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Thelma and Louise is a popular commercial film that has stirred extensive critical discussion of the woman's place in Hollywood action drama. With its self-conscious gender switch on road film outlaws, it has provoked a fresh consideration of sexual stereotyping in film genre and in cultural ideology generally. But writer Callie Khouri and producer-director Ridley Scott's film is more than a satire on patriarchal presumption. As I hope to demonstrate, Thelma and Louise not only invites consideration of Hollywood's road rebel history from a feminine perspective, but relates it to a deeper problem of subjectivity in contemporary consumer culture.
The media response to this film was immediate and provocational. After placing Thelma and Louise with other 1991 productions that concern women's revenge such as Mortal Thoughts, V.l. Warshawski, and Sleeping With the Enemy, Time magazine's June 24 cover story, "Gender Bender," goes on to assert that "A white-hot debate rages over whether Thelma and Louise celebrates liberated females, male bashers-or outlaws" (Schickel 52). Richard Schickel's byline is accompanied by one from Margaret Carlson, who denies the film's claim to a feminist sensibility altogether because of its reliance on a male action mode (57). Either way, the confrontational gender stance identified in and extrapolated from the film by Time's writers and editors exemplifies the news media's tendency to over-simplify and exploit topical social conflicts represented in cultural narratives. This reductionist approach to a complex film typifies the effects of commercial pressures in mass market journalism and hardly moves beyond the kind of solicitous oppositionalism that characterizes American sociopolitical debate. Schickel's symptomatic reading of Thelma and Louise may be correct when he asserts that it "is satirically aware of the violent and depersonalizing traditions of our visual popular culture" (56). But exactly how this film links its particular images of "violent and depersonalizing... popular culture" (which sounds like an entity one could blame) into specific chains of meaning remains to be interpreted.
Some of these linkages have been addressed in recent symposia on this film carried in Cineaste and Film Quarterly. The authors in both publications tend to mistrust this popular movie's rather comfortable inclinations toward violent Hollywood spectacle. Thelma and Louise is seen, for example, to be either an imperfect satirical analogy of the woman's dilemma...