TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/062491/0624420.000

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                                                                                CINEMA, Page 52

COVER STORIES

Gender Bender


A white-hot debate rages over whether Thelma & Louise celebrates
liberated females, male bashers -- or outlaws

By RICHARD SCHICKEL -- Reported by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York,
Sally B. Donnelly and Martha Smilgis/Los Angeles


    It is "the first movie I've ever seen which told the
downright truth," says Mary Lucey, a lesbian activist in Los
Angeles.

    It is a "paean to transformative violence . . . An
explicit fascist theme," writes social commentator John Leo, who
went out prospecting for a column in U.S. News and World Report
and discovered a mother lode of fool's gold.

    It is, according to Cathy Bell, a Houston environmental
communications specialist who was once married to "a redneck
control freak" and found the courage to dump him after a
liberating weekend trip with a girlfriend, "like seeing my life
played before my eyes."

    "It justifies armed robbery, manslaughter and chronic
drunken driving as exercises in consciousness raising," charges
New York Daily News columnist Richard Johnson, who also finds
it "degrading to men, with pathetic stereotypes of
testosterone-crazed behavior" and half-seriously proposes a ban
on it.

    It is, according to Miami Herald movie reviewer Bill
Cosford, "a butt-kicking feminist manifesto . . . which sweeps
you along for the ride." No, says Sheila Benson, a Los Angeles
Times film critic, it is a betrayal of feminism, which, as she
understands it, "has to do with responsibility, equality,
sensitivity, understanding -- not revenge, retribution or
sadistic behavior."

    Whole lot of heavy thinking going on out there. Some
pretty heavy journalistic breathing too. Hard to believe that
the occasion for this heated exercise in moral philosophy and
sociological big-think is a modest and, at its most basic level,
very enjoyable little movie called Thelma & Louise, which is so
far a moderate commercial success. It has earned about $20
million in its first 3 1/2 weeks of release -- less than a
muscular big-boy movie like Robin Hood or Terminator 2: Judgment
Day could expect to make on its first weekend.

    No matter. Thelma & Louise is a movie whose scenes and
themes lend themselves to provocative discussions. What business
it's doing is in all the right places -- the big cities and
college towns where opinion makers are ever on the alert for
something to make an opinion about. For their purposes, this
movie is a natural. In the most literal sense of the word. For
the picture has a curiously unselfconscious manner about it, an
air of not being completely aware of its own subtexts or largest
intentions, of being innocently open to interpretation,
appropriate and otherwise.

    This, indeed, is its salient redeeming quality. If it were
as certain -- and as clumsy -- about what it was up to as its
more virulent critics think it is, it might easily have been as
overbearing -- and as deadly -- as some of their interpretations
are. It is not, though, and anyone with a sense of recent film
history can see Thelma & Louise in the honorable line of movies
whose makers, without quite knowing what they were doing, sank
a drill into what appeared to be familiar American soil and
found that they had somehow tapped into a wild-rushing
subterranean stream of inchoate outrage and deranged violence.
Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider, Dirty Harry and Fatal
Attraction -- all these movies began as attempts to vary and
freshen traditional generic themes but ended up taking their
creators, and their audiences, on trips much deeper, darker,
more disturbing than anyone imagined they were going to make.

    These are not the big-budget movies that solemnly announce
the importance of their subject matter and often totter off
into oblivion clutching a Best Picture Oscar -- emotional
irrelevancy's consolation prize. The true genre-bending films
are less pretentious, less carefully calculated entertainments
that may have only a hazy idea of their objectives. And (best
thing about them, really) they have a way of driving some people
-- the ones who think movies ought to be a realistic medium or
an ideologically correct one -- crazy.

    Consciously or not, these films tend to serve as
expressions of the values or confusions jangling around in their
society, or occasionally as springboards for earnest discussions
of them. At a time when moral discourse has been reduced to the
size of a sound bite and rapid social change has everyone on
edge, the messages conveyed in even the most frolicking of these
movies stir peculiar passions. Such films often have an
astonishing afterlife, not only in popular memory but as
artifacts that vividly define their times.

    These times, in movies as in American society, seem
defined by perilous, off-balance relationships between men and
women. The year's two top box-office winners, The Silence of the
Lambs and Sleeping with the Enemy, dramatize the judicious
revenge that a woman takes on a brutalizing man. In another new
film, Alan Rudolph's dour and inept Mortal Thoughts, two women
(Demi Moore and Glenne Headly) kill a hateful husband (Bruce
Willis, who lately can't seem to get a break). The trend
straddles oceans too: Luc Besson's stylish French thriller, La
Femme Nikita, is about a woman (Anne Parillaud) whose romantic
life conflicts with her career as an espionage hit person.

    The movie summer promises more women who take their life
-- and a gun -- in their own hands. Kathleen Turner will play
a tough private eye in V.I. Warshawski. Even the budget-bustin'
action-adventure Terminator 2 offers a strong female figure:
Linda Hamilton is an embattled mother powerful enough to square
off alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger.

    The success of these films as popular entertainment and as
clues to the zeitgeist remains to be determined. But they will
have to go far to match Thelma & Louise. "Ten years from now it
will be seen as a turning point," says Peter Keough, film
editor of the Boston Phoenix.

    He is more than likely right. Movies achieve this kind of
historic stature not because they offer a particularly acute
portrayal of the way we live now or because they summarize with
nuanced accuracy the opposing positions in an often flatulent
quasi-political debate. They work because somehow they worm
their way into our collective dreamscape, retrieve the anxious
images they find there and then splash them across the big
screen in dramatically heightened form.

    That's why most of the questions raised about Thelma &
Louise seem so weirdly inappropriate. Does it offer suitable
"role models"? Is the "violence" its heroines mete out to their
tormentors really "empowering" to women, or does it represent
a feckless sacrifice of the high moral ground? Is its
indiscriminate "male bashing" grossly unfair to an entire sex?

    Should we care? As Barbara Bunker, who teaches psychology
at the State University of New York, Buffalo, very sensibly
notes, "It's a dramatic piece, not a ((literal)) description of
what's going on in our society. It seems to me that drama is
supposed to make things larger than life so you get the point."
Agrees Regina Barreca, who teaches English at the University of
Connecticut and is the author of They Used to Call Me Snow White
but I Drifted, a book about women and humor: "It has got to be
seen not as a cultural representation but as a fairy tale." In
other words, as a dream work, full of archetypes and
exaggerations.

    This does not mean that Thelma & Louise is or was ever
meant to be a sweet dream, a comfortable, comforting movie like,
say, City Slickers. "Screenplay idea," jotted Callie Khouri in
her notebook one day in 1987: "Two women go on a crime spree."
Khouri, whose first screenplay this is, had the notion that if
a female couple were somehow forced by circumstances to take up
the outlaw life, they would, under the suspenseful impress of
life on the lam, undergo the same kind of bonding process --
sweet, funny, appealing -- that male protagonists customarily
experience in this kind of movie. But she also seemed to sense
that just because of its off-casting, it could have a jagged
edginess that its models had long since lost.

    Khouri's idea was, to borrow a term from old-time
Hollywood writers, a nice little switcheroo -- logical, easy to
explain and not too 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
than the $17.5 million they ultimately spent.

    It is possible, of course, that the Suits were just as
nervous about the story that Khouri developed as some of the
film's latter-day critics have turned out to be. Hollywood is
not, after all, the world capital of the new masculine
sensibility.

    Be 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 feel more than entitled to shed their mates for a
long weekend at a friend's vacation retreat.

    On the way, 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.

    It is a remarkable mood swing, one of the few
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, and it doesn't
solve anything."

    It is also blessedly unexplained. In the aftermath of the
killing, we do learn that something dreadful happened to Louise
years ago. Obviously it was some kind of sexual assault, but she
never reveals its exact nature. This, of course, runs counter
to the conventions of popular culture. If this were the
TV-rape-movie-of-the-month, a hysterical revelation of the exact
nature of the abuse -- especially if it were, say, gang rape or
years of incest -- would be obligatory in order to balance the
moral scales.

    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.

    Within the moral scheme of the movie, writer Khouri's
choice of this particular crime as the motive for the women's
"crime spree," instead of, say, grand theft -- auto, has other
advantages as well. For one thing, it ironically restores Thelma
and Louise to equality with men -- at least in one realm of
action. Says Martha Nussbaum, a philosophy professor at Brown
and an expert on women in antiquity: "I think the modern idea
that women are gentle and sweet is parochial. Just look at
Medea." The Greeks, Nussbaum suggests, understood that crimes
are committed by those with the least access to power, which
then, as now, included women. "As the ancients said, `No force
in nature is stronger than a woman wronged.' "

    Or, perhaps, a woman who has had a taste of revenge and
would like to gulp down more of it. Believing that no one is
likely to accept their account of what happened in the parking
lot, Thelma and Louise decide they have no choice but to make
a run for the Mexican border. This long concluding passage of
the film, rich in irony and ambiguities, is fueled dramatically
by a slow, steady shift in their relationship. As Sarandon
notes, Louise suffers "great remorse" about the murder. "It
doesn't change the world, and in the long run it doesn't serve
to her advantage." Indeed, fear of her act's consequences slowly
undoes her former take-charge capability. She gradually cedes
leadership of their little expedition to Thelma -- possibly
because she sees that it can end only in tragedy, while Thelma
can't see anything because she is having the time of her life.

    It is Thelma who spots a really cute hitchhiker by the
side of the road and decides she just has to have him. With him
she has great sex for the first time in her life. To him --
he's a convenience-store bandit -- she loses all the getaway
money that Louise had scraped together from her life savings.
But what might have seemed yet another rape, this time of a
more symbolic kind, turns out to be a fair exchange. The
hitchhiker, using Thelma's hair dryer as a gun substitute,
teaches her the tricks of his dubious trade; soon she is doing
hold-ups. It is Thelma too who gets the drop on a cop who stops
the two women for speeding, orders him into the trunk of his
squad car, and gently warns him to be sweet to his wife, adding,
"My husband wasn't sweet to me, and look how I turned out."

    Literalists criticize Thelma's erotic awakening because,
they say, it could not happen so soon after the trauma of near
rape. Doubtless that would be true in circumstances less special
than the ones the movie sets up. The point it's insisting on is
that a sudden access of freedom is eroticizing as well as
empowering.

    By the same token, some representatives of the world's
largest minority, the humor-impaired, regard the women's
response to an oil-tank trucker with whom they keep playing
fender tag as excessive. Every time they encounter him, the guy
proves by word, smirk and obscene gesture that he's a chauvinist
dinosaur. When he inquires if they're "ready to get serious,"
they reply encouragingly. What he doesn't know, of course, is
that they're thinking metaphorically, with a little help from
director Scott, with whose surrealistic reinvention of the West
-- one-third desert, one-third industrial wasteland, one-third
unzoned strip development -- this oil-truck rig fits right in.
In Scott's eyes, and his heroines', it is a gigantic penis. And,
yes, they are ready for that. Ready to blow it to smithereens
with their little guns.

    It is, as SUNY-Buffalo's psychologist Bunker says, "a
fabulous move dramatically, a catharsis for all those times
you've taken something and couldn't give it back." But taken
together with some of the women's other acts, does it represent
an excessive response to the provocation? Sarandon insists not.
She says the charge shows "what a straight, white male world
movies traditionally occupy. This kind of scrutiny does not
happen to Raiders of the Lost Ark or that Schwarzenegger thing
((Total Recall)) where he shoots a woman in the head and says,
`Consider that a divorce.' " Sarandon insists that all concerned
spent a lot of time making sure Thelma & Louise didn't turn into
"a bloodlust-revenge film." Certainly, compared with the typical
male-action film, the violence here is spare and rather chastely
staged.

    But that's not really the issue. What people sense,
particularly in Davis' performance, is that she is getting off
on her newly discovered taste and talent for gun-slinging
outlawry. It's a kick, not so very different from, maybe part
and parcel of, her newly discovered pleasure in sex. This is
something nice girls -- nice people, nice movies -- are not
supposed to own up to, let alone speak of humorously. But as
Bunker observes, violent assertiveness is "basically
unrestrained expressiveness," and, let's be honest about it, we
all enjoy our opportunities, all too rare in the real world, to
partake of its pleasures.

    The cost, though, is high. It is toward self-destruction
that Thelma and Louise's road inevitably winds. For all the
time they have been out there expressing themselves, a posse
has been relentlessly closing in on them. By a pleasing irony,
it is led by the only thoroughly nice guy in the picture,
detective Hal Slocumbe (Harvey Keitel). A patient, sympathetic
man, he is this myth's wise father figure. By the time Thelma
and Louise finally see him, however, he is one of a small army
of cops who have hemmed them in against the top of a sheer
canyon wall. Hal advances toward them, arms outstretched, in a
last-minute plea for reason.

    Fat chance. The women eye him, eye the drop ahead of them,
imagine a prison stretch, contemplate the last free choice
available to them -- life or death -- and floor the accelerator,
sailing off the cliff into the movie's concluding whiteout.

    Unlike most of the plot points that have stirred debate,
this one actually deserves it. Sure, everyone recognizes it as
a straight steal from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but
what final meaning does it impose? Sarandon thinks it's "the
least compromising ending. You built this whole film to have
these people not settle anymore, and then you'd toss them back
into the system?"

    It's hard to find anyone who thinks the women should have
turned themselves in. It is equally hard to find anyone who
detects a note of triumph in their suicide. Novelist Alix Kates
Shulman quotes La Pasionaria on this point: "It's better to die
on your feet than live on your knees." But as Brooklyn Law
School professor Elizabeth Schneider points out, the message
here is that "self-assertion and awakening lead to death." Or,
as film scholar Annette Insdorf puts it, "When death is your
only choice, how free are you?"

    All of which is a way of saying, "Baby, you've still got
a long way to go." And a way of saying that, seen in narrowly
feminist terms, Thelma & Louise advances the women's movement
only a few hesitant steps. But perhaps the film should not be
looked at that way. Davis, for one, resents the connection:
"Why, because it stars women, is this suddenly a feminist
treatise, given the burden of representing all women?"

    A good point. In its messy, likable way, Thelma & Louise
is getting at even larger, more mysterious issues. Carol
Clover, a film scholar at the University of California,
Berkeley, says the movie is trying to study, among other topics,
"the distance between men and women, the desire for each sex to
separate itself." It also attempts to look at the opposite side
of that coin: the increasingly dangerous ways in which the sexes
come together. Novelist James Carroll wrote last week in the New
Republic that "when men and women reduce each other to sexual
objects, they take the first step toward beating each other up."

    Since this movie demonstrates Clover's point, and since it
places that point in a context that is satirically aware of the
violent and depersonalizing traditions of our visual popular
culture, it just may be that Thelma & Louise is in fact better
than any of its exegetes have made it sound. It remains the most
intriguing movie now in release. No other cheers one's
argumentative spirit, stirs one's critical imagination, and
awakens one's protective affection in quite the way Thelma &
Louise does.