Hollywood Utopia

Such affirmation of woman’s difference can, however, lead to the polarising
position which remains ‘essentialist, reductive and representative of an
ideological/theoretical justification of patriarchy’ (Sargisson 1994: 85).
Nevertheless, leaving aside Mellencamp’s eulogy, many critics found it difficult to
come to any form of feminist consensus regarding the film. Within a broadly sociohistorical
context, the film takes on its particular meaning in relation to women’s
changing social status and gender roles in the political economy of America after
the Second World War. For most critics it generally represents the social reality of
white, post-war baby boomers. Thelma is unhappily married and Louise is single,
like a lot of women in America. In particular, some critics were totally dismayed at
the film’s transformation into a buddy movie and its apparent appropriation of
patriarchal agendas, especially within its evocative closure. What encouraged so
many women critics to take this film so personally? ‘The answer must lie in the
film’s openness to the fantasmatic scenarios one can bring to it’ (Willis in Collins
1993: 122). 21
In spite of cogent criticism, these potent protagonists came to symbolise escape for
a whole generation of (post)feminist critics, who were not given the ‘heroic fantasy’
of Easy Rider and its heroic ilk during the counter-revolutionary period of the
1960s. Yet like their alter-egos in Easy Rider, a price has to be paid for such heroic
freedom and their ‘adolescent pose’ conveys the stereotypical romantic fantasy of
the tragic situation. The two female protagonists kiss and hold hands in a symbolic
‘suicide love pact’ before driving off over the sublime precipice. 22
Craig Owens, in ‘The Discourse of Others’, remarks on how ‘in order to speak, to
represent herself, a woman assumes a masculine position; perhaps, he argues, this
is why femininity is frequently associated with masquerade, with false
representation, with simulation and seduction’ (cited in Foster 1983: 59). As in
Ridley Scott’s other big box office success with Sigourney Weaver, Alien (1979),
‘the only conceivable fate for a woman with the right stuff is to be driven off a
precipice into oblivion’ (ibid.).
The inability or even unwillingness of many critics to appreciate the often
contradictory and excessive ‘pleasure(s)’ of the text, effectively misses the
‘transgressive’ utopian nature of the film as defined by Sargisson and others in
Chapter 1. Thelma and Louise certainly offers numerous contradictory pleasures,
including a somewhat ‘adolescent’ agency and exposition of a feminist eco-utopian
space. This is most clearly affirmed by Yvonne Tasker, who suggests that the film
is a fantasy which works through a drama about ‘limits and transgressions’,
together with an exploration of a new type of space. ‘Thelma and Louise operates
within a different set of terms, which we might think of as - utopia’ (Tasker 1993:
154).
3 Westerns, Landscapes and Road Movies 113