Hollywood Utopia

114 Hollywood Utopia
Third Space and Closure
Gillian Rose in Feminism and Geography affirms:
I want to explore the possibility of a space which does not replicate the exclusions
of the same and the other . . . feminism through its awareness of the politics of the
everyday, has always had a very keen awareness of the intersection of Space and
Power
(Rose 1993: 137).
Michel Foucault’s notion of ‘heterotopia’ (other spaces) focuses on the space ‘in
which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives,
our times and our history occurs’. He asks why has time ‘been treated as richness,
fecundity, life, dialectic, while in contrast space has been typically seen as ‘dead,
fixed and immobile’ (cited in Soja 1996: 14). 23 This evolution of ‘third space’ is
most particularly evidenced in the ending of Thelma and Louise. Probably the true
potency of the closing image has remained undervalued, which is why critics
especially find it hard to understand, being unwilling or unable to assess utopic
moments in film which often swamp narrative causalities embedded in it.
The frozen image of the car, framed at the centre of the mise-en-scène displaying
a romanticised image of a sublime natural precipice, is reminiscent of the famous
match-cut in Kubrick’s classic science fiction film 2001, when a bone, fashioned as
an evolutionary, technological symbol of violence for our prehistorical ancestors, is
hurdled up into space and becomes transformed into an advanced spaceship
touring the galaxy. This counterpointing of temporal continuity, while critical of the
human and technological evolutionary process, is majestically visualised as the ship
floats within the stars to the glorious romantic music of Strauss. Similarly,
audiences have become transfixed with the ending of Thelma and Louise, as
evidenced through many of the critical readings cited above. It is not inconceivable,
I would argue, to read the ‘unnatural’ image of the scene as producing an equally
potent metaphorical match-cut which reflects audience desires, hopes and fears
particularly framed within an ecological discourse.
As the American open-top convertible is frozen in mid-air, with its two
romanticised heroines at last ‘controlling’ or at least ‘negotiating’ their co-equal
destiny, the audience is allowed space and time to appreciate the protagonists’
significance within an iconographically potent sublime landscape. Metaphorically
and spatially they are at last in nature, as Dargis suggests; at one with the natural
eco-system as opposed to surrendering to the forces of patriarchal law and order.
Their journey has allegorically become transformed into a ‘pilgrimage’, having
secured utopic meaning for their lives. Time and narrative processes do not matter
anymore as they become frozen and immortalised in space. 24