Thelma and Louise: a weekend as a life's journey

Thelma & Louise

Girls and their Guns -- Phallic violence and female autonomy in "Thelma and Louise"

The protagonists of the film "Thelma and Louise" (1991) illustrate a paradox. On one hand, the relatively disempowered women of the introduction of the film find a sense of autonomy and friendship in their quest to avoid the law over the course of the film. This suggests that "Thelma and Louise" can be classified as a feminist film. The protagonists assume the traditional male role celebrated in earlier 'road films' of American cinema like "Easy Rider" and "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." They also seem to be, as friends, kind of romantic outlaws as a couple, along the lines of "Badlands" and "True Romance." The women of "Thelma and Louise" are violent, as in the scene when they blow up the truck of a sexist driver. They are sexualized, picking up a young drifter, purely for the pleasure he can give them, yet their most important relationships are with one another. The protagonists powerfully enforce their own code of revenge, as when Thelma shoots her friend's would-be cowboy rapist. This act touches off their flight and subsequent crime spree. But they do so only by assuming negative, male roles, and their quest is death-driven rather than life-drive. This suggests that "Thelma and Louise" uses the road picture conventions to invert, but not really question, the American belief in phallic, violent power and gender norms.

The disempowerment of the two women of the beginning of the film shifts as they find empowerment through the use of a symbol of masculine, phallic power, that of a gun, which they can wield against the male, elemental sexual presence. At the beginning of the film, Thelma, the original victim depicted in the film, is particularly oppressed. She is in a confining relationship with her husband Darryl who evidently does not appreciate her efforts to make herself or her home look beautiful. In the first scenes, Thelma rushes around the home, nervously tending to the house and preparing for her short, brief respite from her mundane life with her friend Louise.

Louise at least has a job as a waitress and seems somewhat more empowered than her friend. After all, she encourages Thelma to leave her home for a time, and to get away, dance, and enjoy life a bit. But Louise serves men at the coffee shop where she works, and her employment seems like a dead-end 'pink collar' job. She is also living with a musician who does not seem to appreciate her any more than Thelma's husband appreciates his wife efforts to be a homemaker. Furthermore, the viewer eventually learns that within her memory, Louise has a terrible secret locked away -- she is the victim of a rape. Both women thus begin the film subjected to men, in some sense, either as a wife or a victim.

The women enjoy a weekend together, bonding in their female friendship. They at first 'hit the road' in Hollywood style, in a flashy yet beat-up 1956 Thunderbird, just to let down their hair for a bit and temporarily let loose their wilder selves, believing that they will easily return to their old lives. But Thelma has a few drinks and becomes overly friendly with a male line-dancer. In the parking lot of the bar, where he has coerced her into following him, he tries to rape her, physically inserting his presence between the two women, and emotionally and psychologically damaging both women.

To protect her friend, Louise does not call for help. She is no damsel in distress, she does not seek the law or even an outlaw cowboy to help her, as might be typical of previous Hollywood Westerns or road pictures where the male protagonist took center stage. But Louise does select a very male way of settling scores -- she takes a gun and shoots the man. The female friends flee, but now with a purpose -- rather than pretending to be urban outlaws, when they are really having a 'girl's night out,' by asserting the right of Thelma not to be raped and Louise to act as an individual, female arbiter of justice, they have become outlaws for real.

Appropriating the male, 'protective' power of the gun becomes symbolically reinforced by the fact that Thelma took the gun from her husband 'for protection' while they went on their 'fishing trip,' which is what she calls her vacation, given Darryl's fondness for going on all-boys' fishing trips over the weekend. The women thus are falling into a patriarchal way of enacting justice (even of going on vacation) They are inverting it but not changing it, using a phallic symbol of male dominance, given to them by an exploitive husband, against male sexual violence. Because Louise does so in protection of her friend, she almost seems to be supplanting Darryl's role. Her decision to shoot the man to protect her friend's honor and her own honor places her in a traditionally male role, without questioning a male-dominated society where such acts seem needed and justified to live.

The complex psychology behind Louise's action is underlined by the fact that Louise does not use the gun in 'pure' self-defense. True, she needs the gun at first to protect Thelma and prevent Thelma from being raped. But she shoots him when Thelma is no longer in danger of being raped. Had she not tried to assert total male power and control over Thelma's rapist, the film would likely have ended there, and the two women could have, for better or worse, returned to their ordinary lives. Louise tries to teach the rapist a lesson that "when a woman is crying like that, she is not having any fun." But he acts disrespectfully towards both women, and sneers at Louise, openly spurning her threat of violence.

His words, "*****" take Louise in her mind back to her own rape, when she had no gun for protection. In her mind, she rationalizes that the man will continue to act violently towards other women if she does not do something. She shoots him, to assert her own power, and the only way she knows how to answer him is not within the traditional, feminine device of words or sex (which the man is using) but violence, male, symbolic violence that trumps all words and sexual gestures.

Louise does not believe in the power of the justice system, like an outlaw. She does not, because like the traditional cowboy, she harbors a dark secret, only in this case her secret is that she was a victim in her former life, not a villain. She sees the justice system, with some justification, as patriarchal, ineffective, and dominated by male views of women. Because Thelma had had a few drinks, danced with the man, and seemed friendly towards his advances on the dance floor, no one will believe her it she says she was raped, counsels Louise.

Louise speaks from her own experience, justifying her renegade form of justice. The audience sympathizes with Louise, because she seems to speak an uncomfortable truth, and because she acts with compassion towards her friend, no matter how violent her actions. Louise appropriates male power symbolically and literally, becoming the more powerful and violent person, becoming a law unto herself through the use of a weapon that no words can overcome.

The male fantasy of the gun is that when a male has a gun, a kind of surrogate penis, he does not need to be subject to the will and desires of the justice system. He does not need to protect himself by obeying the law and trusting that the courts or sheriffs will make sure he is not harmed. He does not even need to speak very much like Clint Eastwood's the Man with No Name of his famous Western series. The outlaw with a gun only needs to shoot -- that is the only answer he needs to have. Louise lives this fantasy herself rather than asks a man to save Thelma or herself, but by killing a man she brings the wrath of the justice system on her head.

Louise transgresses the law, and also transgresses gender barriers by taking up a gun as her voice. As the film evolves, the cat-and-mouse chase of a man chasing a woman becomes written onto the road outlaw picture. True, both women are in some sense the 'pursued' given that they are being pursued by male policemen and state troopers. But it is they who are feared by the law, not vice versa. The crossing of gender barriers is also evident as the women pick up a young drifter, clearly intending to exploit him sexually for his dumb, beautiful attractiveness, much in the way that women in road pictures have been traditionally captured and exploited by the protagonists. Even the women's clothing experiences a kind of conversion, as they shift from their original dresses -- the uniform of a servant waitress and a housedress -- to the free, comfortable, yet openly sexy jeans and t-shirts of cowboys.

And as with male road pictures, it is sex that threatens to divide the two women. Not when they unite to blow up the truck of a leering, misogynistic truck driver, but when the drifter they pick up tires to exploit them and Thelma's attraction towards him. Thelma is more flighty and sexual, and her youthful, sexual drive, unfulfilled in her relationship with her husband, causes the events that propel the narrative of the road picture, and perpetually frustrates Louise. The film does seem to imply that women cannot have sex, love, freedom, and power but then again most road pictures suggest that men cannot settle down into marriage with women and still glory in the freedom of the road. Like the women's relationships, the male relationships of road pictures often seem homoerotic in their intensity and disdain of the opposite gender's compassion. However, when transposed onto a feminine narrative, the scenes between the woman and J.D. could be 'read' as suggesting that female autonomy and going from partner to partner, is dangerous to female friendship as well as individual female freedom and escape. After all, Louise's lover does not want to settle down, and is not punished for his freedom in the film.