addicted to Love (1997) has the Left Banke’s “Walk Away Renée,” the British star Jane Birkin’s sexily whispered French megahit “Je T’aime, Moi Non Plus,” and a song by the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré.

Semiotic Specificity Orchestral underscore is historically rooted in one dominant musical tradition—beginning with late Romantic style in 1930s and 1940s Hollywood film, evolving through the century to include a wider pool of popular idioms —ensuring what might pass for universal comprehension of the moods, cultural associations, and genres it thus defines. For example, Max Steiner’s orchestral score for Casablanca (1942) speaks a quintessentially conventional musical language. Low minor chords that accompany the title theme convey tragedy and despair as refugees in the purgatory of Casablanca look overhead to watch an airplane fly a lucky few away to freedom. As another scene opens on a shot of the Blue Parrot, the score draws on nineteenthcentury European musical conventions of modal exoticism to give Signor Ferrari’s club some Oriental local color. In contrast to the “universal” European musical language of underscoring, the song score can open films to much more specific cultural and personal associations, based in viewers’ lived experiences with specific songs, styles, and performers. Song lyrics and titles themselves can endow scenes with precise meanings that the orchestral cue, nonrepresentational and abstract, cannot. In Sleepless in Seattle (1993), hero Sam (Tom Hanks) reluc68

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tantly opens his heart to a radio talk show about his wife’s death. After this phone call, the visuals move outdoors from a melancholy shot of Sam and his son to a night view of sailboats and houseboats festooned with strings of lights for Christmas Eve. On the soundtrack, Ray Charles sings a fragment of “Over the Rainbow,” whose wistful lyrics (“Birds fly over the rainbow / Why then, oh why can’t I?”) instantly bring to mind the yearning of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz (1939). Although the lyrics might seem innocently hopeful, in this new context of a contemporary adult “realist” drama, they poignantly emphasize the young widower’s lingering grief and his inability to see “over the rainbow.”

Complex Identification The crucial factors of lyrics, style and genre, and the delivery and history of the performer/stars, are capable of engaging viewers in complex relations of identification. Identification itself is a multifaceted process. A song may cause us to identify, consciously or otherwise, with class, race, age, and other social categories—and this according to the filmgoer’s own social identities; a song may encourage us to identify with a character and/or the singing star, or a conflation of the two; it may act as an authorial commentary on the character; it may place us in a certain perspective vis-à-vis general or specific aspects of a scene. In the Sleepless in Seattle scene, the voice of Ray Charles, not The Wizard of Oz’s Judy Garland, is first of all male, fitting the narrative moment in complicity with the film’s hero. Further, this updated performance is presumably received as hip and knowing. Charles’s presence gives cachet to the film for its thirty-something white middle-class viewership: like Armstrong before him, this enduring and beloved black entertainer stands for both nostalgia and contemporaneity, representing a blackness that is inclusive rather than socially threatening. Charles, king of blues, soul, jazz, and pop, is singing a sweet tune in his ageless, gravelly voice, a tune that was originally performed by a white girl during the Depression. I have seen Charles in concert—on the Seattle waterfront, no less—so my own response to this number is emotively colored by my personal history. Popular music listeners have a sense of ownership of music they recognize, whereas it is di∞cult to imagine such a general response to an orchestral score by Max Steiner or John Williams. Kassabian makes precisely this point in distinguishing between “assimilating identifications” generally enabled by orchestral scores and “a∞liating Hearing Thelma & Louise

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identifications” more typically enabled by song scoring. The o∞cial or “universal” musical language of the traditional symphonic score—quite alien to many filmgoers—coerces each audio viewer, no matter her real subject position (race, class, gender, and so on) to assimilate to its dominant culture to be able to participate in the meanings it conveys. Pop and rock songs on the soundtrack, by contrast, encourage a∞liating identifications, taking into account our lived experience with the music’s genre, style, performers, and so forth, to participate in a looser playground of meaning. The composed orchestral score tends to obliterate particularities of history, whereas the song score, she states wryly, “brings the immediate threat of history” (Kassabian 2001, 2–3).

The Songs The world of Thelma & Louise is replete with roadside cafés, jukeboxes, bar bands, muzak in convenience stores, and oldies on the car radio. The way characters listen—or do not listen—to them supplies cultural cues about them and the milieu they inhabit. The two heroines—Thelma in her thirties, Louise a bit older—dance to live rock music in a tavern and groove to the Temptations as they drive across Oklahoma. Although the relations between songs and action may seem casual, they are anything but. Ridley Scott was thinking about specific songs for Thelma & Louise even before the film’s actors were cast,3 and he clearly constructed a number of scenes around recorded songs.

Singing along to tunes on the road. Frame capture.

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Whether diegetic or nondiegetic, nearly all the songs are narratively significant. The very first two songs, for instance, cue us to the friends’ anticipation of their weekend getaway in the mountains: both Kelly Willis’s country song “Little Honey” and Martha Reeves’s cover of Van Morrison’s “Wild Night” both tell of the good time ahead. “Little Honey” plays diegetically in the café, so it is heard in the background of Louise’s conversations there. “Wild Night” accompanies a music video–like sequence whose parallel editing alternates between Thelma and Louise preparing, in their opposite styles, for a weekend away from home, and it is the song that gives continuity to the images. After the shooting of the would-be rapist, the two women collect their thoughts in a roadside diner. Everything has changed, and the jukebox happens to be playing Tammy Wynette’s “I Don’t Want to Play House,” as if confirming that the women can no longer accommodate to the social roles of waitress and housewife. Subsequently, as Thelma and Louise drive ever further away toward freedom and death, the song titles themselves give the picture: “Drawn to the Fire,” “No Lookin’ Back,” “Don’t Look Back,” “Better Not Look Down.” Other songs and their placements in scenes suggest considerably more than the literal tag of the title or prominent lyrics. Songs can prefigure story events. In the Silver Bullet tavern, Charlie Sexton sings about pursuing a woman: “Lookin’ for a Cadillac with Tennessee Plates,” when soon the fugitive women in the Thunderbird with Arkansas plates will be speeding across Oklahoma; another line in the song refers to a police dragnet. Or consider the music that plays in the shop where Thelma buys an armload of tiny bottles of liquor. She has not yet decided whether to go with Louise to Mexico. We hear a muzaked version of the well-known Mexican tune “La Adelita.” A few minutes later, Thelma has talked with her egregiously awful husband Darryl on the phone; consequently realizing she has nothing to lose, she asks Louise, “So when are we going to goddamned Mexico?” “La Adelita” is again on the soundtrack, only marginally identifiable as diegetic (the women are well outside the convenience store where the tune was ostensibly playing). Not only does the tune signify general “Mexicanicity,” as Barthes would call it, but the eponymous Adelita of the Mexican tune is a heroine who went o≠ to fight in the Revolution, and the song is thus an apt piece to accompany the film heroines’ new goal in solidarity. A song may clearly signify one thing and then evolve as the scene itself shifts. Take the phone conversation between Louise and Jimmy, in which Hearing Thelma & Louise

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she asks him to empty her bank account and wire the money to her. Although she cannot tell him about the shooting, they talk in the strained but intimate language of lovers. Glenn Frey’s country song “Part of Me, Part of You” plays softly in the background, suggesting their bond in spite of the gap between them. Cut to the poolside outdoors, where a fretful bikinied Thelma lies on a chaise lounge, the roar of interstate tra∞c just behind her. The Thunderbird appears just outside the pool fence, and Louise brusquely herds Thelma into the car for the drive to Oklahoma City. With the cut to the pool, the music dials up significantly.4 We hear, as Louise breaks Thelma’s reverie, I can feel it when I hear that lonesome highway So many miles to go before I die;

Louise urgently orders Thelma into the car; Thelma loads her suitcase and climbs in, and they drive o≠. The lyrics with this action: We can never know about tomorrow Still we have to choose which way to go; You and I are standing at the crossroads. . . .

So, whereas at first the song may have pertained to Louise and Jimmy, it is now emphatically focusing on Louise and Thelma, every line applying to their flight together on highways and at literal and figurative crossroads. A number of the soundtrack’s songs are truly set pieces, so meticulously coordinated are song and picture. Music producer Kathy Nelson confirms that several songs, including “I Can See Clearly Now” and “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan,” had already been worked into the film before she came onto the project. As we shall see, these songs and the sequences they accompany are closely knit together.

I Can See Clearly Late in their flight from the law, Thelma and Louise are stopped for speeding by a New Mexico state patrolman. Fearing their discovery as fugitives, Thelma draws a gun on the o∞cer. After shooting a couple of airholes into the trunk lid, the women lock him into the trunk of his patrol car, throw his keys into the sagebrush, and drive away. The film returns to the hapless o∞cer a few scenes later, starting with an extreme long shot of the vast desert landscape and the police car. Out of nowhere, an incongruous lone 72

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bicyclist rides up: he is a black, stoned Rastafarian in full bicycling regalia. On his Walkman he’s listening to Johnny Nash’s classic reggae song “I Can See Clearly Now.” The song’s laid-back, cheery spirituality uses metaphors of sky and weather; obstacles and dark clouds are giving way to sun and blue skies and a rainbow: “it’s gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day.” The cyclist is comically oblivious to the cop’s claustrophobic drama and discomfort, this oblivion aided and abetted by the reggae song that fills the soundtrack. He takes a deep drag o≠ a joint before approaching the police car. In fact, the film does not show him doing anything to aid the o∞cer, only (as the scene’s punch line) blowing marijuana smoke into the trunk’s airhole. One can see the narrative of Thelma & Louise as a series of insults and blows inflicted on the two women, alternating with a series of scenes taking serious potshots back at patriarchal authority. The principal butts of patriarchy are Thelma’s husband Darryl, Harlan the rapist, and the obscene truck driver, each of whose macho stupidity receives comeuppance. The o∞cer locked in the trunk has already been neutralized by Thelma and Louise, so the bicyclist’s racial and cultural outsider response to him puts icing on the cake, adding further political edge to the movie’s feminism. A deeper hilarity results from the scene’s construction. Every phrase of “I Can See Clearly Now” that is heard is meticulously coordinated with what we see onscreen.5 In the exquisite timing with which the scene is edited, the song’s lyrics suggest a sort of conversation of points of view. The first line heard, “It’s gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day,” objectively describes the setting: a hot day with intense blue skies in a lonely, gorgeous stretch of desert. As the cyclist takes a big drag, “All the bad feelings have disappeared.” This line sides with his perspective. Then, “Here is the rainbow I’ve been praying for,” as the cyclist, with his very colorful garb and accessories, walks toward the patrol car: this “I” clearly refers to the o∞cer’s perspective, as he has surely been praying for rescue from his little inferno. It’s possible to miss this shift of point of view, since the sound of the music itself—its wonderfully leisurely rhythm, the instrumentation, the floating and simple vocal style of Johnny Nash—culturally oppose the world of the cop. The incongruity is one factor that makes this ping-ponging of points of view of the lyrics humorous, and the choice of reggae, not a white country tune, tips us o≠ to the victory of the black man. The trapped o∞cer’s finger sticks absurdly, castratedly, out of the airhole Hearing Thelma & Louise

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and points in the direction of his car keys. We hear the song line “Look all around, there’s nothing but blue sky”—which expresses the perspective of the stoned cyclist in answer to the o∞cer’s request; he looks, but sees sky, not keys. Finally, the repetition, “Look straight ahead, nothing but blue sky” (and the volume is notched up here), occurs as the cyclist blows marijuana smoke into the trunk through an air hole—which suggests the cop’s impending condition. The song suddenly cuts o≠, simultaneous with a cut to the fiery and polluted scene of the exploded tanker truck, where helicopters and patrol cars hover helplessly around the billowing columns of smoke. “I Can See Clearly Now” has helped set up a stark juxtaposition of happy music to overbearing helicopter sounds, blue sky to black smoke, quiet desert road to cacophonic police activity. “Nothing but blue sky” has been rudely interrupted in mid“sky,” in the jump from one aftermath of Thelma’s and Louise’s justice making to another. The fantasy in the cyclist scene—a black man blowing marijuana smoke in a white policeman’s face in perfect serenity—is a political one, just as in terms of gender politics the film constructs an appealing fantasy of women’s revenge, however provisional, against the patriarchy. This is a far cry from the scene as originally written, which merely called for an old timer in a beat-up pickup truck to pry open the police car with a crowbar, allowing the o∞cer to escape from the trunk. Not only is the o∞cer’s fate not resolved in this comic scene, but the entire scene has now been conceived with the song as its centerpiece. The cyclist is a character whose presence is justified only

“I can see clearly now.” Frame capture.

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by a certain surrealist impulse and by the reggae song. The mood of the scene changes from matter-of-fact (Khouri’s original) to stoned and happy, making the o∞cer a comic butt, an afterthought. The rhythm of the picture editing is subordinated to the rhythm of the song and above all to its lyrics, creating a brilliant play of points of view.

Lucy in the Canyon The protagonists drive through Monument Valley in a pensive night sequence on the road. They comment on the beauty of the landscape. Thelma wistfully notes that she always wanted to travel, “I just never got the opportunity.” Louise answers, “You got it now.” This exchange fades in to a song about a woman’s missed opportunities, Shel Silverstein’s “Ballad of Lucy Jordan,” in a synth-pop arrangement sung in the hoarse and world-weary voice of Marianne Faithfull. The film uses the first stanza and the chorus: The morning sun touched lightly on / The eyes of Lucy Jordan In a white suburban bedroom / In a white suburban town; As she lay there ‘neath the covers / Dreaming of a thousand lovers ’Til the world turned to orange, and the room went spinning round. [CHORUS:] At the age of thirty-seven, she realized she’d never ride Through Paris in a sports car, with the warm wind in her hair So she let the phone keep ringing, and she sat there softly singing Little nursery rhymes she’d memorized in her daddy’s easy chair. [CHORUS #2:] At the age of thirty-seven, she knew she’d found forever As she rode along through Paris, with the warm wind in her hair. . . .

The matching of lyrics to story here works di≠erently than the reggae song. As with the “I Can See Clearly Now” scene, there is no dialogue to compete with the song lyrics, and thus the lyrics are foregrounded. In contrast to “I Can See Clearly Now,” this is a narrative song, about a third character (Lucy Jordan), sung by a fourth (Faithfull) whose real-life story also participates in the trajectory of loss, alcohol, and wasted opportunity. But wait. At what point are we overreading? How much can a song lyric really a≠ect the meaning of a movie scene? Je≠ Smith states how a song in a film may address two kinds of audiences simultaneously: On one level, an audience of uninformed viewers may interpret the song as background music pure and simple. As such, they may make judgments regarding the overall style and its appropriateness to considerations of setting, character, and

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mood. However, an audience of informed viewers will recognize the song’s title, lyrics, or performer, and will apply this knowledge to the dramatic context depicted onscreen. In such a way, musical allusion also serves as an expressive device to either comment on the action or suggest the director’s attitude toward the characters, settings, and themes of the film. (Smith 1998, 167–168)

For the “naïve” listener to Thelma & Louise, the song sets a mood. Although the white suburban bedroom, ringing telephone, and nursery rhymes belong to the song lyrics alone and correspond to nothing in the visual scene, the themes and moods complement each other. “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan” is a slow, sad, dreamy narrative, obliquely sharing in the tradition of ballads sometimes heard in classical-era Westerns. We may feel a loose equivalence between Louise and the song’s Lucy. The beautifully lit visuals (a soft unnatural glow on the two women in the car, the lighting on the landscape) contribute to the impression of Monument Valley as an immense stage. The high degree of reverb in the song’s recording amplifies this impression of the natural setting as a scenic space, both cavernous and womblike. One extreme long shot of the landscape, apparently shot in the dead of night yet lit by unseen banks of powerful lights, shows the car as a tiny pair of headlights wending through the enormous expanse. The absence of diegetic sound heightens this eerie transformation of nature into stage. For the informed listener, the personas of Thelma, Louise, Lucy, and Marianne conflate in a number of ways. For one thing, the song’s second stanza, unused presumably because of length considerations, tells of a kind of triumphal death. In the unheard stanza Lucy climbs up to her roof and jumps, in a delusion of going to a white car. Although the film elides this, it takes care nonetheless to bring in the final chorus, in which Lucy “knew she’d found forever.” The viewer familiar with the song’s lyrics is aware of its fatalism, which is less explicit in the film’s excerpt of it. Further, the filmgoer familiar with Marianne Faithfull’s biography, from her entrance into the public spotlight with Mick Jagger to her deeply troubled, drug- and alcohol-filled life in the 1970s, will no doubt appreciate the moment during the scene when Louise takes a swig of Wild Turkey. Faithfull’s distinctive broken voice confers both toughness and vulnerability onto the protagonists late in the film. Their faces are lined by the sun, they have accepted and embraced their fatal trajectory. All four female personas are united by fatalism then, and the articulation of the scene makes poetry out of their interrelationships. 76

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Dissolves between head shots of Louise and Thelma meld them into a single collective character during the song. The phrase “at the age of thirtyseven” links the two protagonists generationally with the song’s Lucy. At a point when the camera lingers on the sleeping Thelma, the lyrics sing, “She realized she’d never ride / Through Paris in a sportscar, with the warm wind in her hair.” Backlighting highlights the warm wind in Thelma’s hair. Whereas the “I Can See Clearly Now” scene is constructed according to shifts in point of view, the “Ballad of Lucy Jordan” sequence is edited precisely according to the rhythm of the song. During the song’s four-bar introduction (a rhythmic I–IV chord alternation on synth), we see the blue Thunderbird convertible and red taillights from the rear, theatrically lit in the profound darkness and silence. On the first beat of Faithfull’s first line, the film cuts to a head shot of Louise at the wheel for exactly two measures. Dissolve to the face of Thelma, in time for the first beat of the next two measures. Dissolve back to Louise for exactly four measures, then to Thelma for the next four. The image we see over the last two lines of the stanza (i.e., four measures), “’Til the world turned to orange, and the room went spinning round,” is the extreme long shot of Monument Valley lit in an earthy orange chiaroscuro. During the chorus, even the moving camera is calibrated to respond to the song’s rhythm and content. It begins on Louise on the line, “At the age of thirty-seven,” and during “She realized she’d never ride” it pans over to Thelma. The next four bars, “Through Paris in a sportscar, with the warm wind in her hair,” rest on Thelma. The camera pans right during the next two measures, “So she let the phone keep ringing,” following Louise’s arm taking the bottle of Wild Turkey. The camera rests on Louise for the next few measures; she takes a swig from the bottle on the downbeat of “sat”: And she sat there softly singing Little nursery rhymes she’d memorized in her daddy’s easy chair.

The night scene in Monument Valley is a most beautiful and pensive segment, the calm before the next day’s storm. The song’s acoustical, musical, and narrative properties combine with the picture editing in ways that evoke both premonitions of tragic grandeur and the calm intimacy of two women driving through the western night.

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Better Not Look Down Callie Khouri wrote the final scene of Thelma & Louise taking B. B. King’s song “Better Not Look Down” as inspiration. In her original screenplay, the two heroines have decided to avoid capture by driving into the abyss. They say their goodbyes, and just before Louise puts the car in gear and floors it, the song begins. “Hal’s eyes widen for a moment at what he sees, and then a sense of calm overtakes him and he mouths the word ‘alright,’” reads the script. Khouri typed the lyrics to the first verse into the script, these lyrics to be heard over shots of Thelma and Louise, and of Hal and all the police lowering their weapons in disbelief as the car guns toward the edge.6 Then, “as the speeding car sails over the edge of the cli≠,” comes the chorus, the lyrics again spelled out in the script by Khouri: Better not look down, if you wanna keep on flyin’ Put the hammer down, keep it full speed ahead Better not look back, or you might just wind up cryin’ You can keep it movin’ if you don’t look down.

Khouri’s reasons for wanting the song are pretty clear. It is upbeat, in both musical delivery and lyrics. A rousing gospel-pop anthem, it puts an intense focus on the the lives of the two protagonists rather than their tragic deaths. The screenplay depicts acceptance—by Thelma and Louise and also by Hal—and comedy, by the cops, a final snub at the nose of patriarchy. The lightness and joy would be furthered by the obvious pun between soundtrack lyrics and visual action as the car sails over and into the abyss: better not look down. In actual practice, though, the pun at this supreme moment in the film would be grotesque.7 Thelma and Louise are not comic characters; we have too much invested in them to appreciate a final joke that seems to be on them (better not look down . . . as you are defeated by patriarchy, who gets the last laugh on you). We know that the plot’s ending underwent much reworking and discussion. Additional footage was shot that placed greater narrative weight on Hal; he not only runs after the Thunderbird (as he indeed does in the release version), but also looks over the edge after the car has crashed below. Fortunately, Scott concluded that this footage took the ending away from the women. The film settles for a middle ground between Khouri’s unreflective ending—with an accepting Hal and the musical pun— 78

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and the impulse to dwell, through the intermediary of Hal, on the tragic emotional and political logic of the events. The drive into the freeze-frame is both a defeat and a triumph, and the film as it is refuses to minimize the defeat. Instead of “Better Not Look Down,” there is scoring, with no lyrics threatening to trivialize the pregnant moment. I shall return to this scoring presently. The chorus of “Better Not Look Down” does, however, make it into the film for an earlier scene, as the prologue to the exploding truck. The women meet up on the highway with a tanker truck whose moronic driver has been honking at them and making obscene gestures. They invite him to pull over for what he thinks will be a sexual encounter and what they anticipate as an apology. When neither materializes, they deliberately fire their guns at his fuel truck, which explodes into an immense fireball. Through the first part of this episode, “Better Not Look Down” plays. At first, when the women are driving, the song appears diegetic, as they seem to be bouncing to its rhythm on the radio. When the truck driver “courts” the two women from his rig on the highway, the volume is reduced behind the dialogue. The vehicles pull o≠ the highway, and the song cranks up again (with no diegetic source apparent). The trucker prepares to descend from his cab. Here we can imagine taking the lyrics literally, as a Greek chorus warning the driver not to engage with the women: “you’d better not look down [from your truck], if you want to keep on flying.” Overall, the song’s joyful musical qualities give dynamism to Thelma and Louise in their satisfying path to revenge. Its gospel arrangement of a female choir backing up B. B. King, and its preponderant I–IV chords giving associations of joy, of truth, of rightness, endorse the justice to be exacted by the women. The song is up-tempo, too, so there is a lightheartedness musically that belies the urgency of the lyrics that apply to the two protagonists as much as to the driver. Even though they had better get going now, even though they had “better not look back, or you might just wind up crying,” the humorous and life-a∞rming music makes this scene, at least, into a rollicking journey. Once the trucker’s symbolic emasculation is definitively carried out, a speedy, comical, countryish cue by Zimmer picks up on this spirit, taking sides with Thelma and Louise as their car encircles the man, they grab his fallen hat, and they leave him in the dust and flames. How can we not be on their side when such music plays? Hearing Thelma & Louise

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Thelma grabs trucker’s hat after explosion of tanker. Frame capture.

It is impossible to overemphasize the importance of music in directing viewer sympathies. Imagine the film’s final instrumental cue here instead. It would impose a certain gravity and heroism to their act. Other music might encourage us to read their destruction of the truck as morally ambiguous, or cruel and callous, or slapstick. Any piece of music here will do something; what is worth attending to is the semiotic mutual interaction that does occur with the music chosen.

Gender Of the eighteen soundtrack songs, the film’s first four, heard before Thelma and Louise’s fateful stop at the roadside bar, have female performers. “Little Honey,” sung by Kelly Willis, plays in the café where Louise works as a waitress. “Wild Night,” performed by Martha Reeves (of Martha and the Vandellas), plays to the parallel montage of the two protagonists preparing in their separate homes for the weekend getaway. As they launch their trip in Louise’s Thunderbird, we hear Toni Childs’s “House of Hope.” Then they enter the Silver Bullet, and Kelly Willis’s song “I Don’t Want to Love You but I Do” plays on the sound system. In its choices in song scoring, therefore, the film initially establishes a female vocal presence on the soundtrack, and thus a kind of feminine space for its events. But then the live band performs in the bar. Something about the unleashing of testosterone is signaled in Charlie Sexton’s three numbers (“Tennessee Plates,” “Mercury Blues,” and “Badlands”). This is when Harlan begins flirting with Thelma; in this space of male privilege even the waitress 80

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who knows his modus operandi so well remains passively tolerant. A connection is made between the music and the macho society for which it constitutes the soundtrack.8 We cannot miss it, because we see the band, and the music is carefully mixed to permeate naturalistically all spaces in which it is heard, from the main room of the tavern, and the women’s restroom, to the parking lot. For the critical scene in the Silver Bullet parking lot, the band indoors is heard playing an instrumental break. The wild ri∞ng of the lead guitars and the pulsating drums and bass, all heard with strong reverb from outside, not only provide a realistic representation of macho country rock performance. In addition, in the context of the onscreen brutalizing of Thelma, and Louise’s execution of Harlan, the music gives poignant expression to Louise’s emotional disarray as she stares at Harlan’s body. Until this moment, the gun was an embarrassing secret locked in the glove compartment, but to stop Harlan’s attack, Louise uses it, the only phallus equal to his. In response to his final verbal thrust (“Suck my dick”), Louise fires the gun. The most dangerous thing the women can do is become phallic women; they first do so here. Having entered the privileged realm of masculinity, they are in terror, and the music eloquently mirrors their chaos. The rest of the film traces their acceptance and embrace of gender transgression, their pleasure in taking phallic power. At every turn, music’s presence helps define the process. At the diner after Louise has shot Harlan, “I Don’t Want to Play House” signals that the heroines will no longer be associated with domestic space. In fact, notes Kassabian, male characters—Darryl, Jimmy, and Hal—will be seen in homes, highlighting all the more the women’s separation from their previous life in patriarchy (82). Their new space will henceforth be the car, their refuge and their vehicle through the “wild” west they create and traverse. On the DVD (MGM, 1997), Ridley Scott comments on the look the women have acquired near the film’s end, when they have shed their original makeup, clothing, and hairdos. He describes them as “looking heroic: women would like to be like this, secretly.” After their improbable getaway from the first regiment of police cars just near the end, Scott comments that “Thelma looks handsome, very strong . . . very sexy, as is Louise.” Scott’s movie reveals a conception of what “women would like to be like,” stars of an action film, correcting men who abuse masculine power, their final act a thrust into the void. As the film conceives it, their escape is both a powerful Hearing Thelma & Louise

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fantasy and a real-life impossibility. Scott and Zimmer abet this phallic fantasy in the film’s driving action rhythms, but ultimately the narrative disallows it. Or does it? This is the big question in the endless volleys of critical opinion that followed the film’s release. Consider the video and audio components of the final scene. In the last moments in the police stando≠, we hear suspense music, sustained minor harmonies with a strong pulse in the bass, a subdued twangy guitar solo in the lower register, and a trumpet-like synth sound evoking war, tragic heroism, and the like. Large close-ups show guns being cocked—much, much bigger guns than the one Louise used to kill Harlan, and many, many more of them. The women are surrounded at a distance by a phalanx of phalluses. Then for the heroines’ last dialogue, when Thelma urges Louise to drive ahead, the main “Thunderbird” theme returns (see below). The noise of men—helicopters, shouts, guns cocking—disappears. As Louise propels the Thunderbird toward the brink and the heroines clasp hands, a women’s gospel chorus joins the instrumental music for the first time; the chorus contributes two brief, beautiful subdominant (IV) chords rising in pitch. The car leaps into the void and the film freeze-frames, but the chorus continues singing with the ongoing instrumental theme. Has women’s discourse triumphed, with the heroines’ final act visually frozen at the apex of the leap, and with women’s voices a∞rming it to our ears? The music provides the continuity beyond the chronological ending of death, as the film flashes back to earlier, happier moments, as if to say, Thelma and Louise live; look, here are the pictures and here is the music. Ultimately, although the film may be nostalgic, in the form of the freezeframe, the flashbacks, and the feminized iteration of the music, there is no getting around the brute fact of the plot’s eradication of the heroines. The nostalgia provides a sort of emotional cushion for the inevitable hard landing, which may be felt as a poetic happy ending despite the political reality of this dialectical situation. Only one song repeats on the soundtrack: “Part of Me, Part of You” returns at the very end to accompany the second half of the film’s closing credits. To which couple (“You and I will always be together”) does it refer? Most logically, of course, the couple in question is Thelma and Louise. Following the stunning leap o≠ the cli≠, the film has ended with a nostalgic montage of moments in the story of the two women—not a montage of Louise and Jimmy, not of Thelma and J. D., not of Thelma/Louise and Hal. 82

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Louise: “It’s the goddam Grand Canyon.” Frame capture, Thelma & Louise: The Last Journey.

But then again, the film has chosen a male voice to sing its final song, so a (less threatening?) promise of the heterosexual fantasy remains—even though what male character would be singing to what female character, in the translation of the song lyrics to the story, is a mystery. At any rate, the film at least maintains an ambivalence about the wild zone it has opened up, the zone of Thelma’s and Louise’s transgression and of their phallic identities, even if Glenn Frey is positioned to have the last romantic word.

The Instrumental Score By 1990, composer Hans Zimmer was in high demand in Hollywood, having scored numerous films and TV productions in both Germany and the United States, including Rain Man (1988), Twister (1996), Black Rain (1989), Backdraft (1991), Driving Miss Daisy (1989), Days of Thunder (1990), and Pacific Heights (1990).9 Zimmer is well known for his use of digital synthesizers, advanced computer technology and electronic keyboards, often mixed with live instruments. For Thelma & Louise, in response to Scott’s desire for music “with a rather sad note to it,” he came up Hearing Thelma & Louise

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with two dozen twangy, western-inflected instrumental cues. Although this instrumental music covers a wide range of moods, there is an emotionally evocative majesty to its guitar solos, which are performed by Peter Haycock of the Climax Blues Band. The score uses a restrained palette dominated by synths and electronically processed instruments, electric and steel guitar, harmonica, and banjo, often with a strong bass presence and strong percussion. The sound includes “lonesome” bent notes from slide guitar and harmonica, blues ri≠s for a solo electric guitar, the busy sound of banjo and guitar picking for dynamic or comic moments, and, almost always, substantial reverb in the mix. The reverb and the blues-western conventions give the music a strong internal consistency. The cues seem to bespeak the very essence of the American heartland, in this movie by a British director and scored by a German composer. It goes almost without saying that the music is in reality accessing a constructed version of the idea of the American heartland. Zimmer’s contemporary western sounds are culled from many sources that include not only classical Westerns, but also the work of two other European director-composer teams with musical ideas about “westernness,” Ser-

Hans Zimmer, composer. Frame capture, Thelma & Louise: The Last Journey.

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gio Leone with Ennio Morricone (notably the spaghetti westerns from A Fistful of Dollars [1964] to Once Upon a Time in the West [1968]) and Wim Wenders in his collaboration with Ry Cooder, Paris, Texas (1984).10 Zimmer built the score on several themes and motivic strands: 1. The opening theme, a long, almost arrhythmic stanza for steel guitar that starts in C major and modulates to A minor (Theme 1); 2. A theme in A major, which Zimmer calls “Thunderbird.” It begins with the same two notes as Theme 1; 3. A chord progression (A minor—E minor—G minor—D minor) heard in connection with the law; 4. A brief, slow minor motif in the synthed voice of a horn; as the law closes in on the women, strong percussive and bass e≠ects associated with the Feds’ ominous pursuit.

This instrumental score, like classical scores, provides narrative and emotional cueing. Unlike the film’s pop songs, which, as we have seen, tend to be edited closely to actions onscreen, the score does not synchronize closely with specific visual events, but instead establishes general tones. In fact, songs and instrumental scoring here virtually exchange their usual behaviors. Whereas classical underscoring conforms to onscreen action— think again of Williams’s closely synched music for the shark attack in Jaws—Zimmer’s scoring in Thelma & Louise is more formally self-contained, and rather than synch with the action it established overarching moods. In a word, in some ways it acts like song scoring. Repeated music in Thelma & Louise does not establish clear denotations as leitmotifs in many other films tend to do. For example, there is no motif for any particular character or for any repeated plot or explicit thematic element. The closest the score gets to a “labeling” function is the musical depiction of the police and FBI. Rather, we might sometimes term the deployment of Zimmer’s music philosophical with relation to the visuals. By this I mean that the music suggests a meta- or poetic commentary, quite unlike the classical-era score that remained in the realm of the denotative, on one hand, and the emotive, on the other.11 To explore the idea of music used philosophically, let us consider “Thunderbird,” the second of the film’s two main themes. This melody features the reverberant sound of an electric slide guitar, in A major, accompanied by sustained chords on synths. Hearing Thelma & Louise

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“Thunderbird” theme. Original graphic. Claudia Gorbman.

This musical theme first appears a good halfway through the film when, after J. D. has stolen Louise’s savings, the women commit their first robbery to support themselves. In a dusty one-horse town, Thelma goes into a store to purchase some supplies while Louise waits in the car. The cue begins, and Louise sees a woman, perhaps sixty years old, watching her from behind a window. Louise begins to apply lipstick, then considers this exercise in femininity pointless and tosses the lipstick out of the car. (Immediately after the above cue ends, Thelma runs out with the money from her holdup, the women make a getaway with fast-paced music accompanying them.) The shot of the woman in the window suggests the conventional older woman that Louise will now never become. An answer shot of Louise, in tandem with the reflective Thunderbird melody, suggests Louise’s own prise de conscience of her mortality. The woman’s inertness in that shot behind glass and the absence of an establishing shot that would anchor her in the fictional space suggest an abstract idea—conventional older womanhood—rather than a concrete presence. The next iteration of the theme occurs after Thelma and Louise have learned that the police are pursuing them for murder. Taking a back road, they pause in their car at a cattle crossing. To allay Louise’s despair about all that has happened, Thelma matter-of-factly reassures her that there is no basis for regret. This dialogue of clear-headed mutual forgiveness is accompanied by the theme. 86

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Louise looking at old woman. Frame capture.

Reverse shot: old woman. Frame capture.

Louise telephones Hal. As they speak, and the FBI men work to trace the call, we hear not the melody, but only the chords that normally undergird the Thunderbird theme. Soon after, both women pledge their intention to go all the way. The theme plays, now melody and all, and with a rhythmic pattern in the accompaniment. Thelma: “I can’t go back. I just couldn’t live.” In the final sequence at the Grand Canyon, surrounded on all sides by police with cocked weapons, Thelma encourages Louise to “keep going” rather than surrender. The camera records the desperate moments of police activity, and the wordless understanding between Thelma and Louise, their hands clenched and the Polaroid photo flying away in the wind. As stated earlier, the Thunderbird theme is heard but now with women’s voices in the mix. Hearing Thelma & Louise

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Unlike (for example) the four-chord progression that signifies the police, this theme has no simple denotative function.12 The I–IV (tonic-subdominant) harmony under the guitar takes on an epic feel, with the religious associations of the IV–I (“amen”) cadence so deeply ingrained in American church music. There is something heroic sounding about the cue in its combination with the scenes it accompanies. So what does it “mean” in the accumulation of its diegetic associations? Each scene in which it appears registers an epiphany or advance in the women’s purity of purpose, a frank acceptance of the death that will result inevitably from their choices. The music becomes the music of heroism, but, rather than heroism of action, it is a heroism of thought and of being. As the car drives over the precipice, the final arrangement of the Thunderbird theme includes an entire female chorus, perhaps recalling the gospel backup choir in “Better Not Look Down,” the song originally destined for this climactic moment. One also thinks of other holy moments in the cinema involving women’s wordless singing voices—particularly the soaring female voice on the soundtrack of Once Upon a Time in the West (1969) that raises the story of Charles Bronson and Claudia Cardinale to the status of myth, the operatic American story of the railroads and the settling of the West. Only in Thelma & Louise, the West is being unsettled, by a pair of characters who dismantle the structures of gender in the Western.

Notes 1. For an authoritative economic and institutional history of popular music in film, see Je≠ Smith’s The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music (1998). 2. Typically, underscoring (especially in the 1930s through the 1950s) employs motifs that can pop up to “signify” or inflect characters or events with attributes. A motif (or a “detachable” part of it) can be very brief, and thus its appearance in the fabric of a score might last only a second or two; on the other hand, it can be extended or repeated to embrace an entire sequence. Think of “As Time Goes By,” the main theme in Casablanca (1942); it is heard in its entirety but also appears as a motif consisting of just the first six notes of the melody. Classical underscoring in the hands of some composers also uses repeatable patterns (for example, a stepwise ascending pattern) that can “vamp” during tense action sequences. Abrupt tempo and key changes allow underscoring to accommodate to ever-changing screen moods and rhythms. These and other techniques make orchestral scoring malleable and flexible. Zimmer’s music in Thelma & Louise, while far from the musical language and tech-

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niques of a 1940s score, nevertheless shares with classical scores the straightforward functions of setting moods and commenting on action. 3. Telephone conversation with Kathy Nelson, president of Film Music at Universal Pictures/Universal Music, July 29, 2002. 4. It could be tempting to see Thelma’s Walkman by the pool as the song’s narrative source, but why then would we hear the song over the previous shots of Louise in the motel room and of Jimmy back home? The song also continues at high volume after Thelma casts o≠ her earphones and hastily joins Louise in the car. Perhaps Thelma’s Walkman plays something entirely other than what we hear. Music is quite frequently ambiguous with respect to the diegesis; it is not always clear where a piece of music emanates from, nor does it have to be. 5. Without mentioning the song, Scott has said that he was inspired to add this scene into the film when, shooting in Utah, he saw the incongruous sight of a black bicyclist with dreadlocks in a café. One suspects that the inspiration for the song followed soon afterward. 6. I’ve been around, I’ve seen some things, People movin’ faster than the speed of sound, faster than a speedin’ bullet. People livin’ like Superman, all day and all night. I won’t say it’s wrong or I won’t say it’s right. I’m pretty fast myself But I do have some advice to pass along right here in the words to this song. 7. Scott, Khouri, and Nelson ultimately decided this would be the case. But by then they were so attached to the song that they felt compelled to find another spot for it in the film. Phone conversation with Kathy Nelson, July 29, 2002. 8. In fact, the band playing (on the soundtrack) behind the real musician Charlie Sexton is from a group called Broken Homes. Broken Homes was hoping to have its music featured in this scene, but this ultimately did not come about. Scott gave its lead singer a bit part in the movie as a consolation; he is the man with whom Louise dances in the tavern. A behind-the-scenes equivalency between macho music and the fictional world’s masculine space is thus reinforced. 9. Since then, he has composed for comedies and dramas, among them The Lion King and Madagascar, but is especially noted for thrillers and action pictures, from Crimson Tide, Broken Arrow, and The Rock to Gladiator, Hannibal, Pearl Harbor, Black Hawk Down, The Ring and The Ring Two, The Last Samurai, and The Da Vinci Code. 10. In a thought-provoking essay, Barbara Ching notes that country music is used in some American independent films to signify the political and moral bankruptcy at the

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heart of contemporary America (e.g., Altman’s Nashville, 1974); it tends to appear in more mainstream films as a sincere expression of solid American values (for example, Coal Miner’s Daughter, 1981) (Ching 2001, 202–225). Thelma & Louise is not a film about country music performers as are the films discussed by Ching, and not all its music is “pure country” by any means. Nonetheless, in terms of the Hollywood dialectic of country music that Ching examines, it is striking that all the music in Thelma & Louise —from the recorded songs to Zimmer’s scoring—is deployed in thoroughly nonironic ways. Music is used to express the “inner truth” of what it accompanies, as does the great majority of film scoring. 11. My thanks go to Michael Pisani for this idea. 12. Although the “Thunderbird” tag refers to the heroines’ car, it would be frivolous to consider that the theme functions solely to denote the car.

Bibliography Ching, Barbara. “Sounding the American Heart: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Contemporary American Film.” In Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music, ed. Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Arthur Knight. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001, 202–225. Kassabian, Anahid. Hearing Film: Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film. New York: Routledge, 2001. Smith, Je≠. “Popular Songs and Comic Allusion in Contemporary Cinema.” In Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music, ed. Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Arthur Knight. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001, 407–430. Smith, Je≠. The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Wojcik, Pamela Robertson, and Arthur Knight, eds. Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001.

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4

I N T E R P L AY I N G I D E N T I T I E S

Acting and the Building Blocks of Character in Thelma & Louise

Susan Knobloch

Even in the hands of a director as aesthetically distinctive as Ridley Scott, acting is its own discourse, whose ideological e≠ects can be read from its physical grammar as placed into action in the smallest details of film texts. We can begin to garner that grammar’s generative rules from acting textbooks. Following such books to define acting as the players’ observable bodily and vocal gestures within a film’s frames, this essay will show that the actors in Thelma & Louise (1991) deploy physical signs of attention and interconnection to denote and connote their own specific meanings within Scott’s very tightly unified filmic system. By ordering their movements in the space of the frame, the actors create many tones, from comic to tragic, and they clarify facets of their characters that other filmic discourses, ranging from Callie Khouri’s script to the actors’ own star personas, may suggest but do not fill out. To examine Thelma & Louise’s screen performances is to consider its story and series of images at the level of their building blocks, opening up fundamental areas of evidence for any interpretative argument about the film to consider, most of all concerning the problems of gender that the filmmakers set themselves to examine. The characters Thelma and Louise are built on an exchange circuit of alluring fluidity and protective materiality. At times the acting gives visual and sonic form to this fluidity, as it helps to construct each character as multiple, open to others and changeable. At other times, the actors’ small physical choices work the same way dust does: to provide the heroines temporary pockets of solidarity with each other and protection from outsiders, whether male threats in the film or the prying camera eye.

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A Story of Men and Women, Liquid and Dust Modern actor training teaches an actor to build her own character through interplay with her acting partners. That interplay reaches the audience through the actors’ use of physical objects: of props and costumes and voices, and, on the screen, the spaces created by the position and movements of the cameras and microphones and by the image and sound editing. Thelma & Louise makes an especially intriguing example of how screen actors work together to define and enrich each one’s part, because its heroines’ story revolves around the borrowings and revisions each woman makes from and to the other, and from and to the men in their lives. The film’s theme that male violence and self-centeredness leave women little space to define themselves as happy, fully operational adults gains force, humor, and pathos, and its feminist politics echo and expand, in the acting’s discursive form. The acting makes the story’s ideas emotionally available to the audience by following a pattern that emphasizes and rewards connections between the heroines while painting their connections with men as just as alluring but less solid, slipperier, and less constructive of the women’s senses of selfhood, and safety, than their interactions with each other. Khouri’s script tells the story of housewife Thelma (Geena Davis) and waitress Louise (Susan Sarandon), who start on their way to a vacation cabin in Louise’s T-Bird, leaving behind Thelma’s impervious husband Darryl (Christopher McDonald) and Louise’s wa±ing boyfriend Jimmy (Michael Madsen). They stop at a bar, where a local named Harlan (Timothy

Two women in the frame. Frame capture.

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Carhart) dances with Thelma and then tries to rape her. Louise shoots him dead. The women take o≠ on the run. Though Jimmy brings them some money, a young man they pick up named J. D. (Brad Pitt) steals it after seducing Thelma. Alone again with Louise, Thelma robs a store, reenacting the method of armed robbery that J. D. described to her. The two women stay in touch with Slocumbe (Harvey Keitel), a cop who is tapping Darryl’s phone, but they resolve not to make a deal with him. Stopped by a police car, Thelma beats the state trooper (Jason Beghe) to the draw, and the women lock him in his trunk. Soon after they drive o≠, a black man on a bicycle (Noel L. Walcott III) happens by but leaves the trooper imprisoned. Meanwhile Thelma and Louise blow up the tanker of a trucker (Marco St. John) who has been making obscene gestures and suggestions on the road. When the women reach the Grand Canyon, Louise can no longer outdrive the cops. Rather than surrender, they agree to drive o≠ the canyon’s edge, though we never see them fall. Thelma & Louise’s plot is both explicitly concerned with, and implicitly structured around, characters formed by multiple bodies and voices. As a realist drama, Thelma & Louise presents characters within its fictional world as believable—rounded, singular, psychologically consistent—individuals, in the everyday sense of the word. On the underlying formal level, the movie presents each character as a composite individual, an agglomerate of multiple performers’ bodies and voices, about whose viability the film goes on to comment. Read this way, Thelma & Louise’s theme is the impossibly high price of such a definition of a multivoiced, multibodied sense of individuality for heterosexual women, in a system that encourages men to think of women only as objects, even if men are willing to play at being object-andshared-subject with women for a short time. Thus, heterosexual couples serve in Thelma & Louise not as the end result but as way stations through which the two heroines pass on their way to marking out their own definitions of self. The film’s strategies suggest that, because of gendered di≠erentials in social power, a communal logic of character formation is viable for the two lead characters only with each other, not with male partners. Feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz finds that, in twentieth-century Western philosophy and popular culture, “the female body has been constructed . . . as a leaking, uncontrollable, seeping liquid . . . liquidities that men seem to want to cast out of their own self-representations” (1994, 203). She hypothesizes that male-dominated thought casts women as others in Interplaying Identities

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relation to distinct, contained male selves, by representing female bodies as fluid, open, and overwhelming to both their own and men’s own boundaries. (See further Grosz’s chapter “Sexed Bodies,” 187–210.) In a sharp reversal of these constructs, Thelma & Louise represents males as the liquid forces that tempt the heroines to incorporate them, only to engulf and drown the females’ senses of self and control. In this film, images of fluidity, or liquid and reflective surfaces, are associated strongly with men (rain, hoses, pools, gasoline), while dust and sunlight refer to women. To mention several examples, Scott cuts to an anonymous man hosing down the sidewalk in front of the motel, as Thelma and Louise begin to face the damage done to them by Harlan. J. D. is first pictured drinking out of a hose. He comes to Thelma’s motel room door with rain shooting o≠ his cowboy hat. The cops who pursue the women do so in the rain back in Arkansas while the women run through the dry, sunny desert. One shot features dust both before and behind their T-Bird, as Scott has a motorcycle raise a cloud into which Louise drives when she leaves an intersection. When the women lead the obscene trucker o≠ the road, dust from the T-Bird’s wake surrounds his tanker truck—which bears, and is shiny like, liquid. Grosz’s summary (191– 192) of the questions at the heart of her study, and of her answers for them, also gets to the heart of the theme and approach of Thelma & Louise: if one takes seriously the problematic of sexual di≠erence, then as mysterious as Woman must be for men, so too must men be for women (and indeed Woman be for women, and Man for men). The task is to find a position encompassing enough for a sexually specific perspective to open itself up to the (reciprocal) otherness of the other sex(es). Sexual di≠erence entails a sexual ethics of the ongoing negotiations between beings whose di≠erences are left intact but with whom some kind of exchange is nonetheless possible.

Star Images as a Background to Performance Analysis Throughout my textual analysis of Thelma & Louise, I will use the names of the actors when describing the physical, observable movements of recorded bodies and voices. I will use the names of the fictional characters, on the other hand, to describe what the script, or the story situation, gives the actors to play. My analysis builds completely on the basis of what is evident on the screen: to call a given action “Sarandon’s” is not to imply that Susan Sarandon as a real person, a creative artist on the set, either did or did not intend or design the moment. It is to imply that the small details of the de94

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ployment of the body and voice given the name “Susan Sarandon”—and, truly, physically executed by the real woman no matter who thought them up—deserve attention. That I take this text-based approach here does not imply that real Hollywood actors do not have an active, self-aware voice in creating film meanings. For instance, Susan Sarandon told Charlie Rose on his eponymous PBS talk show that she suggested to Ridley Scott the moment when Louise stops the car and sits alone for a moment with the desert at night while Thelma sleeps. It is not an everyday part of contemporary Hollywood actors’ job descriptions to make up such large-scale story points. It is their job, however, to attend to the way their bodies and voices will be recorded: for instance, to ascertain or even request shot lengths or angles from the camera operator. I will propose reading the text of a film through the ideas of actor-training textbooks. In the real world, the conduits between textbooks and film texts are the human performers as creative artists at work on the set. That said, there are at least two other avenues open to film scholars interested in the practice and history of Hollywood performance beside the textual analysis this essay will employ: historical research into primary reports of performers’ on-set behavior and analysis of secondary reports about, and wider patterns apparent in, what actors do onscreen and o≠. The last approach was first used by Richard Dyer, whose landmark Stars in 1979 turned critics’ attention to film performers as star images: as the sum of all the texts presented to the public about them, from their roles and performances onscreen to their publicity materials, whether interviews with them or secondhand information about their “lives” (as presented for public consumption) and careers. We can use the case of Thelma & Louise to see how these “intertextual” star images, as Dyer terms them, can feed into a textual analysis of acting in five ways: (1) The “type” of character an actor has become associated with through past (and, in hindsight, subsequent) roles informs any role she assays, both in the general contours and in the small physical acting details. Hollywood casts stars usually with but occasionally against type, as Cathy Klaprat has shown in her 1985 study of Bette Davis. (2) The fictional genres and accompanying actorly “tones” with which an actor has become successful similarly inform any given role of hers—for instance, comedies or realist dramas. (3) Her publicity, especially in today’s “behind the scenes,” Hollywood-saturated TV landscape, reveals something Interplaying Identities

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of her training and study of acting (for example, where it took place, or that the performer was a self-study). Attention to such details in every actor’s publicity institutes in the public mind the notion that actors work with a grammar, or body of accepted ideas. (4) An actor’s publicity also emphasizes the bona fides of the “quality” of her acting by listing the awards she has won. (I feel that anyone who gets steady work as one of the some three hundred actors making a living in Hollywood at a given time is de facto a world-class performer. But the awards and critical praise may, for instance, establish a given actor as ripe for parts of power and authority by confirming that her peers or other judging bodies find her in accordance with contemporary standards of acting power.) (5) An actor’s political stances in interviews and other public speech inform the politics viewers may read into the parts she plays. The following sketches examine these five points in relation to the players of Thelma & Louise. Born in New Jersey, Sarandon went to college in Washington, D.C., at the Catholic University of America Drama School in the mid-1960s. As David Thomson notes (2002, 724–725), she worked as a film actor for some fifteen years before becoming a leading lady. Her first hit was the uniquely marketed science fiction parody and musical comedy of sexual manners, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). She plays a naïf whose sexuality awakens fairly happily amid aliens and monsters. French director Louis Malle’s art house hit Atlantic City (1980) features her as another woman finding her very physical romantic way, but this time her character is a mature woman whose ripeness attracts an older man. Sarandon’s star potential reflects in Malle’s casting her opposite Burt Lancaster, a tough but romantic Hollywood leading man since the 1940s. Sarandon followed this striking supporting role in the company of famous players with two more: as one (with David Bowie) of a vampire’s (Catherine Deneuve’s) paramours in the contemporary Gothic horror show The Hunger (1983, directed by Ridley Scott’s brother Tony), and as one (with Cher and Michelle Pfei≠er) of the devil’s (Jack Nicholson’s) in the dramatic comedy The Witches of Eastwick (1987). Bull Durham (1988) turns around her type and casts Sarandon as the lover who initiates others, in this case young men to the arcana of baseball as (well as) sex. Ron Shelton’s romantic comedy launched her as a star and introduced her to the (her publicity almost always notes) younger man with whom she has since shared her life, actor/director Tim Robbins. White Palace (1990) pulls art after star image by featuring James Spader (contem96

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Sarandon as Louise. Frame capture.

porary Hollywood master of the clean-cut yet kinky) as Sarandon’s younger lover. After Thelma & Louise, Sarandon turned to a string of films that deemphasize her sexuality in favor of her ability to project braininess, compassion, and strong will: Lorenzo’s Oil (1992, as a mother forced to become an amateur medical researcher), The Client (1994, as a lawyer), and Dead Man Walking (1995, as Sister Helen Prejean, the real-life nun who devotes her life to men on death row), for which she won a Best Actress Oscar. The Banger Sisters (2002) paired her with Goldie Hawn as former best friends and rock ’n’ roll groupies dealing with the fallout of their past fun. The persona built from these titles is that of a full-grown, desirable woman, who believes in sexual freedom when it comes both to herself (at any age, the idea of any kind of sensuality from celibacy to promiscuity is hers to choose) and to her partners (younger men, an older woman, or no one at all). She is also her own woman in the corridors of public power, and she relates to other women without undue jealousy and without always putting men first. If this persona is not clearly enough influenced by the feminism of the American 1960s through the 1980s, the public image of “Susan Sarandon, celebrity” is one of a far left activist, a well- and outspoken critic of immigration policy (her 1993 lambasting as an Oscar presenter of the U.S. government’s quarantine of Haitian AIDS patients at Guantanamo Bay) and, most recently, the 2003 American assault on Iraq (in protests against which New York newscasts showed her appearing). Sarandon’s co-star Geena Davis is perhaps the biggest American movie star who has openly acted on her belief in feminist ideals, o≠- and onscreen. Interplaying Identities

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A competitive archer, recently Davis has lent her name to a website called “Geena Takes Aim,” which gives information and support for preserving Title IX, a 1972 U.S. law that mandates equal funding for women’s and men’s sports at publicly funded American universities, and that some politicians are maneuvering to overturn in search of bigger profits and reinforced oldfashioned gender roles. Sadly, it seems that the independent adventurers that Davis played after Thelma & Louise led her to a career doldrums. She has had no starring big screen roles since she starred in two box o∞ce disappointments directed by her then-husband Renny Harlin: Cutthroat Island (1995, with Davis as a pirate chief ) and The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996, with her as a sweet schoolteacher who is really an amnesiac government gunslinger). Harlin made his name directing action hits with male leads, such as Die Hard 2 in 1990 and Cli≠hanger in 1995, but he has not directed any productions with big stars or big budgets since his work with his former wife. In the fall of 2005, Davis starred in the television drama Commander in Chief as the first female U.S. president. Popular and critical response were mixed: Davis won a Golden Globe award, but the number of viewers declined quickly from a strong start, and in May 2006 the series was pulled before the critical sweeps period, when networks traditionally woo advertisers. The Long Kiss Goodnight shows explicitly that the role of Thelma encouraged Davis to pursue later action heroine roles, especially at three points that reference Thelma & Louise directly. Davis’s Sam chides her male sidekick (Samuel L. Jackson) for ogling a woman from his car, shades of Thelma’s nemesis the obscene trucker that grow more pronounced at the film’s climax. Sam uses her pistol to take control of a tanker truck, on which the bad guys have rigged a bomb, locked her young daughter, and cut the brake line. She turns the truck into her own weapon, crashing it to a sliding stop on its side, right at the bad guys’ car. Letting the truck begin to crash, Sam says, “Suck my dick. All you bastards.” The first sentence is—and is read by Davis to sound exactly like—what Harlan says that immediately provokes Louise to shoot him. In The Long Kiss Goodnight, the line verbally parallels Sam’s actions with guns and the big truck: she seizes traditionally male tropes to play out her anger, fear, and confusion, channeling it into skill and daring and vengeance, in response to male violence against her. Sam’s confusion revolves around whether she can be both a loving mom and a resourceful, physical powerhouse. The film’s ending suggests she can, 98

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as she playfully flings a knife into a tree stump with assassin’s skill, smiling with her family in a field. Sam drives to that field on a golden-hued highway in a convertible, with a kerchief wrapped around her hair and sunglasses on: that is, with a nice nod to Sarandon, in the same outfit Louise wears at Thelma & Louise’s start, and in the publicity photo used in its poster and on its video box. Davis, a Massachusetts native, majored in drama at Boston University in the late 1970s. Her first role in a major film was in the backstage farce Tootsie (1982). She sharpened her expertise as a comedienne on TV with the sitcoms Bu≠alo Bill (1983–1984, acid and untraditional) and Sara (1985, a more conventional, single-girl-in-the-city star turn for her). She worked up a distinctive sci fi-action-comedy meld in The Fly (1986), Beetlejuice (1988), and Earth Girls Are Easy (1989). For her most quiet and realistic role yet, in The Accidental Tourist (1988), she won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar, using her smile more than her healthy-looking athleticism. (Her publicity often mentions that she is six feet tall, well over the Hollywood women’s norm of 5 feet 8 inches—which Sarandon approximates, according to the Internet Movie Database.) Thelma & Louise was the first film in which Davis had a leading role. Both Sarandon and Davis were nominated for the Best Actress Oscar for the film, though neither won. Davis’s only subsequent commercially successful feminist fable was Penny Marshall’s 1992 ensemble women’s baseball dramedy, A League of Their Own. She starred in two 1994 romantic comedies with underbaked scripts, Angie (about a single-by-choice new

Davis as Thelma. Frame capture.

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mother) and Speechless (a 1930s-esque story of bickering lovers in the workplace). Her only recent movie work has been as the human foster mother of animatronic mouse Stuart Little (1999 and 2002). Biographical sketch artist Thomson crassly attributes Geena Davis’s success to her “hot” physical qualities and her decline to the ephemerality of such sexualized appeal (210). He mentions nothing of her persona’s feminist overtones, her leading roles’ reliance on decisive action, and female flesh bared to show rippling strength as much as curvy sexuality. (In Harlin’s two movies with Davis, he films male bodies—for example, Samuel L. Jackson’s—just like hers, bared to show vulnerability and beauty as much as muscular power and gut-level determination.) I speculate that both Harlin’s and Davis’s careers have slowed since their feminist action films in some measure because of the films’ politics. Male action-film heroes of Davis’s era (Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Travolta) have headlined perceived flops without losing further chances at leading parts. Among Thelma & Louise’s men, New York theater veteran and Actors Studio member (Walker 2001, 243) Harvey Keitel made his name onscreen with gangster auteur Martin Scorsese (especially Mean Streets in 1973, and Taxi Driver in 1976). Keitel’s film persona is that of a working-class tough guy usually on the wrong side of the law, with much more use for and understanding of the men in his life than the women—even as questions eat away at him about how to define, defend, enjoy, and withstand his and others’ masculinity. Keitel’s work with Quentin Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs in 1992, Pulp Fiction in 1994) built on this image after Thelma & Louise. Ridley Scott’s casting of Keitel as Thelma and Louise’s last best shot at understanding and assistance from men and from the law thus flips backward Keitel’s more usual types. The violent aspects of his persona do appear during Keitel’s scene interrogating Brad Pitt; his use of a Stetson hat to beat Pitt (fairly) lightly about the head seems a funny intertextual reference to Thelma & Louise’s transfer of the tough guy from New York to the Southwest. Also, Sarandon had acted with Keitel in 1989 in the flaky murder mystery The January Man; the film was not a hit, but they apparently liked working together. After simmering in Hollywood for about a decade, Michael Madsen had just played an associate of the rock band chronicled in The Doors (1991) when Thelma & Louise featured Madsen himself as a brooding musician. Since 1991, Madsen has become an archetypal Hollywood tough guy, with 100

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Reservoir Dogs (as one bad jewel thief ) his best-known role, and the popular video game Grand Theft Auto III (2001, as the voice of a mother-hungry Mafioso) a burlesque on his screen type. The violence and insolence of his persona feeds into Thelma & Louise now, making Louise seem even tougher than she might otherwise; if this man is her come-when-called boyfriend, just how commanding a presence is she? The later elevation of Brad Pitt to superstardom also retroactively colors Thelma & Louise. Like Davis, Pitt did his apprenticeship on TV sitcoms (Growing Pains in 1985, Head of the Class in 1986). He never formally trained in acting (Thomson, 684). J. D. is a sort of fulcrum for all of Pitt’s subsequent star work: half all-American glamour boy, half violent, antisocial outlier. As befits a successful supporting actor, Christopher McDonald has a list of Hollywood credits much longer than Pitt’s, most of them comic relief. According to the Internet Movie Database, McDonald studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London and at the studio of famed acting teacher Stella Adler in New York. In sum, the intertexts of Thelma & Louise’s players show that its leading women were cast strongly with their types (feminist-influenced, self-reliant women), whereas its supporting men were cast sharply against aspects of theirs (Keitel as good guy, Madsen as lover) yet ambivalently with others (Pitt as amoral charmer, Keitel and Madsen as conflicted men of some violence). As we would expect in Hollywood’s typecast landscape, the women went on to try to develop the personas Thelma & Louise solidified around them, whereas the men mostly returned to the types they had established before—with the exception of Pitt, whose star image had not coalesced until this film. All the prominent cast members brought experience in both comedy and drama, and in both at once, and most brought some formal actor training. The awards committees and the popular press have found the more publicly well-known players to be highly proficient and accomplished; in the case of the least famous of them, Christopher McDonald, his admittance to hallowed halls of actor training in both Britain and the United States testifies that important film/TV/theater industry gateways acknowledged his skills. The actors’ intertexts help the film say certain things in shorthand. For instance, with reference to past roles, Sarandon’s previous work as a woman in love prompts audiences to accept the importance of Louise’s relationship with Jimmy even without much screen time for its build-up. Keitel’s oddInterplaying Identities

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ness as a southwestern lawman, on the other hand, encourages audiences familiar with his work to highlight a discomfort about his character, an uneasiness with which societal pressures surround the man trying to help female victims of male violence who leave their traditional places as damsels for a man to rescue. With reference to personal qualities and histories, Davis’s height and Sarandon’s link by birth to the streetwise, working-class image of North Jersey lend Thelma and Louise’s physical competence believability. (Because both women were raised in the Northeast, both leads’ mastery of the Arkansas accent seems noticeable and noteworthy.) The association of the leads with comedies and realist dramas rather than crime films helps Thelma & Louise present itself, even before the viewer walks into the theater, as a movie about violence treated with measures of realism and yet humor. A related e≠ect now follows the presence of Keitel and Madsen from Quentin Tarantino’s stable of actors, because seriocomic, hyperverbal screen violence is Tarantino’s trademark. What each actor’s looks and history suggest about her, about what her characters can do, how well, and with what attitude, thoroughly informs Thelma & Louise, just as the widely publicized excellence of the players suggests from the start that it is an exceptional story and film—though, of course, this type of inference is not always justified by Hollywood. The rest of this chapter examines how Thelma & Louise’s performances play out a pair of basic generative rules of contemporary Hollywood acting. The actors’ Oscars and good reviews reinforce the e≠ectiveness of the underlying ideas that I will identify, whereas the ideas illuminate some concrete details about how the performances come to meet contemporary standards of excellence in screen acting.

A Brief Look at Performance Analysis in Film Studies Film scholars James Naremore and Virginia Wright Wexman have moved from Dyer’s emphasis on star images to a focus on Hollywood acting as a distinct practice. In Acting in the Cinema, Naremore o≠ers a wide-ranging study of how, across history, actors have been trained to prepare for their roles, and to play them out, with their bodies and with other physical objects. He then elaborates the principles he discusses in case studies of star performances in classic American films from the teens through the eighties of the twentieth century. In Creating the Couple: Love, Marriage, and Hollywood Performance, Wexman writes that she is not seeking “general rules that apply to all film 102

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acting,” as she sees scholars like Dyer and Naremore attempting to do (1993, ix). She links di≠erent performance styles with di≠erent representations of marriage onscreen and with di≠erent branches of actor training theory. I want to look more closely than either of these scholars have at the screen-specific aspects of screen acting. To do so, I begin with the ideas of Constantin Stanislavsky, whose work as actor and director at the Moscow Art Theatre in the early twentieth century led him to distill and elaborate what he found to be the most e≠ective ideas about and within nineteenthcentury European stage acting. Naremore notes that Stanislavsky’s ideas entered American practice beginning in the 1930s, when Lee Strasberg and others at the Group Theatre in New York began using them in staging the Group’s trademark left-wing, realist dramas (1988, 198). In 1947, some Group Theatre veterans (including Stella Adler) formed the Actors Studio, and Strasberg was named its lead instructor. Strasberg credits Stanislavsky with “trying to understand what actually happens when an actor acts” (1955, 16). The “Method” Strasberg taught “related to Stanislavsky in roughly the same way that psychoanalysis is related to Freud,” which is to say its various adherents picked and chose among Stanislavsky’s principles, altering some and accepting others, and arguing among themselves over points that to outsiders seem obscure or overblown (Naremore 1988, 198). “The Method” became a popular catchphrase to describe certain self-consciously una≠ected and modern Hollywood performances, especially of the 1950s–1970s. It also encouraged a cult of personality around Strasberg himself. Like much of the pop culture purveyors of the period, from beatnik poets to rock ’n’ rollers, the stereotypical Method performer prided himself on the authenticity of his emotion, which he combed through his real life to obtain and release into his playing. Older styles of performance were supposedly built from the bodily and verbal postures that reveal emotion, the Method from the emotion that suggested the bodily and verbal postures. Less polemically, Naremore argues “[w]here film is concerned . . . an intuitive Method . . . was at work from the beginning.” Both Stanislavsky and early filmmakers “were part of a turn-of-thecentury attempt to make proscenium framing and blocking seem less artificial; both were interested in . . . intimate, emotionally charged acting” (198). Stanislavsky’s impact on the 1990s Hollywood mainstream that spawned Thelma & Louise makes itself plain in the current, long-running cable TV talk show Inside the Actors Studio, which focuses on interviews with wellInterplaying Identities

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known Hollywood actors in front of acting students. Inside the Actors Studio began in 1994 with a focus on those actors who worked at the Studio, such as Paul Newman and Estelle Parsons. It soon, however, featured a wide range of “name” actors and directors willing to talk with host James Lipton and the students in the audience. The television program’s website (www.newschool.edu/academic/drama/itas/) lists appearances by Keitel, who studied as a young actor at the Studio, and Sarandon and Davis, who did not. The fact that big stars flock to the show indicates the unquestionable prestige of the Actors Studio in contemporary Hollywood. Part of this prestige may reflect the fame and success of many Studio-associated actors (Marilyn Monroe, Steve McQueen, Al Pacino), but to compare ideas underlying the Studio’s teachings with performances of Hollywood stars, especially since the emergence of the Method into Hollywood in the 1950s, is to see that the TV show is attractive to stars because concepts taught at the Studio resonate with concepts that work on a Hollywood set today. There is much work left to be done in film studies delineating the history of actors’ training methods in Hollywood, which have varied both across and within periods of time. Nonetheless, we as viewers can understand more of how and why a film works by considering the Stanislavskian principles at the root of modern screen acting teachers’ thinking.

Screen Acting as a Specific Discourse Actors bring specific meanings to the lines they read and the business they are asked to perform “simply” by means of the specific choices they make (and manifest) about how to do what the script asks. Underneath their shadings of expression or tone, there are two key arenas within which film actors work: movement with and in the framelines and physical connection or what Stanislavsky calls “communion” with fellow players and other onscreen objects. Screen actors attend to the framelines of a shot etched in the space around them as if the framelines were objects or fellow players. To summarize, a stage actor is taught to communicate with the audience by moving her body (and her voice) in patterns that follow from a given story. A film actor does the same, but with regard for the limits set on her movements by the framelines of a given shot. For Stanislavsky, communion reveals itself in signs of attention, and itself reveals the consistency and coherence of the character’s psychology, or 104

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her “emotional through-line.” Stanislavsky suggests that the actor keep her attention focused at all times: attention may be focused on the self, present objects, or imaginary ones. When attention is focused on a given person or object, he calls the result communion with her or it. Communion is made perceptible for the spectator via small physical actions, perceptible to the eye or the ear, that connect actors to each other or to objects—by means of constant shifts in the foci of an actor’s attention, which Stanislavsky calls adjustments. Stanislavsky lists the following physical means for communion: “We use our eyes, facial expression, voice and intonation, our hands, fingers, our whole bodies, and in every case we make whatever corresponding adjustments are necessary” (213). Examples of actorly communion in service of character formation occur when Thelma and Louise first set out in Louise’s T-Bird. The work of the actors’ bodies not only translates the dialogue and the script’s emotional meanings to the physical plane (the job of any actor). It also employs the director’s framing selections to do so as only screen actors can. 1. The scene begins with a traveling long shot from behind Louise’s left profile as she drives, with Thelma in left profile behind her. Louise at the wheel rebukes Thelma, apparently for sitting in the passenger seat with her skirt raised up to bare her thighs. The viewer can only regard it as “apparently” because Sarandon’s arm blocks us from seeing Davis’s body fully. The dialogue tells us that Thelma is displaying her body while Louise in e≠ect protects Thelma’s body from our sight. This is a composite female subject, not the female object of a male gaze so widely found in pre-1980s Hollywood by feminist critics, and it could not exist visually without the small, Stanislavskian gestures of the actors in and aware of the camera’s frame. 2. We cut to an extremely close shot of Thelma’s face looking toward the camera as if it were the sideview mirror. She takes a cigarette from below the bottom frameline and begins to smoke, adjusting her sunglasses as though she is looking at herself. 3. We cut to a close shot of Louise, from Thelma’s point of view. Sarandon performs a screen actor’s typical narrative of motion, giving her framed and closely contained movements an Aristotelean beginning, middle, and end. She starts with a smile facing the camera. Second, she flicks her tongue out sardonically while turning her face to right profile, and inhales visibly with restrained amusement. Finally, she turns her face back to the camera, saying, “Thelma, what are you doing?”

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4. We cut to Thelma’s face again in a very close shot. Thelma says, “Smoking.” She never smokes elsewhere in the film, though Louise does all the time. Sarandon’s hand, also holding a cigarette, darts twice across the frame to briefly obscure Davis’s face—and to link Thelma to Louise, since our vision of Thelma’s face is thus literally formed by both actresses’ bodies at once. Then Thelma says, “Hey. I’m Louise.” 5. We cut to Louise again in close shot from Thelma’s point of view. Sarandon’s hand gestures with her own cigarette now recall Davis’s. Louise embodies the image of Thelma that we never see in the sideview mirror.

“I’m Louise” sequence, shot 1. Frame capture.

“I’m Louise” sequence, shot 2. Frame capture.

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“I’m Louise” sequence, shot 3. Frame capture.

“I’m Louise” sequence, shot 4. Frame capture.

“I’m Louise” sequence, shot 5. Frame capture.

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“I’m Louise” sequence, shot 6. Frame capture.

It seems artless and natural that a driver’s hand should bisect a passenger’s face in the front seat of a car, but, because Davis was not working in the large space of the front seat but only in the cubic space cut out of that front seat by the camera’s very tight framing of her, Sarandon’s entrance into that space is both notable for the critic and demonstrative of the e≠ort put in by the actors. In a contrasting example, Naremore (74) mentions that Rod Steiger claimed he would never forgive Marlon Brando for refusing to sit o≠ camera near Steiger and interact with him while Steiger was in the frame reading his lines, leaving the job of cueing Steiger to a nonactor. Most fundamentally, an actor makes meaning by physical actions, however small, such as Davis’s and Sarandon’s hand gestures. Stanislavky distinguished himself from previous acting theorists by emphasizing not preordained, rigid gestures and postures but highly fluid, varied, quickly changing gestures and sounds, often of a very “ordinary” nature and scale. Stanislavky tells actors, “Arrive gradually and logically [at a moment of high drama] by carrying out correctly your external sequence of physical actions . . . [D]o not think about your emotions at all. Think about what you have to do” (1939, 142). Stage director Robert Lewis, another of Stanislavky’s American heirs, commented in a series of lectures published in 1958: “This continuous immersion in the most emotional, violent, and exciting scenes makes picking up a glass and going to the sink to get a drink a big bore and, somehow, not acting. Yet a part is really composed of a whole series of that kind of thing” (78).

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Acting Connections: Two Women Materializing Each Other The larger dramatic power of the small moments with Thelma and her Louise-like cigarette evolves across the film from the sequence’s formal demonstration that Louise is able to both share a subject place with her friend and be her friend’s object, comfortably, the two together forming each one’s identity for each one’s enjoyment. They each, as we literally view them, continue to be composed of both of their bodies. Thelma & Louise marks its heroines as emphatically material, physical beings in the blocking (or how the actors fit into the space of the frame) and framing (how the frame is defined around them) decisions. Anonymous bodies and other objects often flit through the foreground before both Thelma and Louise. At moments of tension, Sarandon, driving the car, holds objects—mostly signs of the cinematic tough guy, outlaw, or juvenile delinquent, like cigarettes or liquor bottles—between portions of her face and the camera. At one point both actresses load pistols in front of their faces as they ride in the car, Davis driving, neither looking at the guns. Thelma and Louise, in their thirties and forties, read as juvenile delinquent types in three ways, beyond their often irreverent, gleeful use of the socially ( just) sanctioned but dangerous alcohol bottles, cigarettes, and guns. Thelma’s dialogue asserts directly that Darryl acts more like her controlling father than her companionable husband. Thelma forgets Darryl for “J. D.,” whose initials stand for “juvenile delinquent” and whose name reflects his own twenty-something but still-adolescent, slacker-criminal status. Finally, Thelma and Louise’s rebellion against male authority (as much as against male criminality), and their attempts to get the attention and understanding of the powers that be, seem adolescent in quality. The film suggests that women, biologically adult, can still be rendered socially juvenile well into their forties and that this state has its pleasures as well as its strictures. Louise refers to the adolescent haze when telling Thelma that Thelma now, finally, must stop dithering her way through life, “always pleading insanity or some such.” The film glories in Thelma’s switch from crazy-silly to crazy-violent, as she stops pleading to anyone—but concludes that the only way out of all craziness is death. Contemporary (now actually post– Thelma & Louise) self-help books for menopausal women also portray womanhood in the “perimenopausal” range between thirty-five and fifty-five as a kind of adolescence, with physical and emotional upheavals and a Interplaying Identities

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growing awareness of mortality, but also with new opportunities for sexual and social freedom (James and Eichenwald 2003, 27). Instead of or along with an inanimate object—signifying juvenile delinquency or not—one actor’s body often stands between another actor and the camera over the course of Thelma & Louise. In such moments, the story tells us that one heroine is not, for instance, trying to stand in the other’s way or cross out the other’s wishes—to provide some possible translations of the physical postures into verbal clichés. Even when the two characters are in conflict with each other, the placement of one actor’s body between the other’s and the camera coincides with many scenes’ payo≠ moments of moving and distinctive solidarity and mutuality between the fictional women. Sarandon’s arm extends across the frame in front of Davis when Thelma breaks down and cries, with Davis’s hair also drifting across her mouth, in their motel room after the murder. Much later, when Thelma takes command of their team—when they commandeer the car from the cop—it is Davis’s outstretched, bare arms, with the gun in her hands, which bisect the frame in Sarandon’s foreground. Most strikingly of all, when Louise refuses to tell Thelma what happened to her in Texas—a story point that the film refuses ever explicitly to fill in—Sarandon’s hair, in the front of the frame, blows across Davis’s eyes in the background, while Thelma reassures her friend that she does not have to tell her about her past trauma. The script keeps Louise’s private information from the audience, just as Sarandon’s hair keeps Davis’s eyes from the camera. Davis’s eyes stand in for the audience’s curiosity, our metaphorical prying gaze, that the movie softly blocks the same way Sarandon’s hair blocks the camera’s view of Davis’s eyes. Davis’s body thus symbolizes Louise’s desire for privacy, and Sarandon’s body symbolizes Thelma’s willingness to turn a blind eye to Louise’s too-tender memories. Their mutual screen acting here presents a multiple female film character, with a body image made of two (actors’) bodies, comprising a mutual circuit of exchange and guardianship between the two characters, just a bit outside the audience’s reach. It seems a pointedly feminist moment, especially in light of Kaja Silverman’s argument that midtwentieth-century Hollywood films often feature male authority figures forcing female characters to speak their inner truths for the audience (1988, 59). In Thelma & Louise, the interplay of female and male identities is still far more dangerous than that of female and female, for characters of both sexes, but in new ways. 110

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Acting Deflections: The Law, Gender, and Race The actors’ stage business, in combination with the dialogue, makes physical the feeling that Louise wants to share her inner self with Thelma but not with Slocumbe. We see a medium shot of Louise talking to the policeman on a pay phone. Thelma walks into Louise’s background, sipping a cup of co≠ee. Louise says into the phone that she will tell Slocumbe about her escapades “over co≠ee sometime”—as Louise takes the cup from Thelma, smirks at her, and drinks from the cup herself. The moment’s dismissal of a sharing between Louise and Slocumbe—only a pretended sympathy is constructed around the co≠ee—asserts in its small physical detail that the relationship between Louise and Thelma is more present, and superior. In a twist on this theme of defying legal authority as a means of asserting moral community, the film underlines the “coolness” of its heroines through their long-distance solidarity with its only prominent black figure. Alone and out of the blue, he appears for a moment, a bicyclist riding the empty desert highway, wearing dreadlocks, smoking, and playing Johnny Nash’s 1972 pop reggae hit “I Can See Clearly Now” on a Walkman we see strapped to his arm. Because the dreadlocks and the reggae suggest Rastafarianism, we are prodded to think he is smoking marijuana. Actor Noel L. Walcott III pu≠s with o≠hand exaggeration as the biker exhales smoke into the air holes Thelma has left for the trooper imprisoned in his trunk, “blowing o≠ ” the trooper’s male, white power. I have contended that dust and smoke connect Thelma & Louise’s characters in a positive way with their embodied natures—a bodiliness (as opposed to a mindedness) that has long been associated negatively with not only women of all colors, but with black people of all genders (Grosz 1994, 22). Thus, the film’s evocation of race connects to its central concerns, even as it facilely sets up the person whose skin color is in the minority in the story-world as an overshadowed double for ones in the majority. The film uses the biker to indicate, lament, and ham-fistedly avenge the social marginalization of a person of color while the film itself simultaneously marginalizes, stereotypes, and liberally borrows notions about an outsider’s hipness from, his image. Nevertheless, Walcott’s pu∞ng got a big laugh of approval from diverse audiences each of the four times I saw Thelma & Louise in a theater. The biker’s comic touch on a serious thematic point for the film (post-1960s American social revolutions’ empowering of previously repressed groups Interplaying Identities

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and behaviors) is a bit of a star turn for the actor. The tone he strikes aligns Walcott formally with Sarandon and Davis, and to a lesser extent with Brad Pitt, Michael Madsen, and Harvey Keitel, all of whom play characters who find humor in serious situations. It separates Walcott from most of Thelma & Louise’s other supporting, white, male actors, who seek laughs at their characters rather than with them.

Voicing Inflections: Women, Men, Laughter, and Violence The script often has Thelma and Louise make jokes, however bitter. For instance, Davis plays Thelma’s sarcasm by sharply changing her typical intonations, dropping to a deadpan face and voice. The longest speech she makes in this tone comes when Thelma tells Louise her wished-for version of what Darryl says the first time his wife calls him after the killing, that he loves her and only wants her to be safe—the opposite of his real indi≠erence. Davis’s work with Brad Pitt reads a lighter brand of humor out of the script when J. D. comes out with a too-perfect gallantry (“I may be an outlaw, but you’re stealing my heart!”). Davis and Pitt murmur and laugh in reaction to the line (“ain’t he smooth?”), showing J. D.’s self-awareness and self-mockery to be as attractive to Thelma as his corny chivalry. The leads play humorously even lines that the script does not obviously mean to be funny, to energize the film with released tension. For instance, when Louise tells Thelma that J. D. cannot join them, Sarandon holds a stick of red licorice in her teeth. When Thelma persists, Sarandon wags the licorice up and down in her mouth as Louise says, with exasperated warning, “Thelma.” The licorice seems a spoofing phallic image: simultaneously ingested and wielded by a woman—just as J. D. is appealing but forbidden, and eventually loved and imitated by Thelma. Sarandon’s prop, alone in the film, suggests that at some level Louise finds the idea of J. D.’s company sweet just as Thelma does, even though Louise initially cuts o≠ his chances to accompany them. Of course, even for those without phallic imagery in mind, Sarandon’s licorice is funny, because it is a break with accepted manners, both in polite company and in Hollywood performance, for one to speak with her mouth full. Amid its fear and grief, Thelma & Louise also asks its actors to play moments that, to an even higher degree than in the last example, are humorous to the audience far more than to the characters. This is a very tricky tone for an actor to switch gears and display, because there is the risk of 112

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archness, of losing the character’s coherence and believability to the joke. One of the leads’ moments in this respect come when Louise scolds Thelma after finding out Thelma told J. D. that the women’s goal is Mexico. In a lengthy tracking shot of the two stars walking together, Louise’s heavy profanity is both passionately sincere and humorously overblown, because her demonstrated deep friendship with Thelma obviates her criticisms. Louise is blowing o≠ steam, and we know it and can laugh at it; the script invites us to laugh at it by means of coyly punning language (“one of the things we had goin’ for us is gone!”) that the script seems conscious of but Louise does not. Thelma cannot laugh at Louise’s rage, but she cannot take it as implacably serious, either, or the film will become sadder and scarier than it wants to be. Here as elsewhere, Davis and Sarandon use interwoven vocal volumes, pitches, and paces to show that Thelma and Louise are listening and responding to each other. Thus, the acting gives the comedy a place to play without unmooring the characters’ deeper truths; we feel safe to laugh, free of the fear that our heroines’ emotional connection is disintegrating. Underneath Louise’s venting, Davis shows Thelma trying to placate Louise by speaking more softly than, and underlapping, Sarandon’s speech; replicating a raise in pitch at the end of lines that Sarandon repeatedly uses; and speaking at a faster tempo than Sarandon at first uses. This last gives Sarandon the chance, in return, to replicate (and release the “nervousness” in) Davis’s vocal pattern by speeding up her own speech. The actors’ vocal interweaving then helps the scene reach its dramatic payo≠ as Sarandon—sitting in the car after Louise’s screaming has brought Thelma to suppress tears—slows down her speech, lowers her volume, and drops from a fullbodied to a hoarse (tired) timbre. Her anger and worry spent, Louise lectures Thelma with a funny line that might sound too artificial and cute if the actors’ voices had not created a strong realistic pattern for it to play into: ”We’re fugitives now. Right? Let’s start behaving like that.” (A woman does not usually hector someone to “behave” in an extralegal fashion. And fugitives do not “behave” at all!) ”You’re right,” says Davis with a deeper pitch and fuller timbre than she has used previously in the scene, speaking much more loudly (and firmly) than Sarandon does at this point. The audience is prompted to smile not only at the script’s language, but also because the actors’ voices prove the women’s emotions, and their minds, resolved. On the other hand, Christopher McDonald’s Darryl refuses to respond to Interplaying Identities

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Davis’s attempts to defuse his annoyance. Although the script makes it clear that other characters regard Darryl as a moron, McDonald finds a meaty subtext to play: Darryl feels he is the most important being in the world, and anyone’s attempts to divert his attention from himself make him justifiably enraged. McDonald employs subtle emphases that make Darryl’s overvaluation of self and insensitivity to others funny in their single-mindedness. McDonald’s artfully warped attention to the other actors creates a Stanislavkian communion with them, while embodying Darryl’s alienation from their characters. Darryl’s speech is limited in vocabulary and relentlessly profane, and his behavior is devious and unresponsive. As acted, Darryl seems dumb because he is limited in vocal variety, loud, self-absorbed, and physically clumsy. All the actors drift in and out of a Southern U.S. accent: a lilt, with elongated vowels and dropped consonants. McDonald’s accent is one of the most pronounced in that he only rarely changes his vocal rhythm; the only pauses he makes are large and overdone. Darryl repeatedly uses clichéd phrases with the same volume level and intonation each time: “GodDAMN it” and “well-then.” Moreover, the acting-in-the-frame makes Darryl seem loud from his first entrance. Davis walks to the rear of the frame and calls to Darryl, her tones soft until she is at the back of the frame where her yelling to him, recorded to sound “naturally” far away from the camera and us, does not sound loud to the audience. McDonald enters walking toward the front of the frame, yelling very near the camera, “GodDAMN it, Thelma!” He thus sounds loud(er) to the audience. Conversely, Sarandon and Davis are always at the same volume level. Even when Louise is chastising Thelma for bringing too much stu≠ when they leave Thelma’s garage, Sarandon yells the jibe from the rear of the frame to Davis at the front. Therefore, Louise’s mild chastisement of Thelma is “naturally” recorded to sound to the audience at about the same volume as Thelma’s voice in the scene, far softer, and friendlier and funnier, than Darryl’s mean shouting. McDonald next introduces Darryl’s self-dramatizing, self-important side by using too much of a pause in his speech: “Don’t. (pause) Holler like that.” He and Davis together use props to show that Darryl basks in his wife’s attention but does not wish to return it. She reaches to fasten one of his several bracelets and he allows it, but he refuses the cup of co≠ee she pours for 114

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him while he primps his hair in a mirror o≠-screen. He rattles a huge ring of keys at his waist to punctuate the peacocky line: “Well-then. It’s a good thing you’re not regional manager. And I am.” His arrogance is made worse because the dialogue intimates that Darryl cheats on Thelma and that she knows it: she says in a deadpan tone that it is funny people like to buy carpet late every Friday night. The script also gives Darryl pratfalls, a brand of humor used by no other actor in the film. Darryl leaves Thelma and trips on some equipment left near his car by men working in his yard. Scott uses a long shot of long duration to give us McDonald’s physical comedy unedited. Later, when Slocumbe tells Darryl about the T-Bird’s presence at the crime scene, Slocumbe laughs that Darryl has his foot in his pizza on the floor, a pratfall that we do not see until after Slocumbe mentions it. With Slocumbe, McDonald again uses pauses in speech, and physical movements, that are held longer than the other actors in the film hold theirs, to make Darryl seem a self-dramatizing fool—at whom Slocumbe’s laughter seems to reinforce the audience’s. Told his wife may be a killer, McDonald, in the rear of the frame facing the camera with Keitel in the foreground facing him, looks to his left and leans toward Keitel to say, chokingly, “What?” He steps back and to his right, visors his eyes with hands and holds the pose for a moment, holds his hands in the air, palms out, and again says, “What?” a little louder but just as throatily. We cut to Slocumbe chuckling as McDonald from o≠-screen repeats, “What?” McDonald fearlessly plays Darryl’s denseness as Thelma must see it. That Slocumbe sees it too marks his potential identification with the women and their interplaying style of identify formation from which Darryl immures himself.

Sound and Story: Structures around the Acting Factors outside the film performer’s ken such as the director’s choices of camera placement and movement, and of shot interconnection, delimit the spaces within which screen actors work. Yet their presence—far from exceeding and subordinating or even eliding the expressive power of performance—invites actors to apply the principles of their craft within tight formal confines that call them to a dance with the direction. Because movies are works of sound as well as image, this dance also goes on between the actors’ bodies and voices and the sound e≠ects and—especially in films scored with rock-era recordings—music. Interplaying Identities

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For instance, the acting builds a bond of literally heated similarity between Louise and her boyfriend, Jimmy. Jimmy is the film’s biggest male role not associated predominantly with water. When we first meet Jimmy, actor Michael Madsen blows the smoke from his cigarette all over his face, blocking himself from the camera. This is a trope, as we will see later, associated otherwise with Louise. Outside of the acting, when Jimmy and Louise kiss goodbye forever in a motel diner, a waitress remarks that she thought she’d have “to put out a fire.” The record that plays, very softly, after Jimmy leaves Louise alone, is “Drawn to the Fire” by country singer Pam Tillis. Thus, Jimmy associates with fire and “true” heterosexual love. Throughout, songs appear on the soundtrack in the voices of professional singers, usually in the form of recordings on the heroines’ radio. Metaphorically, the songs are one more way that the film presents Thelma and Louise’s voices. The lyrics typically apply to each heroine’s situation, as if the singer’s voice belongs to them both. The women thus parallel and reinforce each other in their address to male objects of desire and fear. Further, even when a song begins by expressing one heroine’s feelings about a man (and his about her), its meaning is transformed over the course of its interplay with the film’s image and sound editing schemes. By the end of a scored sequence, Louise and Thelma metaphorically sing to each other as much as with each other. The record composed to be the film’s end credits number, “(You’re A) Part of Me, (I’m A) Part of You,” by rock star Glenn Frey, rises on the soundtrack as we see Thelma at the pool in the motel, but we hear Louise’s voice on the phone with Jimmy. The song goes on softly as we watch Louise ask Jimmy to bring her money. The song’s lyrics seem to be, like the dialogue and the opening image, from Louise’s point of view, representing her feelings toward Jimmy, and his toward her. The song is mixed into the soundtrack, however, and the story’s space so as to connect Thelma and Louise as much as Jimmy and Louise, if not more. The music’s volume goes up dramatically when we cut to a closer shot of Thelma, wearing headphones, sitting by the pool. “I can feel it when I hear that lonesome highway,” Frey sings—while Sarandon yells from the car in the background of the frame, her voice overwhelmed by and yet fitting into the noise of the loud record, “Thelma!” It seems that the music momentarily separates Thelma from Louise, in a realistic sense, blocking Thelma from hearing Louise’s call to begin running again, but the sound 116

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editing immediately takes the song out of Thelma’s ears specifically: even after she drops the headphones from her ears, the song remains louder than the rest of the story-world’s sound. Scott thus places the song physically and conceptually with and between both heroines (while Frey sings of the “crossroads” they drive out to face), as it was conceptually between Louise and Jimmy. Sarandon’s yelling, while realistic, is also formally meaningful because it both mixes Louise into Frey’s sound and sentiments, and—in its heightened emotion—places Louise’s heightened and pressing bond to Thelma over her bond to Jimmy at this time. Within the narrative proper, as well as the small moments of interplay between actors and between actors and the edited soundtrack, Thelma and Louise are built as circuits of exchange among di≠erent people’s voices and bodies. It seems that it is relatively safe for the women to take markers of identity from men only when they are also standing as doubles for each other in such a way as to stand together with a thus redoubled power over the man involved. For example, Thelma successfully takes a male voice for the suddenly exhausted and defeated Louise’s benefit, when Thelma takes command of their escape plans by borrowing J. D.’s “voice”—his words and style of delivery as a “gentleman robber”—as she robs the convenience store. Later, Thelma swipes a baseball cap from the trucker whose rig they destroy. In between these two acts by Thelma, Louise trades her jewelry— signs of her preoutlaw femininity—to an old man for his hat. She tells Thelma, however, that she “stole” the hat. The dialogue thereby asserts the woman’s right to keep some things back from her friend, to engage in the sharing, doubling, and exchanging of selves with her only as much as she desires. And it furthers the idea that Thelma and Louise are defining themselves by trading with others, at the deepest root (and most safely and satisfyingly) with each other. It is Thelma, after all, who “stole” when she became an armed robber; by asserting that she too steals the hat, Louise parallels herself with her friend even as she holds back some of her “inner truth” from Thelma by playfully lying to her. The story line threatens violent trouble against (or requires it on the part of ) the heroines when the interplay of identities is entered into by overly demanding male figures. When Slocumbe tells Louise he feels almost as though he knows her from talking to her on the phone, she guards against his police negotiator’s tactics: “Well, you don’t.” The state trooper whom the women overpower “gives” them (under Thelma’s gunpoint) items that shore Interplaying Identities

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up his own identity, after attempting to control and curtail such items of theirs. He tells Louise to take o≠ her sunglasses when she is in his power, but after capturing him the women take his ammunition belt and beer as well as his gun and sunglasses—for which Louise trades her own pair. The trade makes explicit the cross-gender identity building and power usurping also at work in the women’s uses of the old man’s and the trucker’s hats. The borrowing and revisioning at play between women and men within the story-world, and the importance of performance at the heart of it, are emphasized visually when Scott shows us Thelma’s first holdup, not as Thelma “organically” robs the store, but as her dumbfounded husband and the cops watch a surveillance tape of it later.

Conclusion: The Film’s Meanings of Bodies The most destructive and least funny man with whom the script mixes up the heroines is the would-be rapist Harlan. (“It’s not funny, Thelma,” Louise says after Thelma suddenly giggles shrilly, remembering Harlan’s surprised look when he was shot.) In a shot of herself alone, when the women first meet him at the roadside bar, Sarandon blows smoke o≠-screen, “at” Harlan. Subsequently, actor Timothy Carhart flinches from the blown smoke in his own individual medium shot. Smoke-blowing is a common screen acting trope, which I find generally introduces a heightened “bodiliness” to a film character. The character, through the exhaled smoke, is shown by the actor both to be part of a physical world (because the smoke can obscure her material form) and have an interiority that is itself physical (as she produces the smoke from within her own body). Sarandon’s use of smoke here is also an interesting bodily pun, which shows Louise seizing the subject place from Harlan—if he is figuratively blowing smoke at Thelma as he flirts, Louise is literally doing so at him. By flirting with Harlan, Thelma is employing him as she employs the cigarettes and the alcohol—as a sign to herself of her own freedom from her everyday life, of her new self on vacation from her overbearing husband, and of her freshly minted adaptation of Louise’s style to herself. The problem with Thelma’s attempts at incorporating Harlan into her play of self and other is that he refuses to see women as fellow subjects, and he refuses to play his part as their object of desire within the limits that they want to set. This is never the case between Thelma and Louise themselves. That

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Louise takes herself as the one who should properly be sharing both subject and object place with Thelma comes out in the roadside bar sequence not only in the images and dialogue, but also in the actors’ use of the story’s music. For example, as the bar band leader (Charlie Sexton) sings a wordless, building “whoo” during “Tennessee Plates,” both Davis and Sarandon, in a medium shot favoring Sarandon over Davis’s right shoulder, toss their heads back and swallow shot glasses of alcohol. After drinking, Sarandon hollers what sounds like “yuck, wah-hoo,” and Davis laughs at her descent into merriment. Thus, the two actresses parallel each other in movement while translating the onscreen musical performer’s sound into their own bodily and verbal gestures. The image editing shows Harlan and Thelma nodding to each other before Thelma says, “Let’s dance.” Louise says, “All right,” happily, and rises to follow Thelma to the dance floor, when Thelma runs to Harlan in the far background. Sarandon, her back to the camera, stops dead; then she turns around to face the table and the camera, lightly hops, and flops her arms in embarrassment. (“I didn’t know what to do,” sings the bar band leader.) Louise obviously has understood her friend to be asking to dance with Louise herself—and the film asks us to understand that Thelma is leaving a safe, mutual play of identities for something else, something worse. Thelma & Louise features characters who develop their identities by incorporating others into themselves. Khouri, Scott, Sarandon, and Davis build Thelma and Louise as material and yet fluid and open to interchange: as literally composed of two or more voices and bodies, whether generated from more than one actor or from a singer and one actor or more, even while the movie is (also) a realist drama. The protagonists borrow, share, and trade markers of self and identity, such as clothing, songs, or props, especially of the tough guy kind signifying the juvenile delinquent–type rebellion of smoking and drinking and rock ’n’ roll. The film employs common Hollywood visual tropes of fluidity and dust or smoke, which represent—respectively—openness and the threat (or promise) of engulfing, liberating obliteration; and materiality and the threat (or promise) of obscuring, protective blockage. Not so common in modern Western culture is the film’s association of liquidity with masculinity and solidity with femininity, a sign that this story of love and death captures a heterosexual female perspective on heterosexual men. Each fictional woman is able to maintain her own in-

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dividual materiality and di≠erences from others, even while she engages in a fluid give and take of identity; the men’s flaw (fatal to both sexes) is their inability to do so. The acting especially asks its audience to laugh at the more fruitless of male partners and to laugh with the women as they try to connect with more responsive and giving men and with each other. But the film also asks us to feel the horrible pain and grief caused by self-centered men who see women as objects with which to prove their own power. The problem for each heroine is how to establish a workable interflow of identity among self, friends, and lovers while protecting “one”-self against inappropriate, unreliable, or hurtful partners. The formation of a composite female identity preoccupies the heroines, ultimately leaving men as outside threats to, or as ultimately nonproductive alternates within, an interplaying of identity created between women. A film character built on such marked mutuality is a form whose ideological meaning is not inherent in itself but is instead open to the inflection of the film system wielding it. This particular story represents its characters as primally in need of other people’s voices and bodies to incorporate into their own senses of self, of satisfied desire, and of viability in their fictional worlds. Because this story certainly does not end with perfect and convincing happiness, we could say that its sad ending makes its audience pay for enjoying, throughout the body of the film, an idea about what it is to be a human individual that does not match Hollywood’s previous terms. The trouble that the film indicates, however, is the failure of the interplay in social context to create a livable identity for Thelma and Louise rather than the method of interplaying in itself. Though Thelma & Louise uses interplay between the actors in the frame and the characters in the script to talk about trouble in contemporary heterosexuality, it does not indicate that there is a necessary contradiction between women’s happiness and an interplay of identities with men. In fact, Thelma & Louise suggests that romantic couples may be able to function without violence and despair only in these feminist-influenced times if both lovers are figured as fair partners, mutually defining and materially supporting each other’s sense of self. Without the tiny nuances of the screen performances, the film by far would not be able to present its themes as completely or compellingly. Sarandon, Davis, and their supporting men all embody the Stanislavskian principle of strictly physical, bodily, and vocal details used to build for the 120

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audience the characters’ fluctuating attention and ultimately emotion. The actors also make highly sophisticated use of the technical aspects of their medium, working with, as well as within, the film/microphone frame, to denote the characters’ interconnections and to connote those interchanges’ varying depths and strengths and their positive and negative social and moral consequences. By having looked at exactly how the actors do the work that won the stars Oscar nominations and the film as a whole such a vivid cultural response, perhaps we can feel even more vividly the importance of the questions raised by those fictional consequences in our world outside the film.

Bibliography Dyer, Richard. Stars. London: BFI, 1979. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. James, Marcia L., and Eichenwald, Theresa. Menopause for Dummies. New York: Wiley, 2003. Klaprat, Cathy. “The Star as Market Strategy: Bette Davis in Another Light.” In The American Film Industry, ed. Tino Balio. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985, 351–376. Lewis, Robert. Method—Or Madness? The Highly Acclaimed Lectures on the Method School of Acting. New York: Samuel French, 1958. Naremore, James. Acting in the Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Silverman, Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Stanislavky, Constantin. An Actor Prepares. Trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood. New York: Theatre Arts, 1939. Strasberg, Lee. “Introduction.” In Acting: A Handbook of the Stanislavski Method, ed. Toby Cole. New York: Crown, 1955. Thomson, David. New Biographical Dictionary of Film. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. Walker, John, ed. Halliwell’s Who’s Who in the Movies: The 14th Edition of the BestSelling Encyclopedia of Film Actors, Directors, Producers, and Writers. New York: Harper Resource, 2001. Wexman, Virginia Wright. Creating the Couple: Love, Marriage, and Hollywood Performance. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993.

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5

A N O U T L AW- CO U P L E - O N -T H E - R U N FILM FOR THE 1990S

J. David Slocum

The locus classicus of the “outlaw-couple-on-the-run” film is Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967). Important earlier examples exist, of course— You Only Live Once (Fritz Lang, 1937), Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1949), and They Live By Night (Nicholas Ray, 1951)—but it is Penn’s film that most incisively draws together the three defining elements of outlawry, coupling, and being on the run. In part, this is an outgrowth of the 1960s’ crisis of public authority, self-conscious cinematic storytelling and cultural mythmaking, and destabilization of prevailing regimes of vision and movement. Bonnie and Clyde illustrates the potentially potent convergence of these elements and contexts in engaging audiences in cultural commentary and critique; revisiting Penn’s film and the media event that surrounded it also underscores the importance of specific historical and social contexts to fuller understanding of the meanings being negotiated. Subsequent productions like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969) and Badlands (Terence Malick, 1973) confirmed the contemporary symbolism of outlaw couples on the lam and their links to the conflictual social and political situations outside theaters in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Kinder 1974, 2–10). In part, the films’ reliance on movement and flight foregrounds and denaturalizes the familiar, patterned, regulated values and anxieties of dominant society. Approached more broadly, the “outlawcouple-on-the-run” film so conceived can be seen to instantiate contemporary negotiations of cultural crises and anxieties—and, in cases of films such as Bonnie and Clyde and, later, Thelma & Louise that provoke media events, to become central to public discourse about those crises and anxieties (Frasca 2001; Laderman 2002). Such media events, it should be stressed, also reveal the contemporary negotiation in public discourse over 122

the role, function, and relevance of mainstream cinema as a social institution for conveying and contesting cultural values. My interest is not in drafting a systematic argument for the historical validity or critical viability of this genre or subgenre (or for the utility or coherence of such analytical categories generally). Although the films illuminate ongoing concerns in American culture and their evolving cinematic inscriptions, the grouping itself is a hybrid that draws together characteristic codes and conventions from other better-formulated genres. Thelma & Louise has been labeled a buddy movie, a rape-revenge drama, a screwball comedy, a (lesbian) romance, an outlaw picture, a road film, and even science fiction (Sturken 2000, 22–32). Scott’s production retains elements of all of these (which themselves, of course, overlap) and reworks and updates them. The value in raising the matter of genres or subgenres is thus not to fix (or fetishize) given characteristics or groupings, but to further an understanding of how cinematic and cultural elements were renegotiated in historically specific and resonant ways in 1991. The aim here is to meditate on Thelma & Louise as an “outlaw-coupleon-the-run” film for the early 1990s. Methodologically, this urges a social historical reading of Hollywood’s contemporary engagement with persistent concerns of American culture. Crucially for such a reading, cinema operates not as an unchanging cultural space in which events and negotiations transparently appear but as an institution whose histories, conventions, and political stakes themselves are simultaneously played out. Among these concerns are three that Ian Leong, Mike Sell, and Kelly Thomas have identified as essential to the road film: “dreams of upward mobility,” “the proper uses of violence,” and “marriage and the family” (Leong, Sell, and Thomas 1997, 85). Each has deep roots in American culture and popular cinema; as noted, they were also subject to especially forceful critique by Hollywood in the 1960s and early 1970s. Thelma & Louise illustrates—and, arguably, counters and subverts, in ways complexly related to the critiques of the 1960s—these conventional concerns both in terms of their longstanding relevance to popular filmmaking but also specifically to the legacy of their reassessment and negotiation two and a half decades earlier. What follows is a closer look at being on the run, outlawry, and coupling, as well as their significance to the historically specific popular culture and mythmaking of the early 1990s.

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On the Run The American road film has deep roots in American culture. Before roads and automobiles, the journey itself served as a metaphor for the emergence and existence of the nation. Most familiarly, it was the physical and imaginary space of the frontier that defined the journey. From the celebrations of the frontier in James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman to the voyage of Huckleberry Finn, American literary journeys continued into the twentieth century in the restless movement of characters in Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Kerouac. The “road movie” evolved conspicuously in the Western film that set picaresque adventure against the dramatic backdrop of the frontier. Yet Hollywood cinema also produced more nearly contemporary and disparate visions of the road. In the 1930s, for instance, the screwball comedy, perhaps most memorably in It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934), and the social problem film, illustrated by You Only Live Once, o≠ered competing visions of the road as a∞rming and fulfilling or oppressive and malignant (Frasca 2001).1

It Happened One Night (1934). Promotional still. Columbia Pictures.

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Capra’s and Lang’s films also help to draw the crucial distinction between being on the road and being on the run. Both feature heterosexual couples and are literally set on the road, of course, but the fictional worlds in which the couples exist and the respective roads they epitomize are very di≠erent. It is necessary to emphasize that the hopefulness and sense of possibility of the screwball road was not infinite; such films do o≠er sophisticated critiques of gender relations and economic class. Yet being on the road still represented the opportunity of meaningful transformation especially through the discovery of one’s authentic self and coupling with one’s true mate. Being on the run was di≠erent. Transformation was not readily possible, if at all, and the prevailing social relations and economic structures were unforgiving. While characters such as Henry Fonda’s and Sylvia Sidney’s in You Only Live Once are on the road trying to evade the police, they are more fundamentally on the run within a dark and even deadly world that seeks to undermine them individually and as a couple (Creekmur 1997). That persistent byword in American personal and cultural journeys, “authenticity,” comes instead to refer to skepticism and the realization that human nature and the society around which it is organized are dysfunctional. Because of this distinction, it is di∞cult to approach Thelma & Louise, a film with great exuberance and authentic feeling but without an abiding air of hopefulness, entirely through the critical lens of screwball comedy. My claim here is not that being on the road a∞rms existing standards and values whereas being on the run leads inevitably to their critique or challenge. Rather, it is that the road has persistently served a space of possibility and redefinition: the transgressive or transcendent quality of that critique of normative boundaries and relations varies, though movies about couples on the run tend to o≠er the more daring and thoroughgoing challenges to social and cinematic conventions. A telling example appears in terms of economic relations and the culture of consumption. The physical mobility showcased in road films is often linked in the American imaginary with upward economic mobility or its frustrating impossibility—or an evasion of those extreme choices.2 We might conclude, in fact, that movies set on the road highlight both the movement of individuals in relation to existing socioeconomic and cultural values as well as openness and unconventionality of the spaces through which the movement occurs. The particular meanings of this mobility and space have evolved over time, refracting conAn Outlaw-Couple-on-the-Run Film for the 1990s

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temporary concerns so as to privilege some and marginalize or neglect others and to o≠er, as we shall see, varying critiques of the contemporary social and cinematic values and anxieties being portrayed. The years after World War II saw the establishment of the interstate highway system and celebration of car culture. Although the demographic shifts of postwar families to suburbs is often noted in accounts of the period, the spaces outside the suburban home, particularly the highway, have been less frequently analyzed. Edward Dimendberg argues that the highway (and other “centrifugal spaces like suburban settlements, industrial spaces, and shopping malls”) “are historically transitional between an older centripetal metropolis of the street and promenade and the emerging electronic cyberspace of virtual reality and the information superhighway” (Dimendberg 1995, 93). What Dimendberg incisively sees as “technological romanticism” in the lure of the road emerges from a simultaneous celebration of, and anxiety over, automotive and highway engineering. Akin to the earlier and more often referenced analogy between early cinema and railroad technology, “the highway provides a controlled visual experience analogous to the montage and multiplicity of perspectives a≠orded by cinema” (Dimendberg 1995, 103, 107). In this view, the road film is defined by not only financial regimes that shape social organization, social constraint, and interpersonal relations, but also visual and perceptual ones that circumscribe individual and collective experience. The assertion of these multiple regimes or economies operating in popular cinema further complicates any simplistic distinction between movies set on the road and featuring characters on the run. As commentators on film noir have consistently observed of that postwar grouping of films so enamored of the automobile and the (illusory) possibilities of the road, it is often cinematic conventions, as well as social or economic conventions, that the films aim to critique. In Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1949) and They Live By Night (Nicholas Ray, 1951), the darkness of noir frequently derives from the refusal to fulfill expectations of moral rescue and narrative recuperation in the film narrative. Although these thwarted expectations may be linked to beliefs in heterosexual coupling, abiding by the law, and upward mobility that underpin everyday life and social relations outside the theater, their exposition in mainstream cinema, as symbolic representations to society about itself, carries special resonance. By the 1950s, the increasingly reflexive and self-conscious quality of popular cinema brought 126

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Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins) shoots. Frame capture, Gun Crazy (1949).

They Live By Night (1951). Frame capture.

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with it attention to the “o∞cial” ways of seeing promulgated by Hollywood. It might even be suggested that classical cinema functioned, in part and certainly not unproblematically, to police social relations by exposing illicit activities and documenting the consequences of counternormative behavior. The disruptions, reversals, and non sequiturs of film noir can be seen in these terms to call attention to the behaviors and beliefs deemed natural by previous filmmakers, the filmmaking forms that had become standardized, and the social function of cinema itself. More specifically, the preoccupation in these productions with the automobile, the highway, and criminality underscores the invocation of complex relations among prevailing standards of lawlessness, especially as they are related to myths of economic opportunity and the possibilities of cinematic representation. Though beyond the scope of this article, it might prove illuminating to consider closely the overlapping preoccupations of film noir and outlaw-couple-on-the-run films. Su∞ce it to observe here that both groupings serve, in most cases, as vehicles for highlighting both the negotiation of the legitimacy of behaviors and social relations in contemporary society but also the role of popular cinema to participate in this cultural process. One di≠erence, despite the persistence of noir, is that after the postwar decades film noir no longer held the same subversive sway in self-consciously assessing the cultural function of Hollywood. In 1991, the year of Thelma & Louise, Timothy Corrigan published a thoughtful appraisal of the road genre’s status. While recognizing the deep roots of the genre in the American cultural imaginary, he emphasized some of the post–World War II anxieties that have given the road movie distinctive characteristics. Among these are the breaking apart of the family unit, the power of events to act on characters or motivate narrative, and the mechanization of the quest motif. It is important to note that each of these elements illuminates the self-reflexive quality of these movies’ narrative structures as well as the concerns themselves. Thus, the breaking apart of the heteronormative couple or nuclear family becomes not only an ostensible subject for a film narrative, but also a critique of dominant, oedipally structured narrative itself. Amid the revisionism and questioning of the period, the road movie epitomizes for Corrigan the “hysteria” of narrative and generic cinema defined by tensions between conventional structures of repetition, recuperation, and containment, on the one hand, and subversive elements of failure, crisis, and excess, on the other (Corrigan 1991, 137–160). 128

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Already in the 1950s, the highway had lost its stable ability to generate meaning; the journey itself was becoming one more troubled by both social and cinematic questionings. Being on the road came to signify tensions between conventional social standards or norms and their critique or failure. At the same time, certainly in film noir, increased narrative and visual selfconsciousness challenged many prevailing cinematic standards, including those of moral recuperation and formal repetition cited by Corrigan. Being on the run extended these social and cinematic provocations, explicitly linking the tension between convention and its subversion to questions of criminality and lawlessness. The distinction is evident in Thelma & Louise in the transition from the initial weekend road trip taken by the women away from the everyday to a run from the law following Harlan’s attempted rape of Thelma and Louise’s killing of him. The latter acts expand what otherwise might have been a simpler, comedic portrayal of uncharacteristic mischief and social margins, of a kind of naughtiness, to negotiations over which behaviors or social relations can be understood as legitimate and which cannot. Indeed, once the sequence of events takes place outside the Silver Bullet, the fuller import of Darryl’s abuse of Thelma and its links to Harlan’s more overtly assaultive behavior comes into focus and justifies questions about the legitimacy of all social institutions—marriage and murder alike—that are systematically inequitable. After that transition, it is those more far-reaching questions of how lawfulness or lawlessness can be signified socially and cinematically that inscribe the film.

Outlawry That these negotiations were culturally and historically specific require us to consider more closely the nature of the law, the meaning of actions against it, and the contexts in which these occur. “The story of the American outlaw,” writes Marita Sturken, “is a story of encroaching modernity” (Sturken 2000, 30). Among the traditional American values critiqued in post– World War II films setting couples on the run were the heteronormative family unit, the ability of psychologically well-developed individuals to act and to motivate narrative, and the personal nature of the journey or quest. In part, as noted earlier, film noir and other productions e≠ected this critique by drawing a crucial linkage between explicit assertions of criminal behavior and mounting challenges to upward mobility and the stable meanings generated by classical filmmaking forms. By the mid-1960s, BonAn Outlaw-Couple-on-the-Run Film for the 1990s

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nie and Clyde compounded these linkages with overt attention to sexuality. Penn’s film advanced the outlaw-couple-on-the-run film’s complex critique of American values and filmmaking norms—Hollywood’s conventional ways of seeing individuals and social relations alike—by presenting “outlawry” in the related terms of sexual expenditure, consumer capitalism, and visual spectacle. Bonnie and Clyde became a media event for many reasons (Friedman 1999). The film drew unapologetic connections between sexual performance and criminal behavior, o≠ered viewers images of beautiful actors involved in graphic violence, and juxtaposed humor and brutal action in unconventional ways. Many critics split over the significance of these reversals and combinations; the production was viewed by some as a revolutionary advance in filmmaking as cultural commentary and by others as indicative of moral decline. Indeed, the film’s status as a cause célèbre turned on its vision of guiding elements of the American experience—bodies, property, and their propriety—as well as Hollywood’s framing of them for a mass audience. Not only were the values themselves at issue; so were the institutional means for representing them to viewers for consumption. Contemporary and later commentators have seen Bonnie and Clyde as “both a challenge to and a reflection of the state of capitalism” (Leong, Sell, and Thomas 1997, 78). The road here serves as a space of possibility, for the characters within the narrative who seek to redefine themselves through criminal trespass. That same possibility existed for many filmgoers, whose experience of viewing the film supported new frameworks of media consumption that included the rise of rock ’n’ roll, the predominance of television, and the targeting of specific audience segments like youths in each. Again, it is essential not to lose track of the questions about social legitimacy posed by the narrative conflict between appealing criminals and “o∞cial” stewards of legitimate authority (the police and Texas Rangers). It is equally necessary, however, to understand the film as a contestation of the cinematic means for representing individual agency and social relations, the media institutions responsible for such mass representations, and the connections between those institutions and other institutions of social, political, and economic power. In other words, while commingling crimes against laws of the street and crimes against laws of the market, Penn’s film also violates what might be seen as a familiar law of Hollywood cinematic representation. Calling attention to filmmaking conventions through their 130

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atypical juxtaposition—say, again, humor and violence, or sexuality and brutal action—turned the very system of Hollywood convention and repetition on itself. Elucidating such multiple registers of legitimacy potentially operating in the outlaw-couple-on-the-run movie enables a fuller appreciation of outlawry in Thelma & Louise. The 1991 film similarly invokes many familiar elements from earlier Hollywood productions (including Penn’s) in order to juxtapose and critique them. Rape, murder, and robbery are among the crimes against statutory laws committed in the film and driving the narrative. Questions have consequently arisen about the gender equity of criminal law or of the woman’s place in society. Indeed, speaking broadly, the film provokes inquiry into the nature and dynamics of patriarchal law as a set of social and ideological values defined according to gender. The actions of Thelma and Louise and the reactions of the police (and other males) in the film push viewers to question the legal system, social standards of legitimacy, and public authority (Wiegand 1997). The gender of the outlaw couple and their performance of actions uncharacteristic of cinematic women have been driving concerns for many critics examining social legitimacy and legal authority in the film. That the production features two women is, of course, a major statement for Hollywood filmmaking long dedicated to heterosexual coupling; in the more specific terms of the outlaw-couple-on-the-run film, too, forming a samesex pair is a breakthrough critique of conventional marriage. This point will be addressed at length below, but, for now, it is worth remarking that the performance of a range of alleged “crimes” in the film o≠ers the possibility of an alternative model for women as performers and for relations within contemporary society. By extension, the presence of women as selfsu∞cient performers also suggests the possibility of a new style of cinematic imagining and, therefore, for both female and male viewers, a potentially new form of popular cultural consumption. As many critics have commented, the notion of performance itself can be seen as subversive (Berlant 1997; Butler 1990; Garber 1992; Spelman and Minow 1996). Rather than adhering to existing and largely static identity categories, particularly those grounded in familiar notions of gender, Thelma and Louise act throughout the film in ways that resist conventional characterization or fixed taxonomies. The obvious, pivotal example occurs in the parking lot scene following the attempted rape, in which Thelma’s An Outlaw-Couple-on-the-Run Film for the 1990s

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conventional hysterical reaction to the assault is contrasted by Louise’s forceful and retributive response. Such actions shed light on the familiar framework of gender-based standards for behavior and the public and legal institutions underlying them. Performance itself in the film thus challenges the fixity of gendered roles on which society and popular cinema alike are constructed. More broadly, we might note that performance in the film undertakes a kind of representational subversion. In its resistance to prevailing cinematic standards and the modern aesthetic imperative to adhere to a given taxonomy of schematic and reproducible types, a preoccupation with performance and its potential for subversion highlights what can be viewed as a postmodern feature of the film. Beyond the narrative’s more overt questioning of inequitable gender roles and the social and public institutions

Louise performing outlawry. Frame capture.

Thelma performing outlawry. Frame capture.

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that maintain them, the film o≠ers through the performance of its protagonists an alternative to the more static and modern representational forms and conventions that elsewhere tend to reinforce and perpetuate social inequalities. The film’s emphasis on the uncharacteristic actions and performance of its female lead couple becomes a violation of the representational norms or, put di≠erently, laws of Hollywood cinema that contribute to the maintenance of inequitable social relations. Probing the nature of Thelma & Louise’s relations to its precursors, or to the norms of U.S. mainstream cinema, begs the larger question of how any genre or grouping of films can be seen as both coherent and evolving. One of the more abstract observations we might fairly make about the outlawcouple-on-the-run film is that, as a grouping, it calls potentially unsettling attention of the very processes by which viewers and critics recognize similarities and evolutionary di≠erences between cinematic productions. Such reliance on the familiarity of a reproducible, if variable, product clearly is essential to Hollywood cinema; repetition is a cornerstone of both modern aesthetics and the mode of consumption guiding its popular circulation. But beyond the central presence of two women as “the couple” or the supercession of other elements that simultaneously resituate and revise the “laws” or “norms” that give shape to films composing the grouping, the issues of legitimacy and repetition raised by outlaw-couple-on-the-run films provoke more far-reaching questions about the nature of popular representation. The film raises the specter of what might be called “the law of genre,” in which the integrity of any categorical grouping of films lies in tension with an inherent instability and necessity for ongoing revision and evolution. To speak of “outlawry” in the film urges, in these terms, consideration of the breaks its proposes to standards not only of social relations and public authority, but also of popular representation and the institutions, like Hollywood, responsible for it. The self-consciousness about the social role of Hollywood cinema is yet another nod to Bonnie and Clyde and, more generally, the self-conscious and often revisionist politics of mainstream filmmaking of the 1960s. During the early 1990s, the era of Thelma & Louise, the status of cinema itself was changing in a media landscape marked by the introduction of digital and other new information technologies. The presence of a range of older communication technologies in the film (television, radio, photography, surveillance video) underscores the importance of media to the production, An Outlaw-Couple-on-the-Run Film for the 1990s

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circulation, and perpetuation of standards for individual behavior and social relations. Police chief investigator Slocumbe’s use of a computer database to sort through possible matches for the couple’s Thunderbird is suggestive of the role of new technologies in extending the policing capabilities of social and political authorities. In fact, the incorporation of these di≠erent types of image and information technologies can be seen to underscore the postmodern nature of the production. Nevertheless, the film also continues largely to rely on traditional cinematic ways of seeing by containing and incorporating these other technologies in its own largely retrospective visual and narrative structures. The unconventional (i.e., female-driven) physical violence in the film and the violation of social and representational standards thus occur in the midst of a controlled visual experience still similar to that of the post–World War II era. Like its self-conscious attention to the uneasy tensions between the continuity and disruptions of narrative forms and gender taxonomies (the “laws” of representation), the film can be seen to consider the very status of cinema as a traditional representational and social institution amid a changing media landscape.

The Politics of Coupling The discourse of “outlawry” informing Thelma & Louise emerges from questions about criminality and the “law” posed within the narrative, from performative elements in the film that subvert conventional laws of representation, notably taxonomies of gender, and from the film’s own selfconsciousness as “outlaw” media production. Putting the last point a bit more finely, we might say that the movie both descends from a line of outlaw pictures featuring couples on the run and breaks from that lineage with its own critiques and questions about predominant representational conventions and the role of popular cinema in maintaining those standards in a shifting media landscape. Pervading these layers of outlawry, and binding them, are gender politics. As we have seen, the road film and outlaw-couple-on-the-run film have as an essential concern the critique of the social institutions of heterosexual marriage and the nuclear family. The conventional relations between men and women, and the inequitable power relations between genders in marriage, have been special subjects of commentary at least since the screwball comedies of the early 1930s. How the institution of marriage and the unequal gender relations undergirding it speak and relate to other social con134

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ventions, behaviors, and institutions shape many familiar productions. Of particular interest are the links between a couple’s sexual and sometimes violent domestic or interpersonal relations and the criminal actions and violence committed on the road suggested in films such as Gun Crazy or Bonnie and Clyde. Consequently, the challenge to conventional gender relations and the institution of marriage is often at the heart of a film’s questioning of contemporary standards for “legitimate” public behavior and social relations. Such challenges both question and reinscribe the centrality of heterosexual coupling and marriage to prevailing social relations and institutions, on the one hand, and to predominant narrative filmmaking conventions, on the other. In the 1980s, the emphasis in public and cinematic discourse on traditional family values showcased this tension between highlighting inequitable social institutions and, through their very narrative rendering, recuperating and resituating them following the rebellious preceding decades. Critics from Andrew Britton (1986) and Robin Wood (1986a) to Michael Rogin (1987) and Susan Je≠ords (1989) have commented on the central feature of this call to family values in popular cinema: the return of the father as symbolic figure of public and familial authority—as well as oppression and denial—after years of doubt and anxiety. The trope appeared in films as varied as the first Star Wars cycle (George Lucas, 1977, 1980, 1983), the Rambo films (Ted Kotche≠, 1982; Jack Cardi≠, 1985; Peter McDonald, 1988), and the Back to the Future trilogy (Robert Zemeckis, 1985, 1989, 1990). The call for “family values” and the reprivileging of masculine authority had obvious and far-reaching ramifications for critics of conventional gender relations and heterosexual marriage. Moreover, the figure at the heart of this repositioning, a former actor turned U.S. president, Ronald Reagan, unavoidably brought together “o∞cial” public and cinematic discourses. To be sure, the road movie did not simply recapitulate or oppose these o∞cial politics. Many of the road productions of this era were farces or romantic comedies that had little of the rebellious or existential edge of the films of preceding years. Almost none of these sentimental and more conservatively oriented pictures featured couples on the run. At the same time, however, as David Laderman has tracked, a handful of movies emerged from independent and alternative filmmakers that savaged some of the basic premises of the outlaw couple film. Stranger than Paradise (Jim JarAn Outlaw-Couple-on-the-Run Film for the 1990s

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musch, 1984), in which the petty outlawry of cheating at cards precipitates fractured movement through time, undermines the mobility and sense of personal or social exploration characteristic of earlier films. Critiquing the influence of media, especially television, in shaping visions of self and society, Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy (1989) emphasizes the uncertainty of rebellion and the couple’s run into the unknown. Raising Arizona (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1987) and Wild at Heart (David Lynch, 1990) contest the reigning discourse of family values, the former film by cartoonishly featuring a couple becoming outlaws in their quest to form a family and the latter posing self-consciously as rebels even as they, too, prefer to settle down. The cinematic reflexivity and ironic tone of all these productions critique traditional Hollywood fantasies of alienation, rebellion, and romantic union, preferring postmodern pastiche and sarcasm to the more modernist forms of expansive vision and mobility framed by their precursors (Laderman 2002, 142–175). Thelma & Louise appeared after a decade of Reaganite politics and entertainment, as well as an alternative politics and the aforementioned often aloof and innovative filmmaking distant from the everyday concerns of many viewers. It is, of course, important not to conceive overly schematically of a monolithic 1980s restoration of masculine public and familial authority being challenged by the liberatory politics of social and gender equity recapitulated in Scott’s 1991 production. Yet to understand the media event that erupted around the film’s release does require appreciation of the prevailing social and political contexts. Also, as has been noted in references to various manifestations of the road and run films, the specific preoccupations over cultural legitimacy, the status of couples, and the meaning of violation of social conventions all recommend thoughtful attention to the eras in which the individual films appeared. With its unprecedented focus on a female couple and explicit questioning of gender inequities at home and before statutory law, Thelma & Louise constitutes an important generic entry in the history of the outlaw-couple-on-the-run film; released when it was, the film more sharply articulated an alternative politics to those that had been predominantly celebrated during recent years. The timeliness of the production and its provocation is crucial. As this chapter claims, though, that historical specificity accrues power and meaning from its recourse to the persistent and more timeless attention given by road and

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run films to social standards of heterosexual coupling and to cinematic conventions for representing outlawry. While culturally momentous and a≠ording unusual viewing pleasures to female and male viewers alike, in other words, the provocations of Thelma & Louise were neither altogether coherent nor absolute breaks from past gender politics or cinematic standards. Thoughtfully represented incoherence can often be as subversive in generating anxiety or disrupting familiar ways of seeing (or, as noted earlier, of structuring narratives) as clearly formulated monolithic alternatives. “When the two women in the representation work with rather than against each other, the potentiality for their aggression connoting lesbianism is almost unavoidable,” writes Lynda Hart. “The anxiety these films generate will be in proportion to the incoherencies in the narrative that permit some glimmer of this recognition” (Hart 1994, 42). Rather than advancing simple or straightforwardly transformative oppositions—between female and male or outlawry and the law or lesbianism and heteronormativity—the film o≠ers breaks from the largely coherent gender and sexual politics or social relations made familiar through contemporary public discourse and cinematic conventions. Consider the comment of filmmaker Gregg Araki, whose own “gay” road film, The Living End (1992), can be seen to contest some of the same social standards as Scott’s: Thelma and Louise, he says, “act just as brainless and obnoxious as men. That’s not exactly progress on the feminist front to me” (Kalmansohn 1992, 41). Accepting Araki’s point that the couple’s behavior is not constructive in traditional terms, we might nevertheless embrace the incoherence and breaks from behavioral and representational standards that generated the media event around the film and fostered a more active public discourse about the very issues of feminism and progress on which he is remarking.3 The question of feminism—its inscription in the narrative and its status in contemporary society—has been prominent in public discourse surrounding Thelma & Louise. As with its cinematic lineage and its representation of outlawry, the film should be situated in broader histories of feminism and gender politics. The so-called second-wave feminism of the 1980s occasioned debates about whether equal rights for women could be best secured and guaranteed through special privileges and treatment or through the enforcement of the same laws for women and men; the e≠ective defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in 1982 illustrated one conse-

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quence of this dispute. In addition, the proliferation of di≠erent women’s groups articulating di≠erent, if overlapping, feminisms—for African Americans, for example, or the working class—fragmented the women’s movement in search of rights specific to their local or particular needs. Marita Sturken observes that, by the early 1990s, “the internecine wars of feminism, the public backlash against its basic principles, the disabling academic debates about ‘postfeminism,’ and the quelling of feminist rhetoric made the idea of liberation seem almost quaint if not historical.” Therefore, she goes on, “it could be argued that it is precisely because of its crude deployment of the codes of liberation, pure and simple, that Thelma & Louise came to stand for many as an icon of feminist film” (Sturken 2000, 13). Again, our concern should be how to understand feminism in light of the longer history of critical, cinematic appraisals of the institution of marriage and the contemporary evolution of gender politics. Any such understanding, at least in terms of the 1991 film, needs to incorporate attention to Hollywood’s process of imagining women and gender politics. “If Bonnie and Clyde is based on a historical account,” Corrigan writes, “it is more accurately a historical account of modern perception, perception that in the sixties is already beginning to reduce history to the material of images, material in which a culture must obsessively act itself out in order to displace the return of more threatening histories” (Corrigan 1991, 150). That remained true throughout the 1980s, when images and spectacle were deployed by a remasculinized American social order and reinvigorated national politics to repress anxiety-making histories like those of Vietnam and Watergate. In fact, a new imperial politics emerged during the Reagan and (elder) Bush years that, as Michael Rogin trenchantly observed, relied on military and media spectacle to instill historical and political amnesia (Rogin 1993). Hollywood contributed the a∞rming images and narratives of Reaganite entertainment, again empowering men and institutions and reestablishing itself as a media institution that a∞rmed the value and beliefs of the nation. With Thelma & Louise, we might say that the reverse occurred: here, culture acts itself in order to invoke recuperative histories and e≠ect a moral rescue of feminism and women generally following a decade in which their status had been undermined, fragmented, and repositioned as subordinate and predominantly silent.

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Nostalgic Visions of Di≠erence The moral rescue o≠ered by alternative narrative occurs in part through a nostalgic calling forth of a more coherent and politically liberatory past through a traditional mode of filmic representation. Automobiles are, of course, a mechanical throwback to modernist regimes of physicality, mobility, and vision that represent an era of preglobalization. Photography, too, at least as practiced in the film is a nostalgic striving not just to capture moments of the past, but also to do so straightforwardly through a trustworthy previrtual or predigital mode of reproduction. Political cinema of the sort aspired to by Thelma & Louise is likewise a throwback to the 1960s and its alternative visions grounded in authentic opposition rather than parodic fragmentation. The film’s feminist politics dwell on explicating the inequities of male-dominated society and institutions, including the heterosexual couple, and the performance of rebellious, self-actualizing acts against it. Indeed, the triumphal ending, in which Thelma and Louise continue their journey by driving away from the law, consummates the couple’s empowering opposition to the predominant social order that nostalgically assumes an ability to remain outside or beyond that order’s sway. Much as Bonnie and Clyde tried to consolidate New Left politics increasingly fragmented by the mid-1960s, Thelma & Louise attempts to counter Reagan-Bush entertainment by reinvigorating the spirit of 1960s critical liberalism and self-authenticating rebellion. The latter film’s politics and, especially, feminism look back to a moment in which radical autonomy and deliberate breaks from oppressive social and familial contexts define rebellion. Filmically, as well, Scott relies on traditional character building, dramatic exposition, and visual experience of the road. Also important, however, the film’s celebration of personal mobility and the journey to authenticity are rendered coherently and without the fragmentation and irony of productions that immediately preceded it. Scott’s film likewise presents the lot of women in contemporary society—and white, working-class women at that—without the complications that arose when targeted political claims were made decades before or when filmmakers subsequently reconceived alternative visions in postmodern terms. Put di≠erently, this is polished political filmmaking that instantiates itself as an outlaw film for the 1990s precisely by recasting familiar articulations of genre and outlawry from the 1960s and, specifically, Bonnie and Clyde. An Outlaw-Couple-on-the-Run Film for the 1990s

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Part of what I have been trying to suggest here is the necessity of complicating readings that rightly celebrate the film’s oppositional structure and alternative politics of liberation. That structure and those politics appear in a film, after all, and it may be well to question how the film participated in contemporary negotiations of the meaning and place of feminism and violence in emergent years not only of feminism, but also of multiculturalism. Set against the iconic landscape of the American Southwest, Scott’s film should be seen to feature more than a female couple challenging masculine narratives and cultural norms from the national and cinematic past. It should also be about two white women who update the cultural priority accorded their experience. Several commentators have remarked on this conventional racialism in terms of feminism itself (Cross 1986, 32–34; Projansky 2001, 121–153; Laderman 2002, 193–194).4 I also want to suggest that, in its very focus, the film diverts attention from concerns about illegal immigration; unfamiliar multiethnicity; shifting economic, technology, and information flows; and the fading moment of modernist and mechanical authority over space and bodies. Particular films cannot be all things to all people, of course, but while examining a production made and released in the era of AIDS, of multiculturalism, and of nascent virtualization and globalization, it is necessary to attend to the multiple and historically specific contexts that shaped the film’s reception and made it a media event. With the Cold War ending and the Gulf War beginning, questions of national direction and social priorities were anxiety making. The individual politics of authenticity and of rebel-

Thunderbird in the Western landscape. Frame capture.

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Thelma and Louise on the road. Frame capture.

lion were likewise fraught by the “culture wars” over often conflicting “identity” politics. As Michael Rogin observed of the end of the Cold War generally, “Filmmakers [saw] themselves as meeting the modern hunger not for violence but for myth.” The “symbolic value materialized in popular culture” at the time had enormous significance in clarifying the dissolution of longreigning bipolar balance of power and oppositional politics (Rogin 1998, 74, 76). Thelma and Louise quickly gained iconic, even mythic, status, and one explanation might be the symbolic clarity and nostalgia with which they engaged an especially uncertain range of contemporary cultural politics and anxiety over what Katie Mills has called the emergence of “sex-gender rebels” in road films (Mills 1997).5 At issue is the film’s deployment of mostly modernist discourses of gender and social relations as well as technologies of vision. These generated mythic and symbolic value at precisely the moment when new models of individual identity, emerging in a multicultural world with freshly problematized borders, and new metaphors of the road—namely, the virtual or information highway—were coming to prominence. The lingering question, then, is the degree to which the performances and politics in Thelma & Louise are forward looking and liberatory, a constructive “feminist appropriation of the masculinist road fantasy” (Cohan and Hark 1997, 11). To what extent, in other words, are the film’s ambiguities and ambivalences bounded by modernist impulses and resistant to 1990s contexts? Genderbased violence and legal and social inequities certainly persist into the present day: yet by relying on traditional cinematic elements and foregrounding the relationship between white female protagonists on a journey of liberaAn Outlaw-Couple-on-the-Run Film for the 1990s

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tion, the film sidesteps many of the social and cultural concerns that have remade the contemporary woman’s position for the twenty-first century. Thelma & Louise presents a vision of alienation and romanticized rebellion that nostalgically invokes the 1960s. By doing so, the movie and resulting media event question the larger legacy of the 1960s and the liberatory, alternative politics, including first-wave feminism, that had been fragmented and undone in succeeding years. Figuring centrally in the film and resulting media event (and still continuing in popular discourse) is what Eleanor Townsley (2001) has called “‘the Sixties’ trope” and, especially, its sharp, irreducible contest between liberal and conservative accounts of social and moral transition. For the discussion here, that trope captures the moral tensions conveyed in the movie and related public discourse. Appearing as it did at an historical moment of uncertainty and promise, the end of the Cold War, and the repoliticization of feminism, Thelma & Louise might be seen to rearticulate the “sixties” as a basis for understanding then contemporary U.S. society and politics, especially as they were conceived of as being in transition or, for some, crisis. In addition, Thelma & Louise emerges from a complex lineage of films set on the road and, often, focusing on couples on the run in order to foreground tensions between conventional and subversive social behavior and relations—not the least those related to heterosexual coupling—and the prevailing cinematic means for representing them. In the early 1990s, the desire was to return to the emblematic recent moment of political, social, and moral ferment. The tensions in the movie are thus not only between masculine-based conventions and feminist alternatives or even between first-wave feminism and its subsequent formulations. Rather, they turn on the continuing legacy of the 1960s as the historical moment by which understandings of contemporary American society and politics can be clearly and comprehensibly framed. That “the sixties” themselves have been so thoroughly mythologized and refigured by popular culture makes all the more emphatic the tension between the film’s attempt at alternative political (i.e., “sixties-style”) mythmaking and the mostly occluded contemporary concerns over multiculturalism, immigration, and post–Cold War global politics. Thelma & Louise can thus be viewed as preoccupied with the polarizing politics of the 1960s, its own political strivings remaining in tension with a twin nostalgia for a separatist feminism and the allure of popular cultural mythmaking about it. 142

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Notes 1. For an exhaustive and relevant analysis of the frontier in Western films, see Slotkin (1992). 2. Consider Helene Keyssar’s observation: “The mobility of the thirties was of a di≠erent order, a fleeing from as much or more than an adventure toward a particular way of life, an attempt to sustain the illusion of economic mobility through the literal movement so aptly emblematized by automobiles and the proliferation of highways to accommodate these machines” (Keyssar 1991, 114). 3. In cinematic terms, this is perhaps not unrelated to the idea of productive incoherence delineated by Robin Wood in his account of some Hollywood productions of the 1970s and the purposeful ambivalence and critique deriving from self-conscious invocation and manipulation of familiar filmmaking conventions (Wood 1986b, 46–69). 4. For a useful and more general discussion, see Willis (1997). 5. Subsequent outlaw-couple-on-the-run films engaged contemporary politics, especially those of the media and multiculturalism, more directly if with less popular appeal. Consider My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant, 1992), The Living End (Gregg Araki, 1992), Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone, 1994), Smoke Signals (Chris Eyre, 1998), and The Straight Story (David Lynch, 1999). Again helpful is the overview in Laderman (2002, 175–246).

Bibliography Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996. Britton, Andrew. “Blissing Out: The Politics of Reaganite Entertainment.” Movie 31/32 (1986): 1–42. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Cohan, Steven, and Ina Rae Hark. “Introduction.” In The Road Movie Book, ed. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark. New York: Routledge, 1997, 1–14. Corrigan, Timothy. A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991. Creekmur, Corey. “On the Road and On the Run: Fame and the Outlaw Couple.” In The Road Movie Book, ed. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark. New York: Routledge, 1997, 90–110. Cross, Alice. “The Bimbo and the Mystery Woman.” Cineaste 18:4 (1991): 32–33. Dimendberg, Edward. “The Will to Motorization: Cinema, Highways, and Modernity,” October 73 (1995): 97–137.

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Frasca, Giampiero. Road Movie: Immaginario, genesi, struttura e forma del cinema americano on the road. Turin: UTET Libreria, 2001. Friedman, Lester, ed. Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde.” New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York: Harper, 1992. Hart, Lynda. “ ‘Til Death Do Us Part’: Impossible Spaces in Thelma and Louise.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 4:3 (1994): 430–446. Je≠ords, Susan. The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Kalmansohn, David. Interview with Gregg Araki. Frontiers, August 28, 1992, 41. Keyssar, Helene. Robert Altman’s America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Kinder, Marsha. “The Return of the Outlaw Couple.” Film Quarterly 27:4 (1974): 2–10. Laderman, David. Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. Leong, Ian, Mike Sell, and Kelly Thomas. “Mad Love, Mobile Homes, and Dysfunctional Dicks.” In The Road Movie Book, ed. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark. New York: Routledge, 1997, 70–89. Mills, Katie. “Revitalizing the Road Genre: The Living End as an AIDS Road Film.” In The Road Movie Book, ed. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark. New York: Routledge, 1997, 307–329. Projansky, Sarah. Watching Rape: Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture. New York: NYU Press, 2001. Rogin, Michael. “‘Make My Day!’: Spectacle as Amnesia in Imperial Politics [and] The Sequel.” In Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993, 499–534. Rogin, Michael. Independence Day; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Enola Gay. London: BFI, 1998. Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Atheneum, 1992. Spelman, Elizabeth V., and Martha Minow. 1996. “Outlaw Women: Thelma and Louise.” In Legal Reelism: Movies as Legal Texts, ed. John Denvir. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996, 261–279. Sturken, Marita. 2000. Thelma & Louise. London: BFI, 2000. Townsley, Eleanor. “‘The Sixties’ Trope.” Theory, Culture & Society 18:6 (2001): 99– 123. Wiegand, Shirley A. “Deception and Artifice: Thelma, Louise, and the Legal Hermeneutic.” Oklahoma City University Law Review 22:1 (1997): 25–49. Willis, Sharon. “Race on the Road: Crossover Dreams.” In The Road Movie Book, ed. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark. New York: Routledge, 1997, 287–306.

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Wood, Robin. “Papering the Cracks: Fantasy and Ideology in the Reagan Era.” In Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986a, 162–188. Wood, Robin. “The Incoherent Text: Narrative in the 1970s.” In Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986b, 46–69.

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6

“ W H AT A L L T H E F U S S I S A B O U T ”

Making Brad Pitt in Thelma & Louise

Cynthia Fuchs

The turning point in Thelma’s character rests on one of the most enduring and infuriating male myths in the culture: the only thing an unhappy woman needs is good sex to make everything all right. Margaret Carlson, “Is This What Feminism Is All About?” Time, June 24, 1991 The iconography of the Western at work in Thelma and Louise provides a context in which signifiers of freedom and power (of masculinity) can accrue to woman. Yvonne Tasker, “Female Friendship: Melodrama, Romance, Feminism,” Working Girls, 1998 I’m one of those guys you hate because of genetics. It’s the truth. Brad Pitt, “The Unbearable Bradness of Being,” Rolling Stone, October 28, 1999

Partway through Thelma & Louise, the inadvertent outlaws meet a cowboybooted hitchhiker named J. D. (Brad Pitt). He acts the proper young man, apologizing when Thelma (Geena Davis) trips over him on her way from the phone booth to her car. As she slumps in the passenger seat, waiting for Louise (Susan Sarandon) to emerge from a convenience store, Thelma spots J. D. behind the car, posing with his du≠el bag slung over his shoulder, so that his “cute butt” is framed by point of view shots in her rearview and sideview mirrors. A “signifier of freedom and power,” J. D.’s body here functions as an emblem of Thelma’s desire and newfound ambition, her claim to “masculine” agency. Until her vacation with Louise, Thelma’s experience with “men” has been limited to sex with and directives from her “pig” of a husband, Darryl (Christopher MacDonald), whom she started dating at age fourteen (“Who is he?” Louise teases, “Your husband or your father?”). For viewers, then, 146

J. D. appears to function much like a comely girl in a male buddy movie, a motivation to action and a means to heterosexualize the same-sex couple. He also serves to di≠erentiate Thelma and Louise, for, just as the latter is perceptibly disdainful of his seductive antics, the former turns to schoolgirly mush when left alone with him in the backseat; on Louise’s return to the scene, Thelma is so preoccupied by her new toy that she barely registers embarrassment. Her visible delight and self-assurance suggest that Thelma is ready to be seduced, just hours after the trauma that set Thelma and Louise on this desert road to Mexico, Harlan’s (Timothy Carhart) assault on Thelma and his murder by Louise. By the time J. D. shows up at Thelma’s Oklahoma City motel room, the rain tap-tapping on his crusty cowboy hat and wet clothes clinging to his body, she’s able to see herself as she sees him, willful, wanting, and wanted. With this sequence, Thelma & Louise introduces Brad Pitt as beautiful object and roguish subject, the means to Thelma’s independence, even if he does abuse and abandon her like every other man in her life. “I’ve never been lucky, not one time,” Thelma fumes, following J. D.’s disappearance with Louise’s life savings. For a minute, though, the film allows Thelma to imagine that the cultural sex-and-gender tables might be turned, that a woman might be able to take pleasure from a man without terrible consequences. Articulating this idea, Thelma breathlessly recounts her first orgasm for Louise: “I finally understand what all the fuss is about.” But there will be terrible consequences: this is the women’s lot and lesson, after all. The movie’s conventionally masculine world will not give them an inch.

Brad Pitt in James Dean pose. Frame capture.

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Marlboro Boy. Frame capture.

Still, for this brief moment, J. D. embodies the parity and opportunity the women seek, the capacity to put themselves and their needs first, and the power to feel “lucky.” This chapter explores the evolving cultural uses of Brad Pitt, as he initially appears in Thelma & Louise and as he continues to appear in subsequent films and entertainment promotional materials. He embodies such “equality,” of female desire, subjectivity, and self-identification, as well as a moral instruction, that women cannot act on their desires without repercussion. That is, the chapter explores the process of “making Brad Pitt,” as he incarnates and represents a particular shift in thinking about masculinity, in 1991, as well as changing structures of sexualization and objectification, female agency and volition. While he was initially presented in Thelma & Louise as the ideal sexual object—youthful, attractive, self-conscious, and eager to please—J. D./Brad Pitt has gone on to signify a more complicated masculine celebrity, perpetually youthful (and so, somewhat unformed), elusive, and feminized.

“I’m Louise” This early version of Brad Pitt (call him “the Marlboro Boy”) looms large in his career lore. J. D. is the role that made him a movie star. He had performed previously, in a chicken suit for the El Pollo Loco restaurant and in guest spots on such television series as Head of the Class (1986) and 21 Jump Street (1987) and the soap, Another World (1987). But J. D., a part originally o≠ered to Alec Baldwin, was something else, life-changing and eye-opening. The actor’s easy charm and wit made the character’s treachery 148

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seem the result of circumstance and accident rather than his own will to do harm. J. D. is tender, confused, and disenfranchised, not unlike Thelma and Louise themselves, more like a woman than the film’s other men. As such, J. D. became the prototypical Brad Pitt role, the image the actor, in so many subsequent parts, has been trying to outrun. The controversy generated by Thelma & Louise surely influenced J. D.’s enduring e≠ect. In the much-cited 1992 Cineaste symposium on the film, Elayne Rapping writes, “The most important things about Thelma and Louise are to be found in the media hullabaloo that followed its release— the fascinating, passionate public discourse it engendered—rather than in the merits or meanings of the film itself ” (28). But such a distinction, between “the film itself ” and the “public discourse it engendered,” is itself a function of a particular context, in which the broadly drawn male characters became background for the women’s movements, glosses on and e≠ects of the focus on Thelma and Louise. From Darryl and Harlan to J. D. and Detective Hal Slocumbe (Harvey Keitel), the male characters embody and reflect the women’s limited options more than they stand as individuals with wills and trajectories of their own. Such a limitation is most obvious in the film’s famous ending—when Thelma and Louise drive o≠ into the Grand Canyon—but it is thematized throughout: each man they meet represents the women’s decreasing time and space, the violence that will be their end within the “iconography of the West.” The film complicates this iconography, and its attendant “freedom and power,” by showing the e≠ects of violence committed against and by Thelma and Louise—that is, by connecting victims and aggressors, relating their seemingly di≠erent fears, frustrations, and desires. Sharon Willis writes, “Violent responses to the film’s ‘violence’ are related to a common anxious fascination with the increasingly visible ‘battle of the sexes’ in popular culture, a fascination that, in the case at hand, often produces ironic coincidences between feminist and antifeminist positions” (1997, 100). These “coincidences” raise a related question, concerning the women’s agency, in particular as this is linked to the “fascinating, passionate public discourse.” In this context, J. D. serves simultaneously as motivation and obstacle for Thelma (especially) and Louise, producing what Willis terms an “ironic coincidence” between reading positions. Like and unlike the women, he simultaneously incarnates their limitations and limitlessness. He pushes their plot in two ways, by stealing Louise’s money and thus setting o≠ “What All the Fuss Is About”

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Thelma’s resolve—following their encounter with J. D., the women will not look back. As he prompts and mirrors Thelma’s desire, J. D. creates a doubled perspective for viewers, as both her spectator and what she sees. Early on, Thelma rehearses the audience’s identificatory process as the women initially drive away from their everyday lives—Thelma’s restriction to her messy kitchen in Darryl’s house, Louise’s discontent with the diner where she works as a waitress and her stark, tidy apartment, where she washes her single water glass before she leaves. In the convertible, Louise’s hair is tied in a scarf and her lips are painted red, while Thelma puts a cigarette to her mouth and pu≠s away, exaggerating her show of glamour and independence as she declares, “I’m Louise.” This moment of mirroring is brief, and Louise appears to be embarrassed as much as she is amused, but connection and cathexis between the women are crucial. Thelma imagines herself like her friend, when she is not, but for men within the film and for many viewers of the film, the women become interchangeable, rebels, victims, and emblems. For all their ostensible di≠erences—in age, class, sexual experience, and marital status—each sees herself, or some aspect of herself, in the other. This grants them a shared set of assumptions and loyalties, goals, and anxieties, pointedly missing for the film’s men, who rarely talk with one another, outside of interrogations or interviews about the women. In the film, the men are defined in their relations to the women, however abstract or remote. At the same time, Louise and Thelma are multiply defined, first by the men who presume to know them; second, by their own increasingly complex involvement with one another; and third, by those viewers who go on to construct “public discourse.” For the first, the film makes its male characters, in the words of Cathy Griggers, a target of “social satire,” because they embody for “the audience’s social consciousness a spectrum of negative male stereotypes” (1993, 135). At once contextual and causal, these stereotypes are not individual. Darryl, for example, is a disturbing and overt joke, so crass that even the detectives laugh at him (this is most visible when he steps into his pizza on learning of his lack of jurisdiction over his wife). Darryl’s serial o≠enses—his vain a≠ections for his red Corvette and foofy hairstyle, his assumption that Thelma is unaware of his a≠airs, and his disparagement of her e≠orts to please him (“I don’t give a shit what we have for dinner”)—don’t so much induce Thelma’s individual actions as they move 150

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the plot along down a road toward increasing identification with the women, as a unit; when Louise “protects” Thelma (though she does not precisely kill “for” her), she is more emphatic and committed to Thelma than Darryl might ever imagine being. By the time Louise later describes Darryl to J. D. as a “pig,” he has more than illustrated the point. Darryl’s cruelty induces Thelma’s surreptitious noshing on her frozen candy bar (surreptitious even when she is the only person in the house), not to mention her decision not to ask his permission to go away for her weekend with Louise. In turn, Thelma’s choice to “break out,” to seek sexual liaisons beyond Darryl, grinds the film into gear. Almost as soon as Louise asserts, “You get what you settle for,” Thelma acts out her own intention to not settle, to expand her options, even if just for an evening. “Well, darlin’,” she warns Louise as they sit in the Arkansas bar where she will meet the rapist Harlan. “Look out, ’cause my hair’s comin’ down!” Even as she mouths the cliché, Thelma also looks desperately “naïve.” It is no surprise that she does not detect Harlan’s bad intentions. Strikingly, both he and J. D. are smooth “talkers,” pro≠ering banal seductions for Thelma, who is, in turn, so eager to be seduced that she fails to guard against her repeated exploitation. That Thelma falls for the patter while Louise dismisses it out of hand underlines their dissimilarity at this early point but also links them—Harlan’s language will provide the impetus for Louise’s violence. She plainly oversteps a conventional moral boundary when she shoots Harlan the redneck rapist, but her decision and viewers’ grasp of it are immediately vexed, framed by her unspoken (and apparently unspeakable) past, Harlan’s comprehensive ugliness, and the political and moral quandaries created by the murder. Sympathy for Louise is thus premised on visible limitations, in the film per se (markers of predatory and ignorant masculinity are hardly subtle), as well as its contexts. This is not to say that Harlan’s context is not also available, but rather that it is restricted by his narrative function. He is the film’s designated brute, the impetus for the women’s step o≠ the edge of propriety and relative safety (or at least, familiar domesticity). J. D.’s context, by contrast, seems more overt because it generally parallels that of the women. Moreover, in mirroring them, he becomes the film’s second means of defining the women, in their involvement with one another. Also an outlaw on the run, he inhabits a conventionally romantic version of their more dire circumstance: because he is male, on his own, and “What All the Fuss Is About”

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cowboy-booted, he incarnates a mythic, “Western” independence, a thief without malice, a rebel without specific cause. In terms of Thelma and Louise’s own relationship, his intervention does not so much ensure their heterosexuality as allow it to slide some. Unlike Louise’s stoic, earnest, predictably masculine boyfriend, Jimmy (Michael Madsen), J. D. is eager to perform for Thelma, to pose and show o≠, to please her with generous displays of a≠ection and arrogance, just before he commits dastardly subterfuge. Thus, J. D.’s infraction solidifies the women’s celebrated bond twice over, triggering both their discussion of Thelma’s orgasm and the convenience store robbery. In this, he is central to what Griggers calls the women’s “excessive” representation (136). She refers specifically to the gun that Thelma packs for the weekend trip, which Thelma will go on to use as J. D. instructs her. Griggers writes that, initially, the gun’s figurative power is “partially provided by Thelma’s excess desire: she gives the gun to Louise, she wants Louise to have it, to use it. And later she takes it for her own” (136). By film’s end, Griggers continues, the women, “prototypes of the mainstreaming of the new butch-femme, don’t become butch because they’re lesbians: they become lesbians because they’ve already become butch to survive” (140). The film charts their complicated process of “becoming,” whether read as lesbian, butch-femme, or masculine and, according to Griggers, marks the excess of their desire by sending them o≠ into the Grand Canyon following their kiss, sign of “erotic surplus.” Still, the relationship remains overdetermined and delimited by the possibilities Thelma and Louise can imagine—that is, they die rather than face what they know already, that their involvement must end, badly. This involvement with one another is in large part inscribed by their relation to language—which they either understand or exceed. Where Thelma is both strengthened and fooled by J. D.’s language, Louise is pushed o≠ her initial edge by Harlan’s language—his own e≠ort to construct a “discourse,” as it were—informed by his assumption of privilege and antipathy toward the women who so plainly threaten and horrify him. When Harlan tells the departing Louise, “I shoulda fucked her,” his fate is more or less sealed. After the shooting, she leans in to his bleeding chest and hisses, “You watch your mouth, buddy.” Willis observes that Louise murders Harlan for a “verbal challenge” rather than his rape of Thelma (or attempted rape, as the scene fragment appears on screen). Although this surely makes for a “thin” legal premise, within the film’s logic, the women’s perception of abuse is 152

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continuous, and their reactions evolve accordingly. In this regard, Thelma and Louise are representative rather than singular, besieged by everyday harassments more than they are moved by a single act. As Willis points out, even as Harlan’s challenge provides a “thin” premise for Louise’s action, it also instigates the “public discourse,” the third process by which the women are defined and made emblematic. As they strike back against Harlan, the women, especially Louise, inspire both outrage and defense. Willis argues that the “‘debate’ about women’s violence emerges forcefully at a point where all positions seem to get stuck in an accord over the necessity of justifying Louise’s homicidal rage. This sticking point may put us in mind of the ways that fantasy remains highly volatile and mobile, or, more precisely, of the ways it is in the nature of fantasy to keep coming unstuck” (105). In other words, as in most male-centered revenge fantasy movies, the rage need not be “justified” as much as trigger the rest of the fantasy. To its credit, Thelma & Louise repeatedly exposes this “sticking point” and refuses to resolve it. The combination of Harlan’s malevolence and Louise’s brutality stands as the fantasy’s most obvious point of departure, but it is more symptomatic than symbolic. And again, as the movie’s most visibly protean character, J. D. best represents this irresolution, even personifies the “sticking point.” A multiply nuanced fantasy—for Thelma, for viewers—J. D. triggers (and is triggered by) Thelma’s desire, even as he soon provides another focus for the women’s rage (not to mention Hal’s rage, on their behalf ). As this focus, J. D. is definitively “unstuck” in “public discourse.” A scoundrel and thief, he remains sympathetic and desirable, the character type that will be both the foundation and bane of Pitt’s ensuing career.

“Women love that shit” According to Willis, “Anxious interpretations of spectator identification that expect women’s viewing pleasures to translate directly into aggressive attitudes and behavior toward men in their daily life may themselves have their source in fantasy” (100). Indeed, much as its violence is broadly conceived and elaborately depicted, Thelma & Louise’s representation of the women’s desires—reasons for them and fears of them—is fascinating because it is so convoluted and contradictory. Unlike male buddies, who push on through to a morally sound end even if they must temporarily work outside the law to achieve it, Thelma and Louise remain outlaws, irrecoverable “What All the Fuss Is About”

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and mad, until they fly o≠ into the Grand Canyon. Just so, their desires are frequently framed in masculinist terms, demonstrating the dearth of language and imagery available to them. Indeed, at the time of the film’s release, Margaret Carlson wrote that, “rather than finding their way with their feminine natures intact or even being able to reach out to the one decent man who could help them, [Thelma and Louise] become like any other shoot-first-and-talk-later action heroes” (57). Aside from an obvious question concerning “feminine natures”—namely, what are they?—Carlson’s point is well taken: the film uses an existing cultural and cinematic vocabulary, including conventions of road movies, buddy movies, and revenge movies that grant the fugitives a familiar action heroes’ trajectory. At the same time, Carlson’s reading raises another question, about the “one decent man.” Hal certainly appears “decent” in comparison to the numerous other louts in the film, but the women respond (negatively) to his ineptitude as much as his stated desire to “help.” (He’s a cop in a suit, and even if they never see him, he is not exactly established visually as their “friend.”) In moments when they have no notion what he is up to—that is, moments to which viewers have access but Thelma and Louise cannot— Hal’s lapses in judgment and emotional frailties emerge. Granted, these are not necessarily indictable o≠enses, and they make him even more sympathetic, more like the women. During his introduction, for instance, he discusses the murder with the waitress, Lena (played by Lucinda Jenney, and a self-described “expert on human nature” who “knows” those ladies could not have killed Harlan) in the parking lot. Lena comes on to him, expecting that their exchange will lead to sex, understanding that they are flirting. Her reading of the situation indicates previous encounters or, perhaps, Hal’s own awkward inability to gauge the conversation. Either way, he escapes the interview by admonishing Lena to “behave yourself,” thus leaving his “honor” intact and her interest piqued. His ostensible disinterest in sex suggests that he is unlike the other men who become involved in Thelma and Louise’s predicament—he is not inherently invested in women as bodies or objects but is, instead, a dedicated o∞cer, initially concerned with solving a crime—revealed in his trundling from site to site and, perhaps especially, with his diligent computer research—and eventually, with “saving” the criminals. Hal’s “decency,” then, corresponds to a fantasy that the dominant social order has all social subjects’ best interests at heart, even those subjects con154

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spicuously contained or oppressed. The movie, however, argues against this faith in decency—or at least exposes its speciousness, its use as a means to an end. When, for instance, Hal and Max (Stephen Toblowsky), the FBI agent, arrive at Darryl’s home to monitor the phone line, they chat—during a downpour, metaphorically indicating their menace—advising him to be “nice” to Thelma when she calls. “Are you close to her?” asks Hal. “I guess,” Darryl rolls his eyes. “I’m about as close as I can be to a nutcase like that.” As Hal laughs to indicate his agreement (in what seems an especially performative display), Max urges him to be “gentle, you know, like you’re really happy to hear from her, like you really miss her. Women love that shit.” Darryl repeats the phrase, grinning in as despicable a way as he can manage, and the conversation continues, rain still pounding all around them, as they perform good times and soggy harmony; here the film cuts abruptly to Louise’s dusty car on Max’s o≠-screen, midsentence apology for sounding so rough: “I’m sorry, it’s just . . .” The cut and the framing (on Hal, still laughing red-faced, like a good ol’ boy) suggest the film’s disinterest in the exchange, except as it sets up the next problem for Thelma and Louise, gathering information from Darryl as to the cops’ knowledge. Darryl’s belief in his authority, much like Max’s, is of no consequence for the women or for viewers, who are categorically more intrigued by the women’s earnest resistance to such smug presumptions than by the men’s bogus tête-à-tête. The movie’s explicit dismissal of various men’s e≠orts to deceive, exploit, or injure the beleaguered women, however, does not mean that it wholly rejects the social order that Hal, in his most generous moments, might epitomize. At times, as during the awkwardly raucous discussion with Darryl, he also appears to be curtailed by the workings of the law, with the law understood as male prerogative as well as legal niceties. This takes place even though he is, most often, manifestly unaware of the e≠ects such workings have on their usual victims—he has presumably never had to contend directly with race or gender prejudice. Still, his ostensible empathy—however well intentioned—only takes him so far, and his desire to salvage the “girls” by recontainment makes his endeavors suspect or inadequate. As if to underline Hal’s good intentions, the film includes other, minor male characters, among them Jimmy; the state trooper Thelma and Louise lock in his own trunk (Jason Beghe); the black cyclist (Noel L. Walcott III) who happens by and blithely blows reefer smoke through the air holes Louise has shot in that trunk; and the lascivious truck driver (Marco St. “What All the Fuss Is About”

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John). Whereas Jimmy and the other white men plainly function in some close relation with a patriarchal order (he is a taciturn musician whose inability to commit is apparently premised on his manly need to wander; the cop and the trucker pretty much reveal their alliance in their uniforms), the cyclist has engendered discussion among the film’s readers. Griggers aligns him with Thelma and Louise, as a sign of textual, social, and legal excess (138); Willis argues that his meaning remains unfixed and unfixable, outside a “binary universe where the man of color operates in a renegade or disabled relation to the law” (114). Much as the cyclist’s visible di≠erence— his blackness and dreadlocks, cool silence, and sanguine pot-smoking— mark his distance from the generally angry and predictably “redneck” types who populate Thelma & Louise, his existence out of the women’s sight also suggests an alternative realm beyond their imagining. In this realm, he might reject the law, as embodied by the cop in the trunk, without fear of consequence. In this, the cyclist is also unlike J. D., who pays for his crimes and is thus more anchored to the women’s sphere. The most prominent male figure who works against the literal law, J. D. both adheres to and challenges a symbolic law of gender. Much as he provides a liaison between an ironic, incomplete, and provocative antidote to the film’s parade of abusive or just too-slow-on-the-uptake men, he is gentle, sly, and charismatic, thus an acceptable object of desire, at least Thelma’s desire, at least for a night. Nevertheless, he serves multiple purposes over and above his sexual role. As Nicole Marie Keating observes, the “J. D. who is the object of Thelma’s rapt attention will soon become her teacher, providing an example she can mimic of how to use a gun to rob a store. Thelma’s active gaze therefore leads back directly to her use of the gun” (1998, 100). How phallic. And, how apposite, as this gaze appears to establish J. D./Pitt as both instructor and irritant, model and motivation for the women’s action beyond recovery. That he teaches Thelma “what all the fuss is about” as well as how to rob a convenience store makes him at once more audacious and more mundane than anyone else in the movie.

“I like your wife” “J. D.’s body is also closely ogled by the eye of the camera,” notes Keating, comparing his representation to Thelma’s during their lovemaking in the motel room; as the viewer’s gaze switches between them, alternating be156

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tween points of identification—his torso, her thighs, his face, her navel—the scene suggests that J. D.’s appeal mirrors and corresponds to hers (101). In this, J. D. inaugurates (or perhaps cements) a prevailing use of “Brad Pitt,” body, type, and character. He is simultaneously hard (as in taut, youthful, and attractive) and soft (an object framed and identified by spectators), arrogant and vulnerable, ambitious and imperfect. If Thelma & Louise constitutes a turn away from passive, yearning women to women who seek out pleasure and freedom—women who drive—the e≠ect is achieved in part through the presence of the marvelous “boy toy” J. D. Although, as Willis holds, the film surely o≠ers “pleasures” in a range of fantasies focused in the protagonists (in particular, the women’s intimacy as well as revenge), this particular presence—the sensitive, solicitous, but bound-to-be-bad boy also has lingering e≠ects. According to Keating, “Because the signifying practices in Thelma & Louise structure a paradoxical representation of both female objectivity (women as objects of the gaze) and subjectivity (the female gaze), viewers are provoked out of absorption by these contradictions and develop an awareness concerning the constructed nature of the film itself ” (102). Within the increasingly dire world of this film, especially, the anomaly of J. D.’s congenial a≠ect and conspicuous allure (“I love watching him go,” smiles Thelma as he saunters o≠ ) draws attention to habits of viewing even as he disrupts them. “I may be an outlaw,” he professes, “but you’re the one who’s stealin’ my heart.” Unlike either the film’s most law-abiding or plainly unscrupulous male characters, here J. D. appears as much a product of his situation as the women, girlish in his smooth body and a≠ect, childlike in his lack of respect and understanding of consequences. As outlaws in a world structured by male spatial and temporal privileges, they will both run out of space and time. They literally slam into the furniture as their desire overtakes them, comically underscoring the literal limits on their actions and their needs. Still, as Hal later points out, J. D.’s most important function is not to grant Thelma an orgasm (“You finally got laid properly,” announces Louise on seeing Thelma’s unstoppable grin and prominent hickey), but to force the women to make a choice that marks their outlaw status absolutely. When Thelma robs the convenience store and appears on the security video mimicking J. D.’s movements and speech, the scene appears to be a translation of her performance for the male audience. Max, Hal, and Darryl all strike dumbfounded poses, and their serial declarations of shock at her dar“What All the Fuss Is About”

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Pitt and Davis, playing, childlike. Still photo courtesy of Jerry Ohlinger’s, New York.

Pitt and Davis kissing: “erotic surplus.” Frame capture.

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ing (“Good God,” “Jesus Christ,” “My Lord!”) makes them viewing subjects but also viewers’ objects: the butt of the scene’s admittedly thin joke. They are no longer possible points of identification, but observers observed, left out of the film’s subjective loop. Although this scene tends to be the last mention of J. D. in most readings of the film, in fact, he appears again, when Hal hauls him into an interrogation room. Confronting the cocky thief (caught with $6,600 of Louise’s $6,700), Hal finally has an o≠ender within reach and takes out his frustrations aggressively and righteously. The exchange highlights J. D.’s appeal again, but here, less as authoritative (or sensationally talented) sex machine than as charming, clueless, and wayward youth, the “James Dean-ish” figure his name evokes. This is the one scene where Hal displays aggression, when J. D. first derides his homosocial a∞nity with uptight Max (“Hey, you two boys got a lot in common, maybe I just better step outta the room a minute”) and then his authority (“Mr. John Fuckin’ Law”). Sending Max outside, Hal sets himself on the table so he can loom over J. D., forcing him to take his cowboy-booted foot o≠ the table and hitting him with his own cowboy hat: “Those two girls out there had a chance. They had a chance and you screwed it up.” Though the film has revealed to viewers that Thelma and Louise did not want to steal money or wield guns, it is unclear that Hal could have known that, except, perhaps, as he is presented as an exceptional and instinctual judge of character. This interaction again destabilizes the film’s continually shifting moral positions. That J. D. becomes the focus of Hal’s rage—quite ludicrously, though understandably—aligns the cop with

Pitt performing the outlaw. Frame capture.

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the women, a structural convenience that allows multiple, corroborating interpretations of their sympathetic outlawness. Contrary to anxious readings that posit all the men in the film as “bad,” Hal’s interpretation and interrogation of J. D. allow a point of entry for viewers preferring to see the women as victims, with reasonable grounds for their actions. It is all J. D.’s fault. And yet, it is not: as he is being led out, past Darryl, he makes fun of the husband’s inability to pleasure his wife. Again, this makes Darryl the comically inept culprit, the man who drives Thelma to step o≠ her own edge. If Louise’s particular history remains unspoken, Thelma’s is laid out in plain language, from Darryl to J. D.: “I like your wife!” taunts J. D., thrusting his hips as he pauses on the stairwell, Darryl’s point of view casting him as the lithe young rock ’n’ roll king he imagines himself to be. With this image of the boy-who-could-become-Darryl—at once seductive and obnoxious, playful and hopelessly self-interested—Thelma & Louise reinforces the women’s maddening lack of options. In this, however, the film reveals its complexity and insight. Neither transparent feminist tract nor naïve inversion of a gendered moral configuration (girls good/boys bad), the film tends to embrace transgression, crosses and recrosses definitional boundaries. Inflated with a romanticism at once self-mocking and self-righteous reminiscent of the ur-buddy movie, 1969’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (toward which the final freeze-frame surely gestures), Thelma & Louise establishes a fluctuating space and time, where binarism only seems inescapable. As the women become mythic within the film (“You bitches from hell!” screams the truck driver when they blow up his vehicle),

J. D.: “I like your wife.” Frame capture.

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they more directly mimic each other, their hair swept up in the desert heat, their faces tanned and dirt-streaked. From their location in the front seat of their car, they move through a landscape seemingly strewn with masculine iconography: drills, trucks, pumps, trains, and crop dusters. These machines roar and spit across the screen, drowning out the women’s dialogue, cutting into the gorgeous, not-quite-expansive-enough vista. Brief shots of their final kiss and entwined hands fragments their shared experience and mutual commitment, gesturing toward the o≠-screen space made momentarily visible in the flight over the Grand Canyon. Here possibilities are simultaneously closed o≠ and infinite, much as J. D.’s final performance, his little pelvic dance in the police station on his way to a jail cell, suggests again his endless potential and utterly limited horizon. “I represent the guy who’s got everything. I deserve a beating, you know what I’m saying?”

This combination of limits and possibilities shapes Brad Pitt’s image since Thelma & Louise. He has played more or less typical romantic leads, in A River Runs Through It (1993), Legends of the Fall (1994), Seven Years in Tibet (1997), or Meet Joe Black (1998). Still, the majority of his performances have built on J. D.’s less-charming aspects. Sometimes he finds ways to resist leading man banality that are subtle, as in the case of David Fincher’s Seven (1997), where Pitt’s Detective David Mills, while sweet and endearing, is also occasionally fervent and twitchy, an ambitious and energetic kid in need of guidance by his older, wiser partner (Morgan Freeman). Add to this David’s emotional (if understandable) decision to execute the serial killer John Doe (Kevin Spacey) at film’s end, and so be hauled o≠ in cu≠s to face a lengthy prison sentence. Pitt’s more explicit e≠orts to debunk the petty and pretty boy rep are well known—as when he played Early Grace, the ingenious but decidedly brutal serial killer in Kalifornia (1993), the utterly wacky and decidedly oddlooking Je≠rey Goines in Twelve Monkeys (1995), the implacably ferocious and decidedly bloodied Tyler Durden in Fight Club (1999), and the nearly incoherent and decidedly pummeled Mickey O’Neil in Snatch (2000). Even as he was making the more traditional romances or the admittedly perverse Interview with a Vampire (1994), Pitt remains visibly committed to antiheroic, and emotionally complex roles, in particular those that bruise, batter, and damage his famous face. (Or limb, as in the case of Seven, when he “What All the Fuss Is About”

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famously put his arm through a windshield while performing his own stunts in a chase scene, resulting in an injury so visible that it required explanation in a revised narrative.) In this pursuit of roles that run counter to his conventional movie stardom, Pitt has been outspoken regarding his intentions to expand his professional horizons rather than deliver to expectations or repeat character types. In 1999, on the occasion of Fight Club’s release, while on vacation in Lisbon, Pitt was interviewed by Rolling Stone’s Chris Heath. For his cover photo, he wears a dress, leaning back provocatively while seated on a table strewn with used dishes and an ashtray; he smokes as he gazes at the camera, his hair buzzed to his skull, his face stubble visible. Inside the magazine, Pitt elaborates on this multiplicity, striking a muscle-proud pose, arms

Tyler Durden, pre-fighting. Frame capture, Fight Club (1999).

Pitt: “I deserve a beating.” Frame capture, Fight Club (1999).

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flexed, legs bent to reveal musculature, while he stands on a twilit beach in a sequined dress. The interview reads like a contest, in which the writer tries to conjure questions that Pitt considers worthy: “What do people commonly misunderstand about you?” “Which drugs would you never take?” And “When did you last use your vacuum cleaner?” Pitt dismisses all, brusquely but also justly. “What do you want?” asks Pitt. “There’s no story there” (1999, 72). The “story there,” the one most often told about Pitt, has to do with his celebrated beauty. (Hence, presumably, the exasperation expressed in reviews of DreamWorks’ animated Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas [2003], wherein he and the equally lovely Catherine Zeta-Jones voice characters who do not much resemble them; Pitt, meantime, referred to the character as “Sin-brad” and extolled the ease of working a couple of hours a day, just down the street from home.) In Rolling Stone, Heath asks whether Pitt’s attractiveness leads to assumptions that he is “dumb”; he rightly avoids making his own assumptions concerning consumers, saying, “I prefer not to be put in a position where I need to defend my intelligence, because I’m not going to do it” (74). During street tangles with paparazzi, he’s known to be antsy, even aggressive, but on screen, he tends to evade and retreat, into “o≠beat” roles that, he claims, challenge him or provide opportunities to work with people who interest him. He typically shows his impatience with the promotional process, in which readers and writers try to “know” him. “I represent the guy who’s got everything,” he tells Heath. “I deserve a beating, you know what I’m saying?” (70). As Pitt understands himself in relation to those who read, judge, and worship him, he might also be understood to appreciate, if not believe the philosophy espoused by Tyler Durden, that is, the “illusion of safety.” “We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession,” Tyler explains to his apparent alter ego, “Jack” (Edward Norton). “Murder, crime, poverty: these things don’t concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy’s name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra . . .” Jack interjects, “Martha Stewart.” Tyler smirks. “Fuck Martha Stewart. Martha’s polishing the brass on the Titanic. It’s all going down, man. So, fuck o≠ with your sofa units and Strinne green stripe patterns. I say, never be complete. I say, stop trying to be perfect. I say, let’s evolve. Let the chips fall where they may. But that’s me. I could be wrong.” Pitt’s delivery of this diatribe, as Tyler leans back into his diner chair, reflecting on the annihila“What All the Fuss Is About”

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tion of all of Jack’s belongings in an apartment explosion, indicates Tyler’s simultaneous arrogance and self-doubt, as this recapitulates and also expands on the persona instituted in J. D. Terrified of a loss of privilege, Tyler also sees himself as antithetical to established social orders, the very orders that grant his privilege by virtue of race, gender, age, and nationality. Pitt’s continuous resistance to the claims made on him by mainstream celebrity appears to enhance his appeal. Twice named People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive,” in 1995 and again in 2000, he was deemed “the reluctant sex symbol” in Vanity Fair’s 2003 “Hollywood Issue” (April 2003). People’s Karen S. Schneider writes that, on July 29, 2000, he “made the ultimate romantic move: He took himself o≠ the market” (2000, 78). More recently, People (December 10, 2001), Us (July 30, 2001), and mainstream “women’s magazine” Redbook (September 2002) have featured Pitt and his then-wife Jennifer Aniston on their covers as, according to Ladies’ Home Journal, “Hollywood’s Hottest and Happiest Couple” (July 2002). In each of these assessments, the hotness and happiness is based in their visible, publicly performed commitment to one another. “It’s the simple gestures that come to matter most,” writes People’s Schneider. “Witness the way Pitt

Two versions of masculinity: Pitt with Ed Norton. Frame capture, Fight Club (1999).

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kept his arm around Aniston’s waist, clutching the back of her black leather skirt at the November 19 L.A. premiere of Spy Game—and responding immediately when, several hours later, his wife tugged at his sleeve in a silent bid to go home” (2001, 111). Even aside from Schneider’s obvious dedication to her task—keeping an eagle eye on the couple’s every move all night long —the description underlines the perception of the stars’ seeming “normalcy” as extraordinary. Just by appearing comfortable and attuned with one another, Pitt and Aniston become exemplary. Similarly, Us magazine’s J. D. Heyman attests to their ability to “keep it hot.” “If it all sounds too good to be true,” Heyman writes assuredly, “even Hollywood cynics say that what Aniston and Pitt share is for real” (2001, 31). Ladies’ Home Journal’s Judy Kessler also calls them a “glaring exception” to the rule by which “the hottest couples are by no means the happiest,” quoting “a friend” as well as Aniston and Pitt from other interviews to make the case (2002, 91). The article attributes their resilience to a shared willingness to take (professional) risks, as in Aniston’s much-admired decision to star in Miguel Arteta’s The Good Girl (2001). “Pitt, too,” Kessler continues, “is known for his willingness to tackle characters completely foreign to his leading-man image” (93). Indeed, Pitt’s resistance to the usual rewards of stardom often generates approbation for his humility, as well as complaints that he is rude, tired, or grumpy. Peter Biskind, in the December 2001 issue of Vanity Fair, suggests that after Pitt has had a decade to “ponder the up- and downsides of celebrity,” he remains uncomfortable with the subject of conversation, if not the experience (274). Following Biskind’s description of the actor’s self-confidence, intelligence, and talent (with supporting quotations from Julia Roberts and Steven Soderbergh, with whom he worked on Ocean’s Eleven [2001]), the profile quotes Pitt himself: “I’ve been overextended lately. I’ve lost that quality of life, as they say” (279).1 “As they say.” Most profiles of Pitt come to this point, that he is acutely aware of what everyone says, and that he willfully resists expectations. His often expressed and keenness to “scru≠ up,” to beat up the conventional beauty he sees as a genetic accident, similarly shows resistance to a cultural imperative to claim privilege. It also reflects an understanding of the sorts of limits and possibilities embodied by J. D. in Thelma & Louise. And yet, as much as J. D. embodies a shift in thinking about masculinity, he also is one more step toward commodification and absorption. The “Brad Pitt type” introduced (or at least solidified) by J. D.’s appeal keeps on. Married or single, “What All the Fuss Is About”

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beat up or highly fashioned, Pitt remains the ideal sexual object even as he changes visibly—self-conscious and resistant, Pitt represents a complicated masculine celebrity, ever elusive and ambiguous.

Note 1. It is startling how little di≠erence five years makes. Since the completion of this chapter, Brad Pitt and his wife have divorced, and he is living with his Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005) costar Angelina Jolie. Though the film focuses on the tensions in a marriage between two super-assassins, a July 2005 W photo spread (stylized pix of suburbanish, backyard familial bliss) o≠ers another version of the same fantasy: two most beautiful people have found one another in screen dreaminess and also, apparently, in their dedication to “children” (in political and personal senses, including the birth of their daughter Shiloh in 2006) and various forms of international and environmental activism. The change in Pitt’s marital status—and his hairstyle—only seems to underline his iconic status as an object of desire. Though stories circulate that he left Aniston for Jolie, he remains beloved and admired rather than rejected by fans who imagine his sensitivity and boyishness as being of an unlikely piece.

Bibliography Biskind, Peter. “All American Heartthrob.” Vanity Fair, December 2001, 272–281, 314–316. Carlson, Margaret. “Is This What Feminism Is All About?” Time, June 24, 1991, 57. Hart, Lynda. Fatal Women: Lesbian Sexuality and the Mark of Aggression. Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press 1994. Heath, Chris. “The Unbearable Bradness of Being.” Rolling Stone, October 28, 1999, 66–74, 116. Heyman, J. D. “Happy Anniversary.” Us Weekly, July 30, 2001, 28–33. Garey, Juliann. “True Love in Hollywood.” Redbook, September 2002, 148–150. Griggers, Cathy. “Thelma and Louise and the Cultural Generation of the New ButchFemme.” In Film Theory Goes to the Movies, ed. Jim Collins, Hilary Radner, and Ava Preacher Collins. New York: Routledge, 1993, 129–141. Keating, Nicole Marie. “If Looks Could Kill: Female Gazes as Guns in Thelma and Louise.” In Bang Bang, Shoot Shoot: Essays on Guns and Popular Culture, ed. Murray Pomerance and John Sakeris. Needham Heights, Mass.: Pearson Education, 1998, 95–106. Kessler, Judy. “Hollywood’s Hottest & Happiest Couple.” Ladies’ Home Journal, July 2002, 90–93, 158–159.

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Maslin, Janet. “Lay O≠ Thelma and Louise.” New York Times, June 16, 1991, H11. Projansky, Sarah. Watching Rape: Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture. New York: NYU Press, 2001. Rapping, Elayne. “Should We Go Along for the Ride? A Critical Symposium on Thelma and Louise.” Cineaste 18:4 (December 1991): 30. Schickel, Richard. “Gender Bender.” Time, June 24, 1991, 52–56. Schneider, Karen. “The Sexiest Man Alive 2000.” People Weekly, November 3, 2000, 76–80. Schneider, Karen. “Truly Madly Deeply.” People Weekly, December 10, 2001, 108–115. Tasker, Yvonne. Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema. London: Routledge, 1998. Willis, Sharon. High Contrast: Race and Gender in Contemporary Hollywood Film. Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997.

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7

INTERVIEW WITH CALLIE KHOURI

December 19, 2002

Bernie Cook

bernie cook: I wanted to begin by asking you about what some scholars call intertextuality or the relations between films. You’ve mentioned in other interviews some of your personal experiences that helped lead to the genesis of the script for this film. I was interested in finding out which films were important to you in the writing of Thelma & Louise. callie khouri: I liked a film called Lonely Are the Brave (1962), which I think in some strange way was inspiring in that it was a person who was on the outside of the law and yet we were very much with him. In retrospect, I think it was almost more the films that didn’t exist. I was inspired more by the idea that there had never been a movie that I felt was just for me. That someone with my sensibility could just go out, and see a movie that is directed 100 percent entirely at me. The woman characters that I saw, even in so many of the 1970s movies that are so revered, were certainly not women that I knew or could relate to or felt in any way were representative of my experience of the world, with the exception of movies like Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974). I just felt very left out. bernie cook: So you were addressing a perceived absence in American film. When I teach Thelma & Louise, students want to think about films like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), especially in relationship to the ending of the film. Was that film ever consciously part of your process? callie khouri: It wasn’t actually. Of course, after you’ve finished something you say, I guess there’s some relationship to it, but I certainly didn’t watch Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid while I was writing it. Mainly, more that the emotional or story content of particular films, learning 168

to speak the visual language became the primary purpose of most of my viewing. I didn’t really watch a lot of movies while I was actually writing. I had watched thousands of movies, never once thinking I even wanted to write. It didn’t dawn on me that that’s what I was going to end up doing. You can obviously see, though, that it has a relationship to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in that there are two characters and they end in kind of a grand way. But it wasn’t something I thought about consciously. My aspirations at that time were as humble as, “Let’s see if I can finish this.” Never having written anything before, that was my main goal, just to complete it. bernie cook: Your description of how your own viewing habits influenced your writing suggests another point of interest to film studies. The argument is often made that, regardless of the intentions of the filmmakers, there are other sets of associations that audiences are always going to bring to bear. For example, a student may have seen Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and then looked at Thelma & Louise, thinking through the ending of the two films in relation to each other. Do viewers misread, or are their own “projections” legitimate?

Callie Khouri’s Thelma & Louise? Frame capture, Thelma & Louise: The Last Journey.

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callie khouri: It depends. Once something has been written and filmed, people’s perception of it are completely out of your control, but, I have to say, I was shocked at some of the preposterous presumptions some people made about the movie. For instance, a film reviewer, and I use that word in the loosest possible sense with this guy, who calls himself Joe Bob Briggs, decided that our use of the name “Silver Bullet” as the location of the bar where Thelma’s attempted rape occurred has some special significance, a sexual connotation of some sort, when in fact the actual name of the location was indeed “The Silver Bullet” and they asked that we use it as a condition of allowing us to film there. There was another reviewer who determined that the cop in the trunk of the car, sticking his finger through the bullet hole in the trunk to indicate where the keys were, was intended as a phallic symbol and that that image was specifically designed to emasculate and humiliate men. Aside from the fact that it wasn’t in the script, that scene was added to make sure that people knew that he wouldn’t bake in the trunk of the car. A lot of the academic criticism and analysis is too mind-boggling to go into. Su∞ce it to say, people sure do come up with some cockamamie ideas about what is “intended” by the filmmakers, and what particular images “mean.” On the other hand, the emotional associations that people make, the way they relate to the characters psychically, or on a feeling level, is perfectly legitimate. That will just be their own private experience, to which they are justly entitled. bernie cook: You mentioned films of the late 1960s and early 1970s, like Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. When I teach New American Cinema, students connect Thelma & Louise with Easy Rider. Was there a sense as you were writing this film that it was a road movie? Was genre important to you? callie khouri: The genesis of it was very strange. The whole idea came in one flash. It was almost like I had a nanosecond of seeing the entire movie, and then I had to write it. None of the details were worked out. I had to kind of start with, okay, who are these women that end up doing this thing? I saw them in the very beginning and I saw them in the very end, and I felt everything that transpired in the course of it. The idea literally came—two women go on a crime spree. But it wasn’t two women who had any criminal intent. It was two women who found who they were in the series of accidents that happened, that required 170

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Reaction shot: Thelma after shooting Harlan. Frame capture.

every action that they take to take them further outside the law until they had just become themselves. I knew the ending, and that’s what I was writing toward. First, I had to figure where they started and who they were when they started and all that you have to know about your characters before you begin. And second, I wanted to write a movie where you absolutely had no idea what was going to happen next. And then when it did, it was obviously the only action that they could have taken at the time to get them out of whatever situation they were in. As far as the attempted rape scene, the reaction to that was one of the things that was really surprising to me because when I wrote that I always imagined that people would be very stunned and quiet, realizing that Louise had just made the biggest mistake of her entire life. That she had just done something so completely unexpected and wrong. The idea that people in the movie theater, at least the first time I saw it, cheered when that happened was one of the most terrifying moments of my life. bernie cook: How do you understand that sort of response? callie khouri: I understand it as an expression of revenge. And when any powerless group of people sees someone standing up and refusing to be victimized, it elicits a very powerful response. That’s certainly a situation that a lot of women can see as extremely plausible, of being attacked in a parking lot by a guy who you thought was a nice guy. I think, first of all, I just underestimated how angry a lot of people are, and, second, I think there is a knee-jerk response to violence as entertaining, even though in Interview with Callie Khouri

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most cases I find it the opposite of entertaining. I find it quite disturbing and threatening. But it seems that there’s this kind of Jerry Springer mentality at work, where people like to see stu≠ like that happen. bernie cook: When I screen the film, some students become very quiet because the violence marks an incredible tonal shift at that point in the film from the sort of fun of the early part of the road trip and the roadhouse, the songs, the dancing. When Harlan takes Thelma outside things change markedly and then Louise enters the picture. What for me separates that moment from some of the rape/revenge films usually located in the exploitation genre, is the humanness of the moment for Louise. That it both is and is not a crime of passion. The beat that you give her after she’s taken control of Harlan, before she goes ahead and shoots him anyway, seems crucially important. How important is consequentiality to the representation of violence in film? callie khouri: I think it’s extremely important. It’s the one thing that I feel is missing in most of the movies I see. I feel like so much of the violence you see in movies is completely inconsequential. It’s really just a device to move the action, but it doesn’t have an e≠ect on the characters in terms of what the real e≠ect of actual violence is. I’ve been held up at gunpoint twice, and I can tell you right now, as soon as there’s a gun in the equation everything is very, very di≠erent— time slows down, everything changes. It’s a life-changing moment. And that’s why the next movie I did I didn’t want to have a gun. I use them only sparingly.

The consequences of violence. Frame capture.

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I also feel like it’s much more di∞cult to write a movie without guns. And so just from a pure writing challenge, to not have this thing that can so easily turn the plot, you really have to be thinking, and you really have to be good, because a gun is so easy. bernie cook: Thelma & Louise ends with lots of guns, but for the largest portion of the film there is only one gun. It’s the gun that Thelma takes from Darryl, the gun that Louise then uses to kill Harlan. By reducing it to the one gun, you get to use the second act of the film to have them react to this moment instead of just hurtling on. They’re moving through the landscape, but they’re also still back there in the parking lot. callie khouri: Yes, they’re completely, inextricably stuck in that moment. No matter where they go, they’re never going to be past that. Also, in some small way, the scene is based on this phrase that people say—I, myself, have said, I hear people say it all the time—if I had had a gun in my hand, I would have killed them. And just the moment at which that becomes true, to actually have a gun in your hand at the moment that the universe conspires to put you in that situation where someone says something to you and some part of yourself, that you had no idea existed or that you had no idea that you couldn’t control, is suddenly there. And you just did that thing that is impossible. bernie cook: Do you feel that some of the critical response to the film is linked to ambivalence about women picking up or taking up that gun? callie khouri: First of all, if you go back and read a lot of the popular criticism of it, it makes it sound like they were on a murderous rampage all across the country. And they make it seem like it was Badlands (1973) or something or they were randomly picking o≠ guys. There was one murder during an attempted rape, and after that there was some destruction of private property and an armed robbery. By movie standards, the violence was so minimal that it’s hard to imagine that people reacted the way they did. John Leo in U.S. News & World Report, called it “neo-fascist.” It blew my mind that Thelma & Louise would be even discussed in U.S. News & World Report or on Crossfire. Somebody called me and said they were debating the movie on Crossfire. And I said, “No, you’ve got to be mistaken. That’s a political show; they talk about politics on that show. And they said, “No, I watched it.” I said “No, you can’t be right.” At the time, I

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just couldn’t comprehend that it would be discussed as anything beyond a summer entertainment movie. I was so surprised that the violence got taken out of the cinematic context and was discussed as if it was intended to be a directive to women everywhere, instead of just a dramatic device that is so common in movies as to go unmentioned ninety percent of the time. But in any case, I just feel that if you had done that very same movie and you had a guy come out to the parking lot, catch this happening—Louise could be standing there holding a gun. He could take the gun, the guy could mouth o≠ to him, he would shoot the guy and say, “Get in the car,” and run. There would have been no movie, because that would have been so commonplace, it would be completely unremarkable. bernie cook: You have remarked elsewhere about the double standard in play with the criticism of films like Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), a contemporary example where the film is wall-to-wall shootings and mayhem, or Total Recall (1990), a film in which Sharon Stone’s character is murdered by Arnold Schwarzenegger, the protagonist. And there’s this sort of joke that he throws in. callie khouri: “Consider this a divorce.” bernie cook: What do you think was in play in culture more broadly in the early ’90s? Thelma & Louise was released and quickly became a lightening rod for conservative social critics. callie khouri: I always kind of leave that for others to argue because I really don’t know. I know that I had been watching movies the prior decade, basically shaking my head going, “What the hell happened? What is this about?” Just kind of wanton violence, never seeing women in roles that caused anything but shame. bernie cook: In Backlash, Susan Faludi o≠ers a reading of the context in which your film was attacked as being an antifeminist response against political and social gains by women. She writes about Fatal Attraction, Adrian’s Lyne’s film released in 1987. Do you have any thoughts about that film’s representation of women and violence vis-à-vis what you were attempting to accomplish? callie khouri: I felt like this is, first of all, a situation that is so much more likely to happen in reverse. A guy is so much more likely to become obsessed and stalk a woman and then kill her. It was some kind of strange fantasy. In terms of the likelihood, comparatively, it just seems like night 174

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and day. Every single day you hear about a guy who has taken out his whole family and then killed himself or has shown up in court because his wife is divorcing him, so he kills her. If he can’t have her, no one will. bernie cook: It seems as if the popularity of Fatal Attraction suggests that Lyne and James Deardon, the screenwriter, were tapping into— ambivalence is maybe a generous way of putting it—antipathy toward women, toward the character of Alex (Glenn Close) in that film as a very successful professional woman, and the film works to turn her into a monster so that the audience can enjoy her death in the end. callie khouri: The other thing that I think is really bizarre about that whole thing, and this is completely left out, is when she tells him she’s pregnant. And I’m just thinking, wow, so he’s had this a≠air, he’s knocked her up, and she’s the crazy one? bernie cook: Then his killing of her in the end becomes a way of aborting this child that he doesn’t want, in a very disturbing way that does get glossed over. Male audiences responded to Fatal Attraction by cheering Dan (Michael Douglas) and Beth’s (Anne Archer) double killing of Alex. How did male viewers respond to the representation of violence in Thelma & Louise?

Alex (Glenn Close) attacks Dan (Michael Douglas). Frame capture, Fatal Attraction (1987).

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callie khouri: Of course, there was not one general male response. I wish I had a nickel for every time a guy came up and said to me, “I’m one of the few guys that liked this.” Guys have embraced this film every bit as much as women. But, having said that, there were plenty of men who took great o≠ense at seeing themselves represented as secondary characters, the roles usually reserved for women. I also often said to men who said they felt the film was hostile toward males, “Then obviously you were identifying with the wrong characters. Now you can see why women are complaining about the way they are represented in most films.” It’s always very gratifying to point that out. bernie cook: In my classes, many male students aren’t threatened in the same way that some of these conservative cultural critics were in the earlier 1990s, and they respond to the film very positively. What do you think the film is saying about masculinity? The film is always assumed to be a statement about women’s experience, but I think the film has some interesting things to say about men and masculinity as well. callie khouri: First of all, I didn’t direct the movie, so there are slight di≠erences in the way certain things are handled as opposed to how I meant them to be dealt with. I think the truck driver, in particular, is a much more cartoonish rendition of that character than I had ever intended. It was, in some ways, a male director and a male actor making the choice to make a cartoon and a bu≠oon and a kind of nonthreatening character out of someone who is in reality very threatening. Because when you’re driving down the road and a total stranger starts making sexual gestures at you and you’re female, there is an implied threat in that behavior—and I think the same is true for men when other men make sexual gestures at them. It’s like people always justify a homosexual being beaten to a pulp if he made a pass at a strange man. And every time I even hear about that happening I think, my heart’s pumping piss water for you, pal. That’s what women go through every single day—unwanted overtures by men they don’t know. But if you look at the script, there is a variety of masculine behavior, so I wasn’t saying just one thing about it. I showed the best of men and the worst. I always wonder why men who hated the way males were depicted didn’t identify more with the Harvey Keitel character. Here was a guy who was really trying to help them, really trying to see past their actions into what was motivating them. He really wanted to save them. I could 176

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go on about this, but the fact is I wasn’t writing a treatise, I was writing an outlaw movie, so I wasn’t necessarily interested in making blanket statements about men or women. bernie cook: In your interview with Jodi Burke, published as a preface to the Thelma & Louise screenplay in the Grove Press edition, you mentioned that you had originally intended to go forward with Thelma & Louise as an independent film with Amanda Temple. What do you think was enabled by your decision to go with Ridley Scott’s production company and the larger budget that came with it, and what do you think might have been compromised? How would it have been a di≠erent film if you had directed your debut with independent financing? callie khouri: First of all, it would have been a much smaller film just because I didn’t have $18 million and never intended to make it for that. I was really surprised that they could spend $18 million on it. But now that I’ve made a movie, I’m not surprised at all. It was one of those moments in time where I could either go on for the next five years trying to convince somebody to give me enough money to get this thing made or I could have this person who felt very passionate about it get it made now. Also, at that same moment, Amanda found out she was pregnant with her first child, so she wasn’t going to be able to produce it in a timely way. And it just seemed like the obvious thing to do was to let Ridley Scott produce it. And he wasn’t even attached to direct at that time. They shopped it to other directors, but no women that I am aware of. In terms of the way certain scenes were handled, it would have been di≠erent. The character of Louise in the script was a much less aggressive and hostile character. She was protective. But there were a couple of moments where, had I directed it, it would have not have happened or it would not have been played the way they were. For example, in the scene in the bar when Harlan comes over to talk to Thelma and Louise, Susan looks right into his face and says, “I’m trying to have a conversation with my friend.” My Louise would never have made eye contact. She would have turned her head in his direction, not looked at him, and said, “I’m trying to have a conversation with my friend”—in a much more shutdown way. She wouldn’t have been challenging him. And I think had it been played that way and then you see this very same woman, who obviously doesn’t cower but isn’t confrontaInterview with Callie Khouri

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tional and isn’t challenging, to see her then in the situation where she has to take this guy on, it would have been very di≠erent. There was another moment where she was walking out of a store and this guy is looking at her and she says, “What are you looking at?” That wasn’t in the script. bernie cook: It makes her angrier and more as if she’s seeking confrontation. callie khouri: Exactly, and this is a woman who would have avoided confrontation at all costs. As far as she knew, the shooting was completely, in every way, out of character for her. She could not explain how that happened or where that came from or that she even had that in her, that anger in response to powerlessness. That response to powerlessness, of just all of a sudden, at that one moment, everything coming together to commit that act would have been out of the realm of possibility in her mind, until the moment it happened. bernie cook: Elsewhere in the film she demonstrates a careful and articulated knowledge of the system that stands against them. Thelma is naïve, but Louise is experienced. Louise knows full well where this trip is going to end much earlier than Thelma realizes it. callie khouri: Part of that is the backstory that I wrote for Louise and gave to Susan Sarandon. In the backstory, Louise had been in Texas and had a job and a group of friends. But the guy who raped her was a cop, a friend. It was a similar situation; it was a guy she knew. bernie cook: Why was he a cop? What was the significance of that? callie khouri: Just because she had no recourse. She wasn’t going to be able to report it. She wasn’t going to be able to do anything. All she was going to be able to do was move. She worked as a waitress on the night shift, so she didn’t have to be at home by herself at night. bernie cook: And what was behind the decision to keep the backstory out of the film, to keep it only suggested? callie khouri: Because at that point, it’s like it doesn’t matter because everybody has their story. Everybody has their reasons, and it doesn’t matter. My point is, you never know what has happened to someone, what secret is in their past, that will cause them to react to someone or some event in an unexpected way. I am trying to say that everyone deserves the respect that you would accord them if you knew their backstory. When a strange man speaks to a woman he doesn’t know, espe178

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cially in a sexual or suggestive way, how does he know that she hasn’t experienced some past trauma or that his action is particularly threatening because of a prior experience. He doesn’t. So the fact that this particular man (Harlan) was confronted by this particular woman (Louise) is random, and, therefore, her backstory is immaterial. Just the luck of the draw, so to speak. Also, a little bit of the dialogue was rewritten or improvised by the actresses. In the truck driver scene—is that how you talk to your mother or your wife or whatever? That was kind of suggested, but it was like, “Is that how you talk to women you don’t even know?” Because the fact of the matter is when guys do that, they really don’t know whom they’re talking to. When a stranger speaks to you on the street, women are always told to just ignore it. Why? Because if you say something then the man might hurt you? That acknowledges an implied threat. I was merely suggesting that that being the case, it might be asking a little much to just ask women to be good sports about that kind of behavior. bernie cook: And you felt that Louise struggled between a self-protective impulse to saying nothing and a building anger that manifests itself in this moment? callie khouri: Yes. But I was also trying to point out how the random confluence of people and events can conspire to change everything. How in one moment everything you ever thought to be true no longer is, and how seemingly unrelated experiences add up to make us a total mystery, even to ourselves. Especially to ourselves. This is the struggle that exists within all of us. bernie cook: Was your decision to direct, as well as write, related to these experiences that we’re talking about, having to surrender your script to somebody else? callie khouri: That’s every writer in Hollywood. That’s not just me. That’s everybody who has ever written a script and handed it over to somebody else to direct. Even when you do direct it, the way a script changes from script to screen can be pretty dramatic. But you certainly give up any modicum of control when you hand it over to somebody else. That said, I think Ridley did a brilliant job. bernie cook: I do not think of that decision on your part as a compromise only, but I think that the tensions between your vision and what Interview with Callie Khouri

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Ridley Scott and Adrian Biddle and others in the process brought to the film are very productive. callie khouri: Ridley and I spent a tremendous amount of time talking about the look of the film. From the standpoint of production design, I said it should start out looking like everything’s come from a Sears catalog. Then, by the end, the setting in the west should look like a cross between Maxfield Parrish and photo-realism. And I think they certainly achieved those looks. bernie cook: Often, film scholarship has chosen to recognize the director as auteur, linking director to film, for example, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde. What is at stake in the naming of this film? Should it be Callie Khouri’s Thelma & Louise or Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise? callie khouri: In many ways, I think it’s probably a lot closer to my sensibility than it is to his. And that’s not the first it’s come up. The film stands in closer relationship to me in many ways than to him. I think, as a screenwriter, probably until Charlie Kaufman came along with his extremely distinct voice and point of view, I was most closely connected to my material. It is my film in that way. I don’t think I’m very di≠erent from a lot of writers who feel about their work—the idea was mine, the characters were mine, therefore, the movie is mine. bernie cook: In some ways, film scholarship is to blame for the emphasis on the director. New York critic Andrew Sarris popularized the Cahiers du Cinema’s politique des autuers for American readers and viewers, establishing the “auteur theory” as a dominant interpretive strategy. Do you feel like Thelma & Louise contains multiple voices? Yours, Scott’s, perhaps others at MGM, and so forth? callie khouri: At times, I can’t really tell where my feelings end and somebody else’s vision begins. Going back to Andrew Sarris’s thing, a friend of mine, Ed Solomon, a screenwriter, was talking about the auteur theory in an interview one time. He said, “You know, it’s always assumed that it’s the director that has vision, when oftentimes what they have at best is style, and at worst, eyesight.” And I think that is unfortunately the case a lot of times in American cinema where the director is not the person who has written the film. The thing with the auteur theory is that in France, in any case, those weren’t directors who were finding scripts and being hired by studios to direct them. They were working with that writer themselves or they 180

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wrote it themselves. And they were making it with their money, do you know what I mean? They actually were auteurs. That’s not really the system that we have in place here. Directors are for hire for the most part. bernie cook: Even in this age of production companies and packaging? callie khouri: Yes. You get sent scripts all the time that you didn’t write, and there’s already a star attached. You come onto a project often a lot later as a director, and I think in that situation it’s really hard to claim authorship. I really think that the “film by” credit is an abomination because not only does it disregard the writer, but I think a director of photography, a production designer can claim every bit as much authorship in a visual medium. It’s a collaborative medium, so why all the whining about acknowledging that and not having one person take credit for the contributions of so many? bernie cook: Your argument about visualization seems particularly apposite with Scott because he’s known as a stylist, someone who is known more for the visuals than for a consistency of theme or treatment or tone. Do you feel like in the films you’ve made since Thelma & Louise, Grace under Pressure (1995), which you wrote but did not direct, and then Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (2002), which you rewrote and directed, are you yourself developing what you see as a consistent set of concerns? callie khouri: In reality, you do what comes your way. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood was not something I ever saw myself doing. It wasn’t something I pursued passionately for years or any of that. It was literally—we want you to do this film and you can direct it. And your long national nightmare of not getting to direct what you write will soon be over. Thus, it was more about opportunity than about needing to say more about women’s relationships. You take the opportunities that you’re presented with and you make the best of them. Fortunately, I got to rewrite the script into the story that I felt I wanted to tell. bernie cook: In your example, creative executives and producers act like auteur critics: reviewing the body of your work and identifying consistencies of treatment and theme. callie khouri: A part of that is market driven. Like when you do something successfully one time, I guarantee you that the very next thing you’re o≠ered is not going to be 180-degree turn from what you did sucInterview with Callie Khouri

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cessfully; it’s going to be a 15-degree di≠erence if you’re lucky. But basically they want you to do the same thing you did before. Do that thing you did on that to this. This is business. That’s really the long and short of it. bernie cook: I sense from this line of conversation that you’re interested in departing from what could be called “melodrama” or “women’s pictures” or films that continue to emphasize women’s relationships and friendship. Is that where you’re heading from here, do you think, or at least the next step? callie khouri: I only want to do what’s interesting to me. Certainly in terms of the films that I like, that’s extremely varied. The thing is that what I find attracts me is something that I feel is true and funny. I’m probably not going to become a director of dark dramas. I’m probably not going to be a director of thrillers because I’m just not that interested in those. bernie cook: I think an interesting film here to maybe point up some of the di≠erences between your sensibility and Scott’s sensibility is a film like G.I. Jane (1997). This is the opening paragraph of a review of Thelma & Louise from 1991, written by Cynthia Fuchs, a contributor to this anthology. This was written for the Philadelphia City Paper. She begins the review by saying, “On the face of it, the concept of a women’s buddy road movie seems retro and irrelevant. Why emulate a formula so familiar and so fraught with reprehensible politics? It’s sort of like becoming a Marine to declare equality with the guys. Why join up when it’s the system itself that’s invidious?” And then she goes on in the review to talk about the ways in which Thelma & Louise actually does engage that problematic. If G.I. Jane seems to literalize Fuchs’s critique of the political possibilities of the women’s buddy road movie, by creating a female Marine, does Thelma & Louise avoid the “reprehensible politics” of the male buddy movie? callie khouri: Thelma & Louise pretty closely follows the structure of a classic outlaw movie. It just feels di≠erent because it’s so unusual to see female characters put into such active roles, and it doesn’t pander or put them willingly into the role of sexual object, which turned out to be something that some men (and women) found objectionable. In fact, some put forth the idea that, because they were so flatly unwilling to be objectified, they were obviously lesbians. If they wouldn’t fit into one sex182

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ual paradigm, compliant object, then they must be put into the other, angry dyke. In any case, I’m not sure I agree that all the politics of male buddy movies is inherently reprehensible. I’m not sure I’m comfortable grinding that particular axe. bernie cook: G.I. Jane contains considerable violence, but is a film that I don’t recall being criticized for its representation of violence. callie khouri: No, because if you put violence in a male context it’s unremarkable. bernie cook: What’s striking to me about the two films in juxtaposition is the di≠erent connotations and meanings of almost the exact same line of dialogue—suck my dick or suck my cock. In Thelma & Louise it’s Harlan, and, in part, the line of dialogue precipitates Louise’s gesture. In G.I. Jane it’s Demi Moore herself. callie khouri: Right, exactly. The gender politics is, first of all, one of my least favorite subjects just because it’s never anything that’s going to be resolved. I can’t tell you over the years how many di≠erent variations of interpretation—from what are you saying, that women have to be like men? Why, if they stand up for themselves, do they have to die? And it’s like, well, I meant none of those things. That’s your interpretation of that. I wasn’t saying that at all.

Demi Moore joins the Marines. Frame capture, G.I. Jane (1997).

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I wasn’t even saying that they died. You can draw whatever conclusions you want. But if you talk to a lot of people, Thelma & Louise is a quintessential half-full, half-empty glass of water. bernie cook: You suggest that Thelma & Louise is what literary scholars call an “open text,” a text that allows for various readings. callie khouri: Exactly, as it’s meant to. I always say why do you say they die? Why not understand that they leapt out into the mass unconscious? You’re asking me about it ten years later, so clearly we didn’t shoot a smoking pile of twisted steel at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. We left them in midair. That wasn’t because they ran out of film. bernie cook: It leaves plausible room for allegorical and metaphorical readings. callie khouri: Exactly. What do you have to do to get viewers to acknowledge multiple possibilities? bernie cook: Do you have any feelings about the way the ending was shot? You describe this ending as central to your vision, how you began with it, how you knew at the outset that this was their end. In writing the film, you had to reconstruct the journey, to get them to this end. Any feelings about how the ending was filmed? callie khouri: I really thought it was quite beautiful. First of all, it’s a di∞cult thing to do. And I thought it was quite beautiful. I really would have preferred not to go to the kind of flashback montage at the end. I think it would have been really nice to just leave it as it was. bernie cook: The return to the still images of Thelma and Louise reminds me of the conclusion of The Wild Bunch, which ends with a cataclysmic orgy of violence where all the principals die. After the shooting stops, the film cuts to this montage of the actors laughing—William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, and the others. callie khouri: I can only imagine that the studio (MGM) insisted on the addition. The ending of Thelma & Louise was very emotional for a lot of people. And obviously something caused them to add the still images. And I think in the testing or somewhere along the line, someone said you’ve got to do something to soften the blow a little bit. bernie cook: Did MGM understand the film, do you think? callie khouri: I think they did. Originally, when we were going to other studios, Ridley had in his contract that he was going to be able to shoot that ending, which was huge, huge. They reserved the right, I’m sure, not 184

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to do it. And, in fact, at one point I think they did test an ending where you kind of see the car goes along on a dirt road—kind of half there or something. I never saw that, thank God—that would have put me in the hospital—but it didn’t test well in that version. I do feel that it was very brave for a studio to go along with it and also very brave of Ridley to insist that he have it his way. It was not an inexpensive shot. bernie cook: In this anthology, Victoria Sturtevant writes on comedy in Thelma & Louise, examining the freedom and exhilaration of the road, the inversion of social orders, including gender. How threatening do you think female laughter is and how empowering do you think it is? callie khouri: I think laughter is always empowering. I think as soon as you see something that you recognize and it’s funny and it’s not presented in a condescending way, but a way that is something that you’re obviously meant to identify with. I think that you get a real validation from that, whether you’re a man or a woman. I guess if they don’t want women to be having a good time, then it’s terribly threatening. bernie cook: In the film, you stage this delicious diminishment of figures who are so wrapped up in symbols of male authority, such as the scene where Thelma and Louise put the highway trooper in the trunk of his car. The spatial inversion accentuates the shift in dynamics: in a low angle shot, Thelma and Louise tower above the trooper as he enters the tight space of the trunk. callie khouri: The other thing is that when you listen to the dialogue in that scene, they are apologizing. They are so unbelievably polite. I think that’s what makes it as funny as anything else, more than just turning that relationship on its ear. The fact that they do it with complete and utter respect for the guy—it’s like, I’m really, really sorry about this, but we have to do this. But they’re apologizing in every sentence. bernie cook: My Georgetown colleague, linguistics professor Deborah Tannen, would make a lot of that moment. She’s written on the way women are socialized to ritually apologize. callie khouri: It struck me as true somehow. People always wonder what my experience with the police is like—is it confrontational or whatever. I am just like Thelma and Louise in this scene. I am extremely polite and respectful at all times of authority figures. bernie cook: Another contributor, Susan Knobloch, writes about performance in the film. And since I know that you began training as an acInterview with Callie Khouri

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tress in college and then after, I wonder what impact that training might have on your writing? callie khouri: I think performing has influenced my writing in every way. I certainly try to write something that I know is going to be fun to perform. I want my actresses to feel, I can’t wait to say those lines. I really want to write in a way that leaves plenty of room for actors to infuse themselves into the film. bernie cook: You’ve spoken before about how the casting of Sarandon in particular di≠ered from your initial vision of the character of Louise. callie khouri: I think originally the way I envisioned the character of Louise was somebody that was a lot more conservative looking. You know Naomi Judd? How properly she’s always put together? Even if she’s being wild, her makeup is perfect, her hair is perfect. And I always thought, my, God, she’s such a beautiful woman. I have no idea what she would look like without her makeup because that is a mask that she presents to the world, which in my mind completely hides what she actually looks like. Something about that is really interesting to me. bernie cook: And you don’t feel that came across in the film as much? callie khouri: In the film, Louise is not someone who hides what she actually looks like. I intended to reveal this inner beauty as the makeup came o≠. Susan Sarandon just doesn’t have the kind of face that can be hidden. bernie cook: You’ve said elsewhere that you didn’t write the moment later in the film where she takes o≠ her jewelry and gives it away or tosses it. Did Scott add that scene? callie khouri: Yes, but again, I felt like that moment was accomplished when she throws the lipstick out of the window. This scene seemed to telegraph the earlier idea. bernie cook: Another contributor, Claudia Gorbman, writes about the soundtrack and the score. I wondered how involved you were. In the screenplay you, at times, mentioned particular music that you had conceived—most prominently is the B.B. King song that you wanted at the end of the film. Were you involved in any way other than that level? callie khouri: Not tremendously, no. bernie cook: What do you feel is the impact of the choices in the final film?

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callie khouri: I’d have to say I’m 90 percent happy. bernie cook: What’s the 10 percent? callie khouri: The Marianne Faithfull song (“The Ballad of Lucy Jordan”) I felt was a little over the top. bernie cook: In another chapter, Cindy Fuchs considers Brad Pitt and his introduction via this film. What is his importance to this film? callie khouri: I think, obviously, Brad had a tremendous impact on the film because he’s just so damn beautiful. And it really did kind of take it into the realm of fantasy . . . again, if you flipped it and it was two guys and they picked up a woman, it would have to have been the female equivalent of Brad Pitt. It would have been extremely appealing to men. I think women looked at Brad in that same context, a sexual fantasy figure. He served several purposes. Good for the plot, easy on the eyes. Some women wondered how I could put her in the position to be with this guy not even eighteen hours after being assaulted. To me there’s a huge di≠erence between getting to fuck Brad Pitt and getting raped. I don’t connect the two things in my mind, and neither did Thelma. I needed Thelma to have one great night. I needed that for a lot of reasons. I needed it because I needed them to lose all the money. bernie cook: The introduction of Brad Pitt is another important inversion. Both the women within the fiction and female viewers have access to fantasy in way that’s often denied in road or buddy films. Did you conceive of this film as a feminist film? callie khouri: No, I did not. In terms of it being some kind of manifesto or a lot of the things that were assigned to it, I did not. I just don’t know how you could write a film if you thought, I am going to write a feminist movie. I just think that’s a really bad place to start because a story has to be organic, it has to be alive. I just think, that if you start from a political place, then what’s real? I just feel like I can’t say with any conviction that it was meant to be perceived as a feminist statement. That being said, do I consider myself feminist? Yes. Do I consider myself a radical feminist? No. Do I believe in equal social, political, and economic rights for women? Absolutely. Do I believe in choice? Absolutely. Do I believe that women should be men? No. And none of that was at work when I was writing this film. I was literally trying to write a movie that, if I were to walk into the

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theater and sit down, I would be entertained. I would be surprised. I would feel that someone was trying to make a movie that I would like. And believe me, I had no idea that this movie was ever going to get made. bernie cook: Did you feel that, at the time of release, you had to distance yourself from feminism to a certain extent? callie khouri: Not at all, and I still don’t feel that way. bernie cook: In your recent commencement address at Sweetbriar College, you also review your politics and beliefs, your relations to feminism. Would you argue that these beliefs do not inform the film? callie khouri: No. But it’s not what the film was about. Really in hindsight, it’s nothing more or less than an outlaw movie. And just the idea that there had not been an outlaw movie for women I think was enough, an outlaw movie in which they were not prostitutes. The way our society seems to accept outlaw women, is if you’re still for sale. And they were not for sale. bernie cook: In your film, the female outlaws enjoy agency, some degree of self-determination even in the face of forces that are unyielding. They choose in the end. callie khouri: I think so, too. And I feel that, if anything, the film was just not degrading, though some women choose to feel degraded by it. Fine, I wasn’t going to feel that way. Again, the movie was never intended to be taken literally, never meant to incite violence, never meant to engender or foster hatred toward men. I was only talking about this feeling—that if women become truly whole, completely who they are,

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true to themselves in every way, complete, self-determined, and selfdefined, then the world might not be big enough to hold them, certainly not the way it is now. It is extremely gratifying to know that the film still persists in the consciousness of the culture, whether it was perceived negatively or positively. Obviously, there have been people making strong cases for both sides for a lot longer than most filmmakers can ever hope for. But Thelma & Louise does seem to have become incorporated into the vernacular and is used as a touchstone to signify female power and integrity. Or female hostility. I will never accept the film as an exemplification of man hating or women’s anger, because that was just so far from my intention, and I believe, from Ridley’s as well. Still, it seems to hold its own place and to be either revered or despised with a lasting intensity. I think, in general, it is more often remembered fondly, and for some, profoundly. I don’t know how any writer or filmmaker could hope for more than that.

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A P P E N D I X I Commentaries

TOXIC FEMINISM ON THE BIG SCREEN John Leo U.S. News & World Report, July 10, 1991

A close friend called to say that Thelma & Louise, the new female-buddy car-chase movie, is a very disturbing film and I must write about it immediately. Since this friend is no faintheart but a strong and extremely successful woman in the movie business, I saw the film and hereby pronounce her correct, as usual. This is just one of the current bumper crop of woman-killsman movies, but it is clearly most upsetting. A colleague at this magazine said she could not come to terms with the themes and ideas so blithely unleashed in this movie, and that many of the women who sat in the audience with her seemed to leave the theater in something of a daze. What is producing this sort of anxiety? I doubt that the movie’s resolute male-bashing is the reason. Hollywood has such a long and honored tradition of misogyny that few of us would begrudge women two hours of male comeuppance. Nor is it that women are invading the male-buddy genre. Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis are at least as good at this sort of thing as Redford and Newman. And knot-in-the-stomach violence is not the problem: just one murder, one armed robbery, one exploded oil truck, one Nazilike cop reduced to blubbering at gunpoint and stu≠ed into the trunk of his police car. By the standards of Butch and Sundance, who shot up screenfuls of totally innocent Bolivians, this movie is basically underdeveloped. The problem, I think, is the dissonance created by manipulation of the audience. Once we identify with likable Thelma and Louise and the legitimacy of their complaints about men, we are led step by step to accept the nihilistic and self-destructive values they come to embody. By the time this becomes clear it is very di∞cult for moviegoers, particularly women, to bail out emotionally and distance themselves from the apocalyptic craziness 191

that the script is hurtling toward. This is precisely the issue that caused the uproar in the ’60s over Bonnie and Clyde, a far better and much less cynical movie from which this one derives.

Trucks and Hoses Louise and Thelma, sensible waitress and ditsy housewife, set out on a weekend fishing trip to escape an emotionally stunted boyfriend and a bu≠oonish, overbearing husband. Right from the start, they are hemmed in by and constantly intimidated by huge trucks, director Ridley Scott’s symbol of su≠ocating male oppression. No movie has ever budgeted so many menacing trucks or so many hoses and spraying machines aimed at women —two or three hoses, two street sprinklers, an irrigation system or two, and one crop-dusting plane. (Calling Dr. Freud: What can all this male spraying represent?) The scene is set in the Southwest, but the real landscape is that of writer Andrea Dworkin and the most alienated radical feminists. All males in this movie exist only to betray, ignore, sideswipe, penetrate or arrest our heroines. Anyone who has ever gotten to the end of a Dworkin essay knows how this movie will turn out: There is no hope for women, or for any truce in the battle of the sexes, because the patriarchy will crush all women who resist or simply try to live their own lives. Now for the really bad news about this film. Though the situation for women is hopeless, a form of pre-suicidal spiritual liberation is possible, and the key to this violence. Killing the would-be rapist makes Louise momentarily ill, but it makes her stronger, giving her, finally, the power to ditch her insu≠erable boyfriend. Thelma, the scatterbrained near-victim of rape, becomes strong and alive when she conquers her aversion to guns, commits an armed robbery, takes on various phallic trappings (including the cap of a male tormentor) and blows up one of Scott’s thumpingly obvious symbols of male power, a big truck. This brings us to many wide-eyed exclamations of spiritual liberation on the run, expressions like “Something crossed over in me,” “I feel awake,” and “Everything is di≠erent—I’ve got something to look forward to.” With this repeated paean to transformative violence, found in none of the male-buddy movies, we have left Dworkin and entered a Mussolini speech. Here we have an explicit fascist theme, wedded to the bleakest form of feminism and buried (shallowly) in a gen-

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uinely funny buddy movie. Whew! No wonder the critics worked so hard to avoid confronting what is really going on in this film. Movie criticism being what it is in America, most of the reviewers seem to have exercised their critical faculties by simply throwing their hats in the air. “Pleasingly subversive,” said Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times. Actually, no. This is a quite small-hearted, extremely toxic film, about as morally and intellectually screwed up as a Hollywood movie can get. Over 20 years ago, Pauline Kael wrote a shrewd essay about a handful of ’60s movies that touched a nerve and “entered the national bloodstream” by accidentally catching (as in Bonnie and Clyde) or consciously manipulating (as in the now forgotten movie Joe) the spreading mood of powerlessness and despair among the young. The mood is the same today. And so the problem is distinguishing between disturbing art and cynical propaganda. Sometimes, however, it’s an easy job.

GENDER BENDER Richard Schickel Time, June 24, 1991 A white-hot debate rages over whether Thelma & Louise celebrates liberated females, male bashers—or outlaws

It is “the first movie I’ve ever seen which told the downright truth,” says Mary Lucey, a lesbian activist in Los Angeles. It is a “paean to transformative violence . . . An explicit fascist theme,” writes social commentator John Leo, who went out on prospecting for a column in U.S. News & World Report and discovered a mother lode of fool’s gold. It is, according to Cathy Bell, a Houston environmental communications specialist who was once married to “a redneck control freak” and found the courage to dump him after a liberating weekend trip with a girlfriend, “like seeing my life played before my eyes.” “It justifies armed robbery, manslaughter and chronic drunken driving as exercises in consciousness raising,” charges New York Daily News columnist Richard Johnson, who also finds it “degrading to men, with pathetic

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stereotypes of testosterone-crazed behavior” and half-seriously proposes a ban on it. It is, according to Miami Herald movie reviewer Bill Cosford, “a buttkicking feminist manifesto . . . which sweeps you along for the ride.” No, says Sheila Benson, a Los Angeles Times film critic, it is a betrayal of feminism, which, as she understands it, “has to do with responsibility, equality, sensitivity, understanding—not revenge, retribution or sadistic behavior.” Whole lot of heavy thinking going on out there. Some pretty heavy journalistic breathing too. Hard to believe that the occasion for this heated exercise in moral philosophy and sociological big-think is a modest and, at its most basic level, very enjoyable little movie called Thelma & Louise, which is so far a moderate commercial success. It has earned about $20 million in its first 3 ½ weeks of release—less than a muscular big-boy movie like Robin Hood or Terminator 2: Judgment Day could expect to make on its first weekend. No matter. Thelma & Louise is a movie whose scenes and themes lend themselves to provocative discussions. What business it’s doing is in all the right places —the big cities and college towns where opinion makers are even on the alert for something to make an opinion about. For their purposes, this movie is a natural. In the most literal sense of the word. For the picture has a curiously unselfconscious manner about it, an air of not being completely aware of its own subtexts or largest intentions, of being innocently open to interpretation, appropriate and otherwise. This, indeed, is its salient redeeming quality. If it were as certain—and as clumsy—about what it was up to as its more virulent critics think it is, it might easily have been as overbearing—and as deadly—as some of their interpretations are. It is not, though, and anyone with a sense of recent film history can see Thelma & Louise in the honorable line of movies whose makers, without quite knowing what they were doing, sank a drill into what appeared to be familiar American soil and found that they had somehow tapped into a wild-rushing subterranean stream of inchoate outrage and deranged violence. Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider, Dirty Harry and Fatal Attraction—all these movies began as attempts to vary and freshen traditional generic themes but ended up taking their creators, and their audiences, on trips much deeper, darker, more disturbing than anyone imagined they were going to make.

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These are not the big-budget movies that solemnly announce the importance of their subject matter and often totter o≠ into oblivion clutching a Best Picture Oscar—emotional irrelevancy’s consolation prize. The true genre-bending films are less pretentious, less carefully calculated entertainments that may have only a hazy idea of their objectives. And (best thing about them, really) they have a way of driving some people—the ones who think movies ought to be a realistic medium or an ideologically correct one—crazy. Consciously or not, these films tend to serve as expressions of the values or confusions jangling around in their society, or discussions of them. At a time when moral discourse has been reduced to the size of a sound bit and rapid social change has everyone on edge, the messages conveyed in even the most frolicking of these movies stir peculiar passions. Such films often have an astonishing afterlife, not only in popular memory but as artifacts that vividly define their times. These times, in movies as in American society, seem defined by perilous, o≠-balance relationships between men and women. The year’s two top boxo∞ce winners, The Silence of the Lambs and Sleeping with the Enemy, dramatize the judicious revenge that a woman takes on a brutalizing man. In another new film, Alan Rudolph’s dour and inept Mortal Thoughts, two women (Demi Moore and Glenne Headly) kill a hateful husband (Bruce Willis, who lately can’t seem to get a break). The trend straddles oceans too: Luc Besson’s stylish French thriller, La Femme Nikita, is about a woman (Anne Parillaud) whose romantic life conflicts with her career as an espionage hit person. The movie summer promises more women who take their life—and a gun—in their own hands. Kathleen Turner will play a tough private eye in V. I. Warshawski. Even the budget-bustin’ action-adventure Terminator 2 o≠ers a strong female figure: Linda Hamilton is an embattled mother powerful enough to square o≠ alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger. The success of these films as popular entertainment and as clues to the zeitgeist remains to be determined. But they will have to go far to match Thelma & Louise. “Ten years from now it will be seen as a turning point,” says Peter Keough, film editor of the Boston Phoenix. He is more than likely right. Movies achieve this kind of historic stature not because they o≠er a particularly acute portrayal of the way we live now

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or because they summarize with nuanced accuracy the opposing positions in an often flatulent quasi-political debate. They work because somehow they worm their way into our collective dreamscape, retrieve the anxious images they find there and then splash them across the big screen in dramatically heightened form. That’s why most of the questions raised about Thelma & Louise seem so weirdly inappropriate. Does it o≠er suitable “role models”? Is the “violence” its heroines mete out to their tormentors really “empowering” to women, or does it represent a feckless sacrifice of the high moral ground? Is its indiscriminate “male bashing” grossly unfair to the entire sex? Should we care? As Barbara Bunker, who teaches psychology at the State University of New York, Bu≠alo, very sensibly notes, “It’s a dramatic piece, not a [literal] description of what’s going on in our society. It seems to me that drama is supposed to make things larger than life so you get the point.” Agrees Regina Barreca, who teaches English at the University of Connecticut and is the author of They Used to Call Me Snow White . . . but I Drifted, a book about women and humor: “It has got to be seen not as a cultural representation but as a fairy tale.” In other words, as a dream work, full of archetypes and exaggerations. This does not mean that Thelma & Louise is or was ever meant to be a sweet dream, a comfortable, comforting movie like, say, City Slickers. “Screenplay idea,” jotted Callie Khouri in her notebook one day in 1987: “Two women go on a crime spree.” Khouri, whose first screenplay this is, had the notion that if a female couple were somehow forced by circumstances to take up the outlaw life, they would, under the suspenseful impress of life on the lam, undergo the same kind of bonding process—sweet, funny, appealing—that male protagonists customarily experience in this kind of movie. But she also seemed to sense that just because of its o≠casting, it could have a jagged edginess that its models had long since lost. Khouri’s idea was, to borrow a term from old-time Hollywood writers, a nice little switcheroo—logical, easy to explain and not too threatening in its originality. Moreover, the times were right for it. Everyone was complaining that there were too few good roles for women in American movies—especially roles that permitted their characters to make their own decisions, control their own destiny. In fact, according to Mimi Polk, Thelma & Louise’s producer, the movie did not “pitch well” to studio executives: “The script was full of subtlety that was lost in a two-sentence description.” Polk 196

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feels, as well, that had she and her partner, Ridley Scott, proposed two male stars in the lead, they could have got a budget heftier than the $17.5 million they ultimately spent. It is possible, of course, that the Suits were just as nervous about the story that Khouri developed as some of the film’s latter-day critics have turned out to be. Hollywood is not, after all, the world capital of the new masculine sensibility. Be that as it may, the movie, which Scott (Alien, Blade Runner) eventually decided to direct himself, starts out in a low, ingratiating gear. It looks like a “buddy romp,” as Geena Davis, who plays Thelma, puts it. Thelma is married to a carpet salesman named Darryl, who represents everything stupid and stupefying about traditional masculinity, keeping Thelma in a state of near childish dependency. Her best pal, Louise (Susan Sarandon), lives with an oft traveling musician named Jimmy, who is nice enough but su≠ers from the other great modern male defect—a maddening inability to make permanent commitments. Both women feel more than entitled to shed their mates for a long weekend at a friend’s vacation retreat. On the way, they stop at a roadhouse for a drink. One of its resident lounge lizards mistakes Thelma’s naïve flirtatiousness for a come-on, follows her to the parking lot and almost succeeds in raping her. Louise rescues her at gunpoint. Then, just as you are figuring out that this is an unaccountably dark passage in an otherwise sunny film, Louise kills the would-be rapist. In cold blood. With malice aforethought, however briefly considered. It is a remarkable mood swing, one of the few authentically daring narrative coups in the cautious recent history of American film. And it is by no means a carelessly considered one. “It was a goal to make that resonate throughout the film,” according to Davis. It does, and it has a transforming e≠ect on Thelma & Louise. It lifts it beyond the reach of gags like columnist Ellen Goodman’s characterization of it as “a PMS movie, plain and simple.” More important, it lifts it beyond the e≠ective range of ideologically oriented criticism. “The violence I liked, in a way,” says Sarandon, “because it is not premeditated. It is primal, and it doesn’t solve anything.” It is also blessedly unexplained. In the aftermath of the killing, we do learn that something dreadful happened to Louise years ago. Obviously it was some kind of sexual assault, but she never reveals its exact nature. This, of course, runs counter to the conventions of popular culture. If this were Commentaries

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the TV-rape-movie-of-the-month, a hysterical revelation of the exact nature of the abuse—especially if it were, say, gang rape or years of incest— would be obligatory in order to balance the moral scales. Such an explanation would have quelled much of the “male bashing” criticism leveled at Thelma & Louise. But it would also have cheapened the movie in some measure, suggesting that some kinds of sexual violence grant their victims murderous entitlements while others do not. By leaving Louise’s mystery intact, the film implies that all forms of sexual exploitation, great or small, are consequential and damaging. Within the moral scheme of the move, writer Khouri’s choice of this particular crime as the motive for the women’s “crime spree,” instead of, say, grand theft auto, has other advantages as well. For one thing, it ironically restores Thelma and Louise to equality with men—at least in one realm of action. Says Martha Nussbaum, a philosophy professor at Brown and an expert on women in antiquity: “I think the modern idea that women are gentle and sweet is parochial. Just look at Medea.” The Greeks, Nussbaum suggests, understood that crimes are committed by those with the least access to power, which then, as now, included women. “As the ancients said, ‘No force in nature is stronger that a woman wronged.’” Or, perhaps, a woman who has had a taste of revenge and would like to gulp down more of it. Believing that no one is likely to accept their account of what happened in the parking lot, Thelma and Louise decide they have no choice but to make a run for the Mexican border. This long concluding passage of the film, rich in irony and ambiguities, is fueled dramatically by a slow, steady shift in their relationship. As Sarandon notes, Louise su≠ers “great remorse” about the murder. “It doesn’t change the world, and in the long run it doesn’t serve to her advantage.” Indeed, fear of her act’s consequences slowly undoes her former take-charge capability. She gradually cedes leadership of their little expedition to Thelma—possibly because she sees that it can end only in tragedy, while Thelma can’t see anything because she is having the time of her life. It is Thelma who spots a really cute hitchhiker by the side of the road and decides she just has to have him. With him she has great sex for the first time in her life. To him—he’s a convenience store bandit—she loses all the getaway money that Louise had scraped together from her life savings. But what might have seemed yet another rape, this time of a more symbolic kind, turns out to be a fair exchange. The hitchhiker, using Thelma’s hair 198

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dryer as a gun substitute, teaches her the tricks of his dubious trade; soon she is doing hold-ups. It is Thelma too who gets the drop on a cop who stops the two women for speeding, orders him into the trunk of his squad car, and gently warns him to be sweet to his wife, adding, “My husband wasn’t sweet to me, and look how I turned out.” Literalists criticize Thelma’s erotic awakening because, they say, it could not happen so soon after the trauma of near rape. Doubtless that would be true in circumstances less special than the ones the movie sets up. The point it’s insisting on is that a sudden access of freedom is eroticizing as well as empowering. By the same token, some representatives of the world’s largest minority, the humor-impaired, regard the women’s response to an oil-tank trucker with whom they keep playing fender tag as excessive. Every time they encounter him, the guy proves by word, smirk and obscene gesture that he’s a chauvinist dinosaur. When he inquires if they’re “ready to get serious,” they reply encouragingly. What he doesn’t know, of course, is that they’re thinking metaphorically, with a little help from director Scott, with whose surrealistic reinvention of the West—one-third desert, one-third industrial wasteland, one-third un-zoned strip development—this oil-truck rig fits right in. In Scott’s eyes, and his heroines’, it is a gigantic penis. And, yes, they are ready for that. Ready to blow it to smithereens with their little guns. It is, as SUNY-Bu≠alo’s psychologist Bunker says, “a fabulous move dramatically, a catharsis for all those times you’ve taken something and couldn’t give it back.” But taken together with some of the women’s other acts, does it represent an excessive response to the provocation? Sarandon insists not. She says the charge shows “what a straight, white male world movies traditionally occupy. This kind of scrutiny does not happen to Raiders of the Lost Ark or that Schwarzenegger thing [Total Recall] where he shoots a woman in the head and says, ‘Consider that a divorce.’” Sarandon insists that all concerned spend a lot of time making sure Thelma & Louise didn’t turn into “a bloodlust-revenge film.” Certainly, compared with the typical male-action film, the violence here is spare and rather chastely staged. But that’s not really the issue. What people sense, particularly in Davis’s performance, is that she is getting o≠ on her newly discovered taste and talent for gun-slinging outlawry. It’s a kick, not so very di≠erent from, maybe part and parcel of, her newly discovered pleasure in sex. This is something Commentaries

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nice girls—nice people, nice movies—are not supposed to own up to, let alone speak of humorously. But as Bunker observes, violent assertiveness is “basically unrestrained expressiveness,” and, let’s be honest about it, we all enjoy our opportunities, all too rare in the real world, to partake of its pleasures. The cost, though, is high. It is toward self-destruction that Thelma and Louise’s road inevitably winds. For all the time they have been out there expressing themselves, a posse has been relentlessly closing in on them. By a pleasing irony, it is led by the only thoroughly nice guy in the picture, detective Hal Slocumbe (Harvey Keitel). A patient, sympathetic man, he is this myth’s wise father figure. By the time Thelma and Louise finally see him, however, he is one of a small army of cops who have hemmed them in against the top of a sheer canyon wall. Hal advances toward them, arms outstretched, in a last-minute plea for reason. Fat chance. The women eye him, eye the drop ahead of them, imagine a prison stretch, contemplate the last free choice available to them—life or death—and floor the accelerator, sailing o≠ the cli≠ into the movie’s concluding whiteout. Unlike most of the plot points that have stirred debate, this one actually deserves it. Sure, everyone recognizes it as a straight steal from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but what final meaning does it impose? Sarandon thinks it’s “the least compromising ending. You built this whole film to have these people not settle anymore, and then you’d toss them back into the system?” It’s hard to find anyone who thinks the women should have turned themselves in. It is equally hard to find anyone who detects a note of triumph in their suicide. Novelist Alix Kates Shulman quotes La Pasionaria on this point: “It’s better to die on your feet than live on your knees.” But as Brooklyn Law School professor Elizabeth Schneider points out, the message here is that “self-assertion and awakening lead to death.” Or, as film scholar Annette Insdorf puts it, “When death is your only choice, how free are you?” All of which is a way of saying, “Baby, you’ve still got a long way to go.” And a way of saying that, seen in narrowly feminist terms, Thelma & Louise advances the women’s movement only a few hesitant steps. But perhaps the film should not be looked at in that way. Davis, for one, resents the connection: “Why, because it stars women, is this suddenly a feminist treatise, given the burden of representing all women?” 200

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A good point. In its messy, likeable way, Thelma & Louise is getting at even larger, more mysterious issues. Carol Clover, a film scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, says the movie is trying to study, among other topics, “the distance between men and women, the desire for each sex to separate itself.” It also attempts to look at the opposite side of that coin: the increasingly dangerous ways in which the sexes come together. Novelist James Carroll wrote last week in the New Republic that “when men and women reduce each other to sexual objects, they take this first step toward beating each other up.” Since this movie demonstrates Clover’s point, and since it places that point in a context that is satirically aware of the violent and depersonalizing traditions of our visual popular culture, it just may be that Thelma & Louise is in fact better than any of its exegetes have made it sound. It remains the most intriguing movie now in release. No other cheers one’s argumentative spirit, stirs one’s critical imagination, and awakens one’s protective a≠ection in quite the way Thelma & Louise does. —Reported by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York, Sally B. Donnelly and Martha Smilgis/Los Angeles

IS THIS WHAT FEMINISM IS ALL ABOUT? Margaret Carlson Time, June 24, 1991 By playing out a male fantasy, Thelma & Louise shows Hollywood is still a man’s world

So few movies place women at the center that when one does it is held up to the light and turned every which way for clues about the state of the gender. This may be more freight than Thelma & Louise can carry. But not since Fatal Attraction has a movie provoked such table-pounding discussions between men and women. Along partisan lines, men attack the movie as a male-bashing feminist screed, in which they are portrayed as leering, overbearing, violent swine who deserve what they get, from a bullet in the heart to being stu≠ed in a trunk. Women cheer the movie because it finally turns the tables on Hollywood, which has been too busy making movies about Commentaries

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bimbos, prostitutes, vipers and bitches and glamorizing the misogynists who kill them to make a movie like Thelma & Louise. Yet for all the pleasure the film gives women moviegoers who want to see the worst of the opposite sex get what’s coming to them, it can hardly be called a woman’s movie or one with a feminist sensibility. As a bulletin from the front in the battle of the sexes, Thelma & Louise sends the message that little ground has been won. For these two women, feminism never happened. Thelma and Louise are so trapped that the only way for them to get away for more than two days is to go on the lam. They become free but only wildly, self-destructively so—free to drive o≠ the ends of the earth. They are also free to behave like—well, men. For all the talk that Thelma & Louise is the first major female buddy movie, it is more like a male buddy movie with two women plunked down in the starring roles. The heroines are irresistibly likable: the gentle, bewildered Thelma, married to a smug, low-rent, philandering salesman who wears more gold jewelry than she does, and for whom, when she takes o≠, she leaves dinner on a child’s partitioned plate in the microwave; and Louise, the world-weary, wised-up waitress who has waited too long for her lounge-singer boyfriend to marry her. But rather than finding their way with their female natures intact or even being able to reach out to the one decent man who could help them, they become like any other shoot-first-and-talk-later action heroes. Thelma and Louise act out a male fantasy of life on the road, avoiding intimacy with loud music, Wild Turkey, fast driving—and a gun in the pants. The movie has almost as many chase scenes per reel as Smokey and the Bandit. The characters don’t confide in each other as real-life women would. When Thelma asks what happened in Louise’s secret past in Texas that makes her murderous, Louise refuses to talk and warns her not to ask about it. She turns driving from Oklahoma to Mexico without going through the Lone Star Sate into one of the movie’s running jokes. The pair can’t seem to just have fun with each other on this woman’s weekend in which they are finally free of the men who hem them in. Thelma is still the teenager at the slumber party who gets bored and has to call a few boys to come over. Less than an hour out of town, she talks Louise into stopping at a raunchy bar, where she dances with a creep who then tries to rape her in the parking lot. The women are sympathetic enough characters by this time so that we leap over the hurdle many adventure movies present— Why didn’t they call the police?—and rationalize what might be a cold202

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blooded murder as an act of self-defense. That way we can climb into that green Thunderbird, put down the roof and go along for the joyride. But it becomes harder and harder to root for the heroines, who make the wrong choice at every turn and act more like Clint Eastwood than Katherine Hepburn. The day after her near rape, Thelma is begging Louise to pick up a hitchhiker. It requires a breathtaking midair somersault of faith to believe Thelma would be eager to take up with another stranger so soon and would let him into her motel room and go limp with desire after he admits he robs convenience stores for a living. The turning point of Thelma’s character rests on one of the most enduring and infuriating male myths in the culture: the only thing an unhappy woman needs is good sex to make everything all right. After a night of knock-over-the-night-stand sex with the hitchhiker, Thelma comes down to the co≠ee shop su≠used with satisfaction and tells Louise, “I finally understand what all the fuss is about.” Thelma is transformed, more confident and buoyant than she has ever been, reducing her angst to the simplistic notion that she was stuck with a husband who was insu∞ciently accomplished in bedroom. Despite such flaws, which leave you wondering if screenwriter Callie Khouri isn’t just fronting for Hugh Hefner, Thelma & Louise is a movie with legs. Long after the movie is done entertaining, it stirs up questions about why men and women remain mysteries to each other. It has its small triumphs. Susan Sarandon makes Hollywood a little safer for older actresses; she fearlessly plays next to someone 10 years younger. And at least Thelma and Louise stop short of emulating Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, who use their remaining ammunition to go out in a blaze of testosteronic glory. The movie may not have the impact of Fatal Attraction, but next time a woman passes an 18-wheeler and points her finger like a pistol at the ties, the driver might just put his tongue back in his mouth where it belongs.

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A P P E N D I X I I Filmographies

CALLIE KHOURI

Thelma & Louise (1991) Direction: Ridley Scott Screenplay: Callie Khouri Cinematography: Adrian Biddle Editing: Thom Noble Score: Hans Zimmer Producer: Mimi Polk and Ridley Scott Released by: MGM/UA Running Time: 129 minutes Principal Cast: Susan Sarandon (Louise), Geena Davis (Thelma), Harvey Keitel (Hal), Michael Madsen (Jimmy), Christopher McDonald (Darryl), Brad Pitt (J. D.) Something to Talk About (1995) Direction: Lasse Hallstrom Screenplay: Callie Khouri Cinematography: Sven Nykvist Editing: Mia Goldman Score: Hans Zimmer and Graham Preskett Producer: Anthea Sylbert and Paula Weinstein Released by: Warner Brothers Running Time: 106 minutes Principal Cast: Julia Roberts (Grace), Dennis Quaid (Eddie), Robert Duvall (Wyly), Gena Rowlands (Georgia), Kyra Sedgwick (Emma Rae) Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (2002) Direction: Callie Khouri 205

Screenplay: Callie Khouri Cinematography: John Bailey Editing: Andrew Marcus Score: T Bone Burnett Producer: Bonnie Bruckheimer and Hunt Lowry Released by: Warner Brothers Running Time: 116 minutes Principal Cast: Sandra Bullock (Siddalee Walker), Ellen Burstyn (Vivi Walker), Ashley Judd (Younger Vivi), James Garner (Shep Walker), Fionnula Flanagan (Teensy Whitman), Maggie Smith (Caro Eliza Bennett)

RIDLEY SCOTT [Note: Scott began his career in television advertising, moving to episodic television, before shifting to film.]

The Duellists (1977) Direction: Ridley Scott Screenplay: Gerald Vaughan-Hughes Cinematography: Frank Tidy Editing: Pamela Power Score: Howard Blake Producer: David Puttnam Released by: Paramount Pictures Running Time: 95 minutes Principal Cast: Keith Carradine (D’Hubert), Harvey Keitel (Feraud) Alien (1979) Direction: Ridley Scott Screenplay: Dan O’Bannon Cinematography: Derek Vanlint Editing: Terry Rawlings and Peter Weatherly Score: Jerry Goldsmith Producer: Gordon Carroll, David Giler, and Walter Hill Released by: 20th Century Fox Running Time: 117 minutes 206

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Principal Cast: Sigourney Weaver (Ripley), Tom Skerritt (Dallas), Veronica Cartwright (Lambert), Harry Dean Stanton (Brett), Ian Holm (Ash), John Hurt (Kane), and Yaphet Kotto (Parker) Blade Runner (1982) Direction: Ridley Scott Screenplay: Hampton Fancher and David Webb Peoples Cinematography: Jordan Cronenweth Editing: Terry Rawlings Score: Vangelis Producer: Michael Deeley Released by: Warner Brothers Running Time: 117 minutes Principal Cast: Harrison Ford (Deckard), Rutger Hauer (Roy), Sean Young (Rachel), Darryl Hannah (Pris) Legend (1985) Direction: Ridley Scott Screenplay: William Hjortsberg Cinematography: Alex Thompson Editing: Terry Rawlings Score: Eric Allaman Producer: Arnon Milchan and Tim Hampton Released by: 20th Century Fox Running Time: 94 minutes Principal Cast: Tom Cruise (Jack), Mia Sara (Princess Lily), Tim Curry (The Lord of Darkness) Someone to Watch Over Me (1987) Direction: Ridley Scott Screenplay: Howard Franklin Cinematography: Stephen B. Poster Editing: Claire Simpson Score: Michael Kamen Producer: Harold Schneider and Thierry de Ganay Released by: Columbia Pictures Running Time: 106 minutes Filmographies

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Principal Cast: Tom Berenger (Mike Keegan), Mimi Rodgers (Claire Gregory), Lorraine Bracco (Elaine Keegan) Black Rain (1989) Direction: Ridley Scott Screenplay: Craig Bolotin and Warren Lewis Cinematography: Jan De Bont Editing: Tom Rolf Score: Hans Zimmer Producer: Stanley R. Ja≠e and Sherry Lansing Released by: Paramount Pictures Running Time: 125 minutes Principal Cast: Michael Douglas (Nick), Andy Garcia (Charlie), Ken Takakura (Masahiro), Kate Capshaw (Joyce) Thelma & Louise (1991) Direction: Ridley Scott Screenplay: Callie Khouri Cinematography: Adrian Biddle Editing: Thom Noble Score: Hans Zimmer Producer: Mimi Polk and Ridley Scott Released by: MGM/UA Running Time: 129 minutes Principal Cast: Susan Sarandon (Louise), Geena Davis (Thelma), Harvey Keitel (Hal), Michael Madsen (Jimmy), Christopher McDonald (Darryl), Brad Pitt (J. D.) 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992) Direction: Ridley Scott Screenplay: Roselyne Bosch Cinematography: Adrian Biddle Editing: William M. Anderson, Francoise Bonnot, Leslie Healey, Armen Minasian, and Deborah Zeitman Score: Vangelis Producer: Ridley Scott and Alain Goldman Released by: Paramount Pictures 208

Filmographies

Running Time: 154 minutes Principal Cast: Gerard Depardieu (Columbus), Armand Assante (Sanchez), Sigourney Weaver (Queen Isabel) White Squall (1996) Direction: Ridley Scott Screenplay: Todd Robinson Cinematography: Hugh Johnson and Stephen Smith Editing: Gerry Hambling Score: Je≠ Rona Producer: Mimi Polk Gitlin and Rocky Lang Released by: Hollywood Pictures Running Time: 129 minutes Principal Cast: Je≠ Bridges (Skipper Sheldon), John Savage (McCrea), Scott Wolf (Chuck) G.I. Jane (1997) Direction: Ridley Scott Screenplay: Danielle Alexandra and David Twohy Cinematography: Hugh Johnson Editing: Pietro Scalia Score: Trevor Jones Producer: Ridley Scott, Suzanne Todd, Roger Birnbaum, and Demi Moore Released by: Buena Vista Pictures Running Time: 124 minutes Principal cast: Demi Moore (Lt. Jordan O’Neil), Viggo Mortenson (Master Chief Jack Urgayle), Anne Bancroft (Senator Lillian DeHaven) Gladiator (2000) Direction: Ridley Scott Screenplay: David Franzoni, John Logan, and William Nicolson Cinematography: John Matheisen Editing: Pietro Scalia Score: Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard Producer: Branko Lustig, Douglas Wick, and David Franzoni Released by: Dreamworks SKG Running Time: 155 minutes Filmographies

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Principal Cast: Russell Crowe (Maximus), Joaquin Phoenix (Commodus), Connie Nielsen (Lucilla), Richard Harris (Marcus Aurelius) Hannibal (2001) Direction: Ridley Scott Screenplay: David Mamet and Steve Zaillian Cinematography: John Matheisen Editing: Pietro Scalia and Danielle Sardoni Score: Hans Zimmer Producer: Dino De Laurentiis, Martha De Laurentiis, and Ridley Scott Released by: MGM and MCA Universal Running Time: 133 minutes Principal Cast: Anthony Hopkins (Hannibal Lecter), Julianne Moore (Clarice Starling), Gary Oldman (Mason Verger) Black Hawk Down (2001) Direction: Ridley Scott Screenplay: Ken Nolan Cinematography: Slavomir Idziak Editing: Pietro Scalia Score: Hans Zimmer Producer: Jerry Bruckheimer and Ridley Scott Released by: Columbia Tri-Star Running Time: 144 minutes Principal Cast: Josh Hartnett (Sta≠ Sergeant Matt Eversmann), Ewan McGregor (Specialist John Grimes), Eric Bana (Sergeant First Class Hoot Gibson) Matchstick Men (2003) Direction: Ridley Scott Screenplay: Nicholas Gri∞n and Ted Gri∞n Cinematography: John Mathiesen Editing: Dody Dorn Score: Hans Zimmer Producer: Sean Bailey, Jack Rapke, Steve Starkey, and Ridley Scott Released by: Warner Brothers Running Time: 116 minutes 210

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Principal Cast: Nicholas Cage (Roy Waller), Sam Rockwell (Frank Mercer), Allison Lohman (Angela) Kingdom of Heaven (2005) Direction: Ridley Scott Screenplay: William Monahan Cinematography: John Mathiesen Editing: Dody Dorn Score: Harry Gregson-Williams Producer: Mark Abela, Henning Molfenter, Denise O’Dell, Thierry Potok, and Ridley Scott Released by: 20th Century Fox Running Time: 145 minutes Principal Cast: Orlando Bloom (Balian), Liam Neeson (Godfrey), Eva Green (Sybilla), Alexander Siddig (Nasir), Brendan Gleeson (Reynald)

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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Benson, Sheila. “ ‘True or False: Thelma & Louise Just Good Ol’ Boys?’ ” Los Angeles Times, May 31, 1991, F1. Berenstein, Rhona J. Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality, and Spectatorship in Classic Horror Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Carlson, Margaret. “Is This What Feminism Is All About?” Time, June 24, 1991, 57. Ching, Barbara, “Sounding the American Heart: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Contemporary American Film.” In Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music, ed. Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Arthur Knight. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001, 202–225. Chumo, Peter N., II. “At the Generic Crossroads with Thelma and Louise.” Post Script 13:2 (1994), 3–13. Clover, Carol. “Crossing Over.” Film Quarterly 45:2 (Winter 1991–1992): 22. Clover, Carol. Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992. Cohan, Steven, and Ina Rae Hark. The Road Movie Book. New York: Routledge, 1997. Cooper, Barbara. “The Relevancy and Gender Identity in Spectators’ Interpretations of Thelma & Louise.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 16 (1999): 20–41. Corrigan, Timothy. A Cinema without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991. Dargis, Manohla. “Thelma & Louise and the Tradition of the Male Road Movie.” In Women and Film: A Sight and Sound Reader, ed. Pam Cook and Phillip Dodd. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993, 86–92. Doane, Mary Ann. “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator.” Screen 23:3–4 (Fall 1982): 74–87. Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women. New York: Crown, 1991.

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Gray, Frances. Women and Laughter. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994. Griggers, Cathy. “Thelma and Louise and the Cultural Generation of the New Butch-Femme.” In Film Theory Goes to the Movies, ed. Jim Collins, Hilary Radner, and Ava Preacher Collins. New York: Routledge, 1993, 129–141. Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998. Hansen, Miriam. Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in the American Silent Film. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991. Hart, Lynda. “ ‘Til Death Do Us Part’: Impossible Spaces in Thelma & Louise.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 4:3 (1994): 430–446. Hart, Lynda. Fatal Women: Lesbian Sexuality and the Mark of Aggression. Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press 1994. Iser, Wolfgang. The Range of Interpretation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Je≠ords, Susan. The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Keating, Nicole Marie. “If Looks Could Kill: Female Gazes as Guns in Thelma and Louise.” In Bang Bang, Shoot Shoot: Essays on Guns and Popular Culture, ed. Murray Pomerance and John Sakeris. Needham Heights, Mass.: Pearson Education, 1998, 95–106. Kinder, Marsha. “Thelma & Louise and Messidor as Feminist Road Movies.” Film Quarterly 45:2 (Winter 1991–1992): 30–31. Landay, Lori. Madcaps, Screwballs and Con Women: The Female Trickster in American Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. Leo, John. “Toxic Feminism on the Big Screen.” U.S. News & World Report, June 10, 1991, 20. Kassabian, Anahid, Hearing Film: Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film. New York: Routledge, 2001. Mayne, Judith. Cinema and Spectatorship. New York: Routledge, 1993. Modleski, Tania. The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory. New York: Metheun, 1988. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989, 14–26. Projansky, Sarah. Watching Rape: Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture. New York: NYU Press, 2001. Rapping, Elayne. “Feminism Gets the Hollywood Treatment.” Cineaste 18:4 (December 1991): 30. Schickel, Richard. “Gender Bender.” Time, June 24, 1991, 52–56.

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Selected Bibliography

Smith, Je≠. “Popular Songs and Comic Allusion in Contemporary Cinema.” In Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music, ed. Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Arthur Knight. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001, 407– 430. Smith, Je≠. The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Spelman, Elizabeth V., and Martha Minow. 1996. “Outlaw Women: Thelma and Louise.” In Legal Reelism: Movies as Legal Texts, ed. John Denvir. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996, 261–279. Stacey, Jackie. Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship. New York: Routledge, 1994. Sturken, Marita. Thelma & Louise. London: BFI, 2000. Tasker, Yvonne. Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema. London: Routledge, 1998. Vares, Tiina. “Framing ‘Killer Women’ Films: Audience Use of Genre.” Feminist Media Studies 2:2 (2002): 213–229. Wiegand, Shirley A. “Deception and Artifice: Thelma, Louise, and the Legal Hermeneutic.” Oklahoma City University Law Review 22:1 (1997): 46–49. Willis, Sharon. “Hardware and Hardbodies, What Do Women Want?” In Film Theory Goes to the Movies, ed. Jim Collins, Hilary Radner, and Ava Preacher Collins. New York: Routledge, 1993, 120–128. Willis, Sharon. High Contrast: Race and Gender in Contemporary Hollywood Film. Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Bernie Cook is assistant dean in Georgetown College and adjunct assistant professor of American studies at Georgetown University. He has published articles on television news coverage of warfare and on violence in American fiction film, including “Over My Dead Body: The Ideological Use of Dead Bodies in Network News Coverage of Vietnam” in the Quarterly Review of Film and Television 18:2 (2001). In 2001, he collaborated on a short documentary, Changing Room (2001), which has screened at film festivals in Washington, San Francisco, and Phoenix. He serves on the Programming Advisory Committee for the SILVERDOCS International Documentary Festival. Cynthia Fuchs is associate professor of English, African American studies, film and media studies, and cultural studies at George Mason University. She has published articles on hip-hop, Michael Jackson, Prince, Juvenile and Cash Money, “gangsta rap,” the Spice Girls, queer punks, alternative masculinities in rock, “bad” kids in Bully and George Washington, images of the U.S. war against Iraq, and Vietnam war movies. She edited Spike Lee: Interviews (University of Mississippi Press, 2002), and coedited Between the Sheets, In the Streets: Queer, Lesbian, and Gay Documentary (University of Minnesota Press, 1997). She has forthcoming articles on race in Bu≠y and Dark Angel; Shakira; Jay-Z; and Taxi Driver. Claudia Gorbman is professor of film studies at the University of Washington–Tacoma. She is the author of Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Indiana University Press and the British Film Institute, 1987), the translator of four books, including three by the French critic Michel Chion, and has published numerous articles on film sound, film music, and French cinema. She is currently writing a book on the French director Agnes Varda for the University of Illinois Press. Susan Knobloch received her Ph.D. in film and television critical studies from UCLA in 1998. Her dissertation considers rock music’s e≠ects on form and feeling in movies. Her essay here is part of her ongoing research into performing women

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in contemporary Hollywood. Her article “Sharon Stone’s (An)Aesthetic” appeared in Martha McCauley and Neal King’s Reel Knockouts: Violent Women in the Movies (University of Texas Press, 2001).

J. David Slocum is associate dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science at New York University, where he is also visiting associate professor of cinema studies at the Tisch School of the Arts. He has published four books about film and media history, including, most recently, the edited collection Hollywood and War: The Film Reader (Routledge, 2006). Victoria Sturtevant is assistant professor of film studies at the University of Oklahoma. Her research examines the intersections of race, class, and gender in classical Hollywood cinema. Her article “Spitfire: Lupe Velez and the Ambivalent Pleasure of Ethnic Masquerade” was recently published in the Velvet Light Trap 55 (2005). Sturtevant currently is working on a book manuscript titled Punctured Romance: The Films of Marie Dressler.

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INDEX

Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations. Academy Awards, 4, 13, 14, 97, 99, 102, 195 Accidental Tourist, The, 99 Accused, The, 52 acting: as cinematic discourse, 3, 91–94, 118–121; and gender and race, 111–112; influence of, on writing, 185–186; and interplay between actors, 109–110; and performance analysis in film studies, 102–104; screen, 104–108; and sound e≠ects, 115–118; and star images, 94–102; and vocal inflection, 112–115 Acting in the Cinema, 102 action movies, 4, 81, 98, 100, 154 Actors Studio, 100, 103–104 Addicted to Love, 68 Adler, Stella, 101, 103 A≠air to Remember, An, 52 agency, female, 33, 148. See also Thelma & Louise: female agency in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, 168, 170 Alien, 13, 33, 197 Aliens, 33 Allen, Gracie, 55 Altman, Robert, 89–90n10 American Association of University Women (AAUW), 25–27 Angie, 99–100 Aniston, Jennifer, 164–165, 166 Another World, 148 Apocalypse Now, 66 Araki, Gregg, 137, 143 Arbuckle, Fatty, 55 Archer, Anne, 175

armed robbery. See Thelma & Louise: armed robbery in Armstrong, Louis, 69 Arteta, Miguel, 165 Atlantic City, 96 auteur theory, 180–181 authority, male, 109, 110, 185. See also patriarchy Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film, 33 Backdraft, 83 background scoring. See underscoring of films Backlash, 25, 174 Back to the Future trilogy, 135 Badlands, 122, 173 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 47, 48, 49 Baldwin, Alec, 148 Ball, Lucille, 50, 51, 55, 56 Banger Sisters, The, 97 Barr, Roseanne, 56 Barreca, Regina, 196 Barthes, Roland, 71 Beetlejuice, 99 Beghe, Jason, 93, 155 Bell, Cathy, 193 Bennett, Tony, 15 Benson, Sheila, 29, 40n6, 194 Berenstein, Rhona, 33 Berlin, Irving, 68 Besson, Luc, 195 Biddle, Adrian, 14, 30, 180 Birdcage, The, 55 Birkin, Jane, 68 Biskind, Peter, 165

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Black Hawk Down, 89n9 Black Rain, 13, 83 Blade Runner, 13, 197 Blickman, Daniel, 34, 36 Bodyguard, The, 67 Bonnie and Clyde, 4, 43, 122, 129–130, 133, 135, 138, 139, 180, 192, 193, 194 Borgnine, Ernest, 184 Boston Phoenix, 195 Bowie, David, 96 Boys Don’t Cry, 56 Boyz N the Hood, 39n2 Brando, Marlon, 108 Briggs, Joe Bob, 170 Brinton, Daniel, 53 British Film Institute, 2 Britton, Andrew, 135 Broken Arrow, 89n9 Broken Homes, 89n8 Bronson, Charles, 88 Bruning, Fred, 40n6 buddy movies, 192; Thelma & Louise as an example of, 4, 16, 20, 22, 31, 123, 154, 182, 191, 197, 202 Bu≠alo Bill, 99 Bull Durham, 96 Bunker, Barbara, 196, 199 Burke, Jodi, 177 Bush, George H. W., 138, 139 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 20, 21, 43, 122, 160, 168–169, 191, 200, 203 Butler, Judith, 33, 49 Cahiers du Cinema, 180 Capra, Frank, 124, 125 Cardi≠, Jack, 135 Cardinale, Claudia, 88 Carhart, Timothy, 12, 30, 38, 92–93, 118, 147 Carlson, Margaret, 5, 40n6, 154; commentary by, 201–203 Carroll, James, 201 cars: culture of, 126, 127; as emblematic of mobility, 143; as a throwback, 139. See also Thelma & Louise: the car in Casablanca, 68, 88 Cash, Johnny, 68

220

Index

Cavell, Stanley, 43 Chaplin, Charlie, 51 Charles, Ray, 69 Cher, 96 Childs, Tony, 80 Ching, Barbara, 89–90n10 Chumo, Peter, 43 cigarette smoking. See Thelma & Louise: smoking in Cineaste, 2, 10, 149 City Slickers, 196 Clark, Barbara, 35 Client, The, 97 Cli≠hanger, 98 Climax Blues Band, 84 Close, Glenn, 175 Clover, Carol, 2, 33, 201 Coal Miner’s Daughter, 89–90n10 Coen, Joel and Ethan, 136 Cold War, 140, 141, 142 comedy films, 95, 102; screwball, 123, 124, 125, 134 comedy in Thelma & Louise. See Thelma & Louise: comedy elements in comedy theory, 3, 43, 47–50 Commander in Chief, 98 Cooder, Ry, 85 Coolio, 66 Cooper, Brenda, 2 Cooper, James Fenimore, 124 Corrigan, Timothy, 127, 129, 138 Cosford, Bill, 194 Costner, Kevin, 67 costume. See Thelma & Louise: costume in Creating the Couple: Love, Marriage, and Hollywood Performance, 102–103 Crimson Tide, 89n9 Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 2 Crossfire, 173 Cummins, Peggy, 128 Cutthroat Island, 98 Danger Girl, The, 56 Dangerous Minds, 66 Dargis, Manohla, 52 Da Vinci Code, The, 89n9 Davis, Geena, 104, 191, 197, 199; career of,

4, 97–100; on DVD cover, 20, 22; on movie poster, 18; photos of, 5, 8, 19, 35, 44, 46, 53, 54, 56, 70, 80, 83, 92, 99, 106, 107, 108, 132, 141, 158, 171, 172; physical acting of, 3, 105, 106, 108, 110, 119, 120; response of, to critics, 7–8, 39n1, 200; vocal acting of, 3, 112, 113, 114, 120 Days of Thunder, 83 Dead Man Walking, 68, 97 Dean, James, 30, 147, 159 Deardon, James, 175 Deliverance, 33 Demme, Jonathan, 65 Deneuve, Catherine, 96 diegetic music, 66–67, 71, 76, 79, 88 Die Hard 2, 98 Dimendberg, Edward, 126 direction. See Thelma & Louise: direction of; Scott, Ridley Dirty Harry, 194 Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, 181 Doane, Mary Ann, 32 Doors, the (band), 66 Doors, The, 100 Douglas, Michael, 175 DreamWorks, 163 Driving Miss Daisy, 83 Drugstore Cowboy, 136 DVD of Thelma & Louise. See Thelma & Louise: DVD of Dworkin, Andrea, 192 Dyer, Richard, 47, 95, 102–103 Earth Girls Are Easy, 99 Eastwood, Clint, 203 Easy Rider, 66, 170, 194 editing, film, 92. See also Thelma & Louise: editing of editing, sound, 92. See also Thelma & Louise: sound editing Equal Rights Amendment, 39n4, 137–138 Eyre, Chris, 143 Faithfull, Marianne, 4, 75, 76, 77, 187 Faludi, Susan, 25, 174 family. See marriage and family

Fatal Attraction, 174–175, 194, 201, 203 Female Masculinity, 23 femininity, 8, 54; as construct or performance, 28–33, 49, 56. See also Thelma & Louise: femininity in feminism, 50, 93–94, 120; backlash against, 25; and Callie Khouri, 13–14, 187–188; in film theory, 32; first-wave, 142; of Geena Davis, 97–98, 100, 101; and interpretations of Thelma & Louise, 5, 73, 92, 110, 139, 141, 160, 174, 192, 194, 200, 201–203; and response to Thelma & Louise, 37, 45, 137–138, 140; second-wave, 137–138; state of, in the 1990s, 26–27; of Susan Sarandon, 97, 101 Feminist Media Studies, 3 Femme Nikita, La, 195 Fight Club, 161, 162, 163–164 film noir, 126, 127, 129 film promotion, 4, 9–11, 15–23 Film Quarterly, 2, 10 Film Theory Goes to the Movies, 2 Fincher, David, 161 Fistful of Dollars, A, 85 Fly, The, 99 Fonda, Henry, 125 Forrest Gump, 66 Freeman, Morgan, 161 Frey, Glenn, 72, 83, 116–117 Fuchs, Cynthia, 4, 182 Garber, Marjory, 33 Garland, Judy, 69 gays, and response to Thelma & Louise, 37–38. See also homosexuality gender, 141; equity, in education, 25–26, 27; and the “gender wars,” 10–11, 25–27, 39n4; play with, in Ridley Scott’s other films, 13; politics, 5, 183; in promotional materials for Thelma & Louise, 23; and the response to Thelma & Louise, 34– 39; as a social construct or performance, 27–33, 46, 56, 58, 60; and the soundtrack of Thelma & Louise, 80–83; and Title IX, 98; in the Western, 88. See also Thelma & Louise: gender in

Index

221

Gender Equity in Education Act, 26 genre(s): actors identified with, 95; bending of, 195; exploitation, 172; horror, 33; “the law of,” 133; male-buddy, 191; and music, 68–70; and outlawry, 139; the road movie, 127–129, 170; Thelma & Louise as representative of various, 43, 49–50, 51–52, 56, 59, 123. See also specific genres Giant, 30 G.I. Jane, 182, 183 Gladiator, 89n9 Golden Globes, 98 Good Girl, The, 165 Goodman, Ellen, 197 Gorbman, Claudia, 4, 186 Grace Under Pressure, 181 Graduate, The, 66, 67 Grand Canyon, 2, 52, 63, 93, 149, 154, 161, 184 Grand Theft Auto III, 101 Gray, Frances, 49 Griggers, Cathy, 2, 44, 150 Grosz, Elizabeth, 93 Growing Pains, 101 Gulf War, 140 Gun Crazy, 122, 126, 128, 135 Halberstam, Judith, 23, 31, 56 Hanks, Tom, 68 Hannibal, 89n9 Hansen, Miriam, 33 Harlin, Renny, 98 Hart, Lynda, 137 Hawn, Goldie, 55, 97 Haycock, Peter, 84 Headly, Glenne, 195 Head of the Class, 101, 148 Heath, Chris, 162, 163 Hefner, Hugh, 203 Helf, Mary C., 34 Hemingway, Ernest, 124 Hepburn, Katherine, 203 Hermann, Bernard, 68 Heyman, J. D., 165 Hill, George Roy, 122 Hitchcock, Alfred, 13, 58

222

Index

Holden, William, 184 homosexuality, 176. See also gays, and response to Thelma & Louise; lesbians, and response to Thelma & Louise; Thelma & Louise: and lesbianism horror films, 33, 96 Houston, Whitney, 67 How Schools Shortchange Girls, 25 Hunger, The, 96 hybridity, 13. See also Thelma & Louise: hybridity in identity. See Thelma & Louise: identity in Insdorf, Annette, 200 Inside the Actors Studio, 103–104 Internet, 10 Internet Movie Database (IMDB), 10, 36, 37, 38, 39n3, 40n8, 99, 101 intertexuality, 168 Interview with a Vampire, 161 Iser, Wolfgang, 11 It Happened One Night, 124 Jackson, Samuel L., 98, 100 Jagger, Mick, 76 January Man, The, 100 Jarmusch, Jim, 135–136 Jaws, 67, 85 Je≠ords, Susan, 39n5, 135 Jenney, Lucinda, 154 Jennings, Anne, 35, 36 Joe, 193 Johnson, Brad, 40n6 Jolie, Angelina, 166 Judd, Naomi, 186 Kael, Pauline, 193 Kalifornia, 161 Kassabian, Anahid, 66, 69–70, 81 Kaufman, Charlie, 180 Keating, Nicole Marie, 156, 157 Keitel, Harvey, 93, 149, 176, 200; film persona of, 100; performance of, as Hal Slocumbe, 30, 61, 101–102, 112, 115 Keough, Peter, 195 Kerouac, Jack, 124 Kessler, Judy, 165

Keyssar, Helene, 143 Khouri, Callie, 7, 75, 78, 91, 92, 119, 198, 203; and development of Thelma & Louise, 9, 11–14, 196–197; interview with, 4–5, 168–189; photos of, 14, 169 Kinder, Marsha, 2 King, B. B., 53, 78, 79, 186 Klaprat, Cathy, 95 Knobloch, Susan, 3, 4, 185 Kotche≠, Ted, 135 Kroll, Jack, 40n6 Laderman, David, 136, 143 Ladies’ Home Journal, 164, 165 Lake, Veronica, 56 Lancaster, Burt, 96 Landay, Lori, 53 Lang, Fritz, 122, 125 La Pasionaria, 200 Last Samurai, The, 89n9 League of Their Own, A, 99 Left Banke, 68 Legends of the Fall, 161 Leo, John, 5, 26–27, 29, 34, 37, 40n6, 173; text of article by, 191–193 Leone, Sergio, 84–85 Leong, Ian, 123 lesbians, and response to Thelma & Louise, 193. See also Thelma & Louise: and lesbianism Lewis, Joseph H., 122, 126 Lewis, Robert, 108 Lion King, The, 89n9 Lipton, James, 104 Living End, The, 137, 143 Lonely Are the Brave, 168 Long Kiss Goodnight, The, 98–99 Lorenzo’s Oil, 97 Los Angeles Times, 40n6, 193, 194 Lucas, George, 65, 135 Lucey, Mary, 193 Lyne, Adrian, 174, 175 Macherey, Pierre, 15 Macleans, 40n6 Madagascar, 89n9 Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women, 53

Madsen, Michael, 30, 92, 100–101, 102, 112, 116, 152 “male bashing,” 29, 191, 193, 196, 198, 201 Malick, Terence, 122 Malle, Louis, 96 marriage and family, 123, 127, 129, 134, 135, 138 Marshall, Penny, 99 masculinity, 23; and Brad Pitt’s star image, 4, 148, 166; in the 1980s, 135, 136, 138; of Ridley Scott, 11–15. See also Thelma & Louise: masculinity in Maslin, Janet, 40n6 Mayne, Judith, 33 McDonald, Christopher, 29, 60, 92, 101, 113–115, 146 McDonald, Peter, 135 McQueen, Steve, 104 Mean Streets, 100 Meet Joe Black, 161 melodrama, 4, 16, 51, 52, 182 Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror film, 33 “Method” acting, 103–104 MGM/UA (later MGM), 180, 184; DVD release of Thelma & Louise by, 11, 19–22; promotion of Thelma & Louise by, 4, 9–10, 15–23 Mills, Katie, 141 Mills, Mort, 58 misogyny, 11, 191, 202 Modleski, Tania, 32 Monroe, Marilyn, 104 Monty Python, 55 Monument Valley, 16, 75, 76, 77 Moore, Demi, 183, 195 Morricone, Ennio, 85 Morrison, Van, 71 Mortal Thoughts, 195 Moscow Art Theater, 103 Mr. & Mrs. Smith, 166 Mulvey, Laura, 32 music. See popular music; reggae music; Thelma & Louise: score of My Own Private Idaho, 143 Naremore, James, 102–103, 108

Index

223

Nash, Johnny, 4, 73, 111 Nashville, 89–90n10 National Review, 40n6 Natural Born Killers, 143 Nelson, Kathy, 65, 72, 89nn3,7 New American Cinema, 170 New Left politics, 139 Newman, Paul, 104, 191 New Republic, 201 Newsweek, 10, 34, 35, 40n6 New York Daily News, 193 New York Times, 40n6 Nicholson, Jack, 96 1960s, the, 4, 142 nondiegetic music, 66–68, 71 Norton, Edward, 163, 164 Novak, Robert, 29 Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, 68 Nussbaum, Martha, 198 objectification of women, 22, 93, 120, 148, 157 Ocean’s Eleven, 165 Once Upon a Time in the West, 85, 88 Oscars. See Academy Awards outlawry, 122; in Bonnie and Clyde, 129– 131, 139. See also Thelma & Louise: outlawry in Pacific Heights, 83 Pacino, Al, 104 Parillaud, Anne, 195 Paris, Texas, 85 Parrish, Maxfield, 180 Parsons, Estelle, 104 Parton, Dolly, 67 patriarchy, and response to Thelma & Louise, 27, 36, 37, 39. See also authority, male; Thelma & Louise: patriarchy in Pearl Harbor, 89n9 Penn, Arthur, 122, 130, 131, 180 People, 164 performance theory, 3 Pfei≠er, Michelle, 96 Philadelphia City Paper, 182 Pisani, Michael, 90n11 Pitt, Brad, 19, 22, 30, 93, 100, 101, 112,

224

Index

164–165, 187; the making of, 4, 146–166; photos of, 147, 148, 158, 159, 160, 162, 164 Pitt-Jolie, Shiloh, 166 Polk, Mimi, 9, 12, 14, 196–197 popular music, 65, 67, 70 postmodernism, 132, 136 Prejean, Sister Helen, 97 Presley, Elvis, 30 promotion. See film promotion Psycho, 58–59, 68 Pulp fiction, 100 race. See Thelma & Louise: race in Raiders of the Lost Ark, 199 Rain Man, 83 Raising Arizona, 136 Rambo films, 135 Range of Interpretation, The, 10–11 Rapping, Elayne, 2, 149 Ray, Nicholas, 122, 126 Reagan, Ronald, 39n4, 135, 138, 139 Reception Theory, 9 Redbook, 164 Redford, Robert, 191 Reeves, Martha, 71, 80 reggae music, 73, 75 relevance theory, 2 Remasculinization of America, 39n5 Reservoir Dogs, 100, 101 revenge movies, 153, 154, 199 Ring, The, 89 Ring Two, The, 89 River Runs Through It, A, 161 road movies, 123, 141, 170, 182; conventions of, 7, 43, 44, 154; critique of marriage and family in, 134–136; evolution of, 124–129; Thelma & Louise marketed as, 4, 16 Robbins, Tim, 96 Roberts, Julia, 165 Robin Hood, 194 Rock, The, 89n9 Rocky Horror Picture Show, The, 96 Rogin, Michael, 135, 141 Rolling Stone, 162–163 romantic comedies, 51, 96, 135 Rose, Charlie, 95

Rowe, Kathleen, 48, 49 Sara, 99 Sarandon, Susan, 7, 92, 99, 146, 178, 191, 203; career of, 4, 96–97, 101, 104; casting of, as Louise, 186; on DVD cover, 20, 22; fearlessness of, as an older actress, 203; on movie poster, 18; photos of, 5, 8, 19, 35, 38, 44, 46, 51, 53, 54, 70, 80, 83, 87, 92, 97, 106, 107, 108, 132, 141, 171, 172; physical acting of, 3, 105, 106, 108, 110, 118, 119, 120; and Ridley Scott, 15, 95; on the violence in Thelma & Louise, 197, 198, 199; vocal acting of, 3, 113, 114, 116–117, 120 Sarris, Andrew, 180 Schickel, Richard, 5, 40n6; text of article by, 193–201 Schneider, Elizabeth, 200 Schneider, Karen S., 164–165 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 100, 174, 195, 199 science fiction, 123 Scorsese, Martin, 65, 100 Scott, Ridley, 11, 22, 30, 91, 95, 115, 119, 181, 182, 189; and “authorship” of Thelma & Louise, 13, 16; and budget of Thelma & Louise, 9, 197; casting choices of, 100; choices of, in adapting Khouri’s screenplay, 4, 12–14, 177, 179–180, 186; DVD commentary by, 81; and the ending of Thelma & Louise, 52, 78, 184–185; music in films of, 65, 70, 83, 89n5; photo of, 12; symbolism of, 82, 192, 199 Scott, Tony, 96 Scott Free Productions, 11, 12 screwball comedies, 43 Sell, Mike, 123 Seven, 161–162 Seven Years in Tibet, 161 sex, lies, and videotape, 39n2 Sexton, Charlie, 71, 80, 89n8, 119 Shelton, Ron, 96 Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America, 25 Shulman, Alix Kates, 200 Sidney, Sylvia, 125 Sight and Sound, 10

Silence of the Lambs, The, 195 Silverman, Kaja, 110 Silverstein, Shel, 75 Simon and Garfunkel, 66 Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas, 163 Singleton, John, 39n2 slapstick humor, 51, 80, 115 “slasher films,” 33 Sleeping with the Enemy, 195 Sleepless in Seattle, 68–69 Slocum, David, 4 Smith, Je≠, 65–66, 75–76, 88n1 Smith, Patti, 68 Smoke Signals, 143 Smokey and the Bandit, 202 Snatch, 161 Solomon, Ed, 180 Some Like It Hot, 43, 55 Someone to Watch Over Me, 13 sound. See acting: and sound e≠ects; editing, sound; Thelma & Louise: sound editing in; Thelma & Louise: score of; Thelma & Louise: sound in Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Music, 88n1 Spacey, Kevin, 161 Spader, James, 96 spectator theory, 32–33, 39n1 Speechless, 100 Springer, Jerry, 172 Spy Game, 165 Stanislavsky, Constantin, 103, 104–105, 108, 120 Stars, 95 Star Wars films, 135 Steiger, Rod, 108 Steinbeck, John, 124 Steiner, Max, 68, 69 stereotypes, male, 11, 57, 150 St. John, Marco, 12, 22, 24, 54, 93, 155–156 Stone, Oliver, 143 Stone, Sharon, 174 Straight Story, The, 143 Stranger Than Paradise, 135–136 Strasberg, Lee, 103 Sturken, Marita, 2, 129, 138 Sturtevant, Victoria, 3, 185

Index

225

Sullivan, Steve, 34, 36 Sullivan’s Travels, 56 surrealism, 75 Sylvia Scarlet, 56 Tannen, Deborah, 185 Tarantino, Quentin, 65, 100, 102 Taxi Driver, 100 Temple, Amanda, 9, 13, 177 Temptations, 70 Terminator 2: Judgment Day, 9, 174, 194, 195 Texas Rangers, 130 Thelma & Louise: armed robbery in, 93, 117, 131, 173, 191–193; box o∞ce of, 9–10; budget of, 9, 15; car(s) in, 81, 94, 105– 108, 115, 134, 140, 203; comedy elements in, 4, 43–63, 111, 112, 185; costume in, 7, 27–30, 56–57, 60, 61, 81, 92, 119; critical response to, 10, 24, 27, 57, 82, 173–174, 191–203; Darryl (character) in, 29–30, 48–49, 55, 57, 60, 61, 71, 73, 81, 92, 93, 109, 112, 113–115, 129, 146, 149, 150–151, 155, 157, 160, 173, 197; direction of, 11–15, 177–181 (see also Scott, Ridley); DVD of, 11, 19–23, 81; editing of, 71, 73, 75, 77, 85, 119; ending of, 5, 52, 78, 83, 184–185, 188; female agency in, 4, 5, 11, 15, 19, 22, 23, 31, 37, 188; femininity in, 28–33, 46, 86, 117, 119; flashback montage in, 82, 184; framing of shots in, 105, 109; gender in, 7–8, 27–33, 48–49, 74, 91, 93, 118, 131–134, 136–137, 160, 185; guns in, 21, 22, 48, 57, 81, 82, 109, 172–173, 174, 192; Hal Slocumbe (character) in, 78–79, 81, 82, 87, 93, 111, 115, 117, 134, 149, 153–155, 157, 159, 160, 200; Harlan (character) in, 28, 38, 49, 73, 80–81, 82, 92, 94, 98, 118–119, 129, 147, 149, 151–154, 157, 172, 173, 177, 179, 183; heterosexuality in, 135, 137, 139, 142, 147; hybridity in, 7, 13, 23, 29, 31; hysteria in, 45–46, 48, 50; identity in, 1, 3, 7–8, 23, 32, 33, 35, 38–39, 44, 49, 58, 91–121, 131, 141; J. D. (character) in, 22, 30–31, 49, 55, 57, 58, 60–62, 82, 86, 93, 94, 101, 109, 112, 113, 117, 146–153, 156–

226

Index

161, 164–165; Jimmy (character) in, 30, 71–72, 81, 82, 92, 93, 101, 116, 117, 152, 155, 156, 197; and lesbianism, 44, 123, 137, 182–183; liquids as symbol in, 94, 119; masculinity in, 24, 28–32, 46, 55, 56, 57– 62, 81, 119, 140–142, 146, 147, 151, 154, 176; Max (character) in, 155, 157, 159; men in, 57–62, 150 (see also specific characters); murder in, 19, 21, 22, 55, 86, 93, 129, 131, 151, 173, 191, 193, 203; outlawry in, 20–23, 123, 131–134, 137, 153, 157, 177, 182, 188, 199; patriarchy in, 2, 11, 63, 73, 74, 78, 131; phallic motifs in, 15, 48, 81, 83, 112; point of view in, 35– 36, 73, 75; poster for, 16, 17, 18–19; production costs of, 9; promotion of, 9, 11, 15–23; race in, 37, 111–112, 138, 155–156; rape attempted in, 14, 19, 21, 22, 43, 45, 46, 49, 55, 81, 93, 129, 131– 132, 151, 152, 170, 171, 173, 187, 192, 197– 199, 202; Rastafarian cyclist in, 72–75, 93, 111–112, 155, 156; repression in, 18, 22, 28, 32, 36, 43; revenge in, 171, 194, 198; scholarship on, 2–3; score of, 4, 14, 65–88, 115– 118, 186; screenplay of, 4–5, 12, 13, 177 (see also Khouri, Callie); sexuality in, 22–23, 31, 37, 44, 46, 53, 62, 110, 130, 198–199 (see also heterosexuality in; lesbianism in); smoking in, 105– 107, 116, 118, 119, 150; sound editing of, 116–117; sound in, 4, 115–118, 186; state trooper scene in, 72–75, 93, 117–118, 155, 156, 185; Thunderbird theme in, 85–88, 90n12; trucker/tanker truck scene in, 15, 21, 22–24, 50, 53, 59–60, 73, 74, 79–80, 93, 94, 98, 117, 155, 156, 176, 179, 191, 199; violence in, 1–2, 3, 15, 22, 24, 47, 62, 117, 134, 140, 149, 153, 173–176, 188, 191– 193, 197–199; Western conventions in, 22 Thelma & Louise: The Last Journey, 11, 14, 39n1; frame captures from, 12, 14, 35, 83, 169 They Live by Night, 122, 126, 128 They Used to Call Me Snow White . . . But I Drifted, 196 Thomas, Kelly, 123

Thomson, David, 96, 100 thrillers, 182 Thunderbird. See Thelma & Louise: car(s) in; Thelma & Louise: Thunderbird theme in Tillis, Pam, 116 Time magazine, 5, 10, 34, 35, 40n6, 201; articles reprinted from, 193–203 Title IX, 98 Toblowsky, Stephen, 155 Tootsie, 99 Top Hat, 68 Total Recall, 174, 199 Touré, Ali Farka, 68 Townsley, Eleanor, 142 Travolta, John, 100 trickster, tradition of, 53–54, 58, 61 Tri-Star, 9 Turan, Kenneth, 193 Turner, Kathleen, 195 Twain, Mark, 53 Twelve Monkeys, 161 21 Jump Street, 148 Twister, 83 underscoring of films, 66, 68, 88n2 Universal Pictures/Universal Music, 89n3 upward mobility, 123, 125, 126 Us, 164, 165 U.S. Congress, 25–26 U.S. News and World Report, 5, 26–27, 34, 40n6, 173; article reprinted from, 191–193 Vanity Fair, 164, 165 Van Sant, Gus, 136, 143 Vares, Tiina, 2 Victor/Victoria, 56 Vidor, King, 32 Vietnam War, 138 violence, 141, 196; in Bonnie and Clyde, 130; and consequentiality, 172; as entertainment, 171–172; and humor, 62–63,

102; normalized, in road movies, 4, 123; in romantic relationships, 120. See also Thelma & Louise: murder in; Thelma & Louise: rape attempted in; Thelma & Louise: violence in V. I. Warshawski, 195 W, 166 Walcott, Noel L. III, 74, 93, 111, 155 Watergate, 138 Weaver, Sigourney, 13 Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, 25 Wenders, Wim, 85 West, the American, 14, 16, 18, 43, 88, 149, 199 Western movies, 16, 76, 84–85, 146 Wexman, Virginia Wright, 102 White Palace, 96 Whitman, Walt, 124 Wild at Heart, 43, 136 Wild Bunch, The, 184 Williams, John, 67, 69, 85 Williams, Linda, 32 Willis, Bruce, 100, 195 Willis, Kelly, 71, 80 Willis, Sharon, 2, 47, 60, 149, 153, 157 Witches of Eastwick, The, 96 Wizard of Oz, The, 69 women’s movement. See feminism; gender Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory, 32 Wood, Robin, 135, 143 Wynette, Tammy, 71 Yentl, 56 Young, Sean, 13 You Only Live Once, 122, 124 Zemeckis, Robert, 135 Zeta-Jones, Catherine, 163 Zimmer, Hans, 4, 14, 65, 79, 82, 83–85, 84, 88–89n2, 89–90n10

Index

227