Chicks Who Kick Butt, 20th Anniversary

Sarandon and Davis in Thelma and Louise

Sarandon and Davis in Thelma and Louise

Film Friday

Slate reminds me that 2011 is the 20th anniversary of Thelma and Louise, a film that once worked (and perhaps still does) as a gender Rorschach test. When it came out, many women loved it and many men didn’t. I remember walking out of the theater feeling very uncomfortable while my wife was pumping her fist.

Indeed, many male critics found the film excessively violent, a curious complaint given the double- and triple-digit body counts we were accustomed to seeing in all those 1980’s Stallone-Schwarzenegger-Willis-Gibson action adventure films. Here’s a list of violent incidents in Thelma and Louise:

(1) Louise shoots and kills a would-be rapist
(2) Thelma holds up a convenience store (no one is hurt)
(3) one of them shoots a man’s truck so that it blows up (he’s not in it)
(4) Thelma locks a policeman into the trunk of his cruiser (first, though, she considerately shoots two holes in the hood so that he can breathe better)
(5) the two drive their car into the Grand Canyon rather than give themselves up to the police.

In other words, the charges of violence seems laughable. Nevertheless, I take the complaints seriously since they indicate how profoundly disturbing men found the film. I think they/we were unnerved by the sight of unbridled female anger.

The film came at a turning point in Hollywood history. The 1980’s had been a decade featuring hard-bodied male heroes, probably in response to the rise of feminism and the shock of losing the Vietnam War.  These stoic individuals could survive practically any beating. The 1990’s, by contrast, saw the emergence of a “kinder, gentler” man (the adjectives are those of a George H. W. Bush seeking to distance himself from “Reaganbo”). Tom Hanks would win two Oscars before the decade was even half over and Schwarzenegger would retool himself into a kindergarten cop and a kinder gentler terminator.

Women, on the other hand, started roaring again. In addition to Susan Sarandon and Gina Davis, there was special agent Kathleen Turner  in V.I. Washawski, tough-as-nails FBI trainee Jodie Foster in Silence of the Lambs, and even tougher survivalist mom Linda Hamilton in Terminator II. It was as though men and women alike were reveling in selves that had been pushed under in the previous decade.

I find it interesting that, while men focused on T&L’s depiction of piggish men, women ultimately seemed to find men an afterthought. Maybe what we men found most threatening was a final scene in which we are all but irrelevant. When Thelma and Louise turn to each other, nod, and then go sailing off into the wild blue yonder, it’s as though they don’t need anyone but themselves.

One school of interpretation has it that T&L is a lesbian love story and the final lyrical driving off the cliff is a metaphor for their culminating orgasm. One of my students took this idea and found sexual exploration at the heart of many buddy road movies. Seeing travel as a separation from conventional behavior, she found similar explorations in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (which she saw as a male love story) and Y Tu Mama Tambien (sex across generational lines).

However one reads it, the film gave many women a new sense of self-confidence. As a result, I think it can be seen as one of those watershed movies that signal a shift in consciousness. Not that women started going around shooting rapists and robbing convenience stores. But as a call to stand up for themselves—yes.

“Strong men love strong women” writes Audre Lorde in a poem that I have been trying to track down. Or maybe she writes, “strong women love strong men.” It works both ways. If men learn behaviors to avoid from the movie and women pick up a new assertiveness, then we can achieve a balance that leaves us all happier.

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