Word: thelma
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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 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...
...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 suffers from the other great modern male defect -- a maddening inability to make permanent commitments. Both women...
...they stop at a roadhouse for a drink. One of its resident lounge lizards mistakes Thelma's naive 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 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...
...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 effect 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 effective range of ideologically oriented criticism. "The violence I liked, in a way," says Sarandon, "because it is not premeditated. It is primal...
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...