Hollywood Utopia

112 Hollywood Utopia
not allowed to look at their bloodied bodies and realise (our) complicity in their
death. As the director asserts, the film has a broader agenda, albeit a commercial
one, rather than the exclusive affirmation of feminist principles. This is probably a
major reason why the film remains so popular and timeless, addressing both the
feminist cultural transcendence over landscape together with a particular
incursion into the perennial war of the sexes.
Thelma and Louise follows the path of many of its predecessors, taking the off-road
instead of the interstate highway and travelling the side roads from Arkansas
through Oklahoma and New Mexico, which is a traditional route for gangsters and
western heroes. The road and its destination become a metaphor for life itself. As
many critics affirm, while the American dream is essentially about success and
security, about ‘making it’, the road is about escape and freedom and a questioning
attitude to such dominant social values.
While male protagonists often use the road to flee from the clutches of castrating
females, female protagonists, on the other hand, cannot simply escape from
patriarchal pressures because of the gendered assumptions of the genre (Roberts
in Cohan et al. 1997: 62). Thelma and Louise - vividly shot by Adrian Biddle
(Aliens) and edited by Thom Noble (Witness) - refuses the western trope of the
final shoot-out, choosing instead a bittersweet and highly contested freedom from
patriarchy through the suicidal acceleration into the natural abyss. Many critics
suggest that the main protagonists must import masculinist concepts of gender
identity to their roles. It cannot be over-emphasised that normally neither ‘the
road’ nor ‘the West’ as locations of adventure have been spaces for feminist debate
in an attempt to (re)construct a progressive form of female agency, with women
more usually represented as passive and submissive.
Patricia Mellencamp contrasts the director, Ridley Scott, and his ‘feminist’
aesthetic to John Ford’s classic western style and sets the tone for much feminist
criticism of the film.
The film’s aerial shots are not like John Ford’s Monument Valley, conquering the land,
triumphant over space. Thelma and Louise almost become part of the land, neither
conquered nor conquering . . . In the end, death allows them to ‘keep on going’. In a
series of extreme close-ups, they are smiling, without fear, looking at each other, laughing.
They hold hands and kiss, the Polaroid they took at the beginning flies away, the
car is held in a freeze frame over the canyon. In the end Thelma and Louise defy
gravity, gaining mastery of themselves, becoming triumphant over death. The ending
is courageous, profound, and sublime
(in Jayamanne et al. 1995: 40).