Thelma and Louise

I chose to do my media analysis on the film Thelma

and Louise, released in 1991. 1 was initially interested
in the film because it was hailed as unique in that it
flipped gender roles because it was a female "buddy"
picture. However, I discovered that though the film
challenges some gender stereotypes, it also reinforces
many more and ultimately provides a negative
message for women. My analysis deals with the
friendship between the leading characters of Thelma
and Louise and how their characters are portrayed,
their relationships with other male characters and
how the males are portrayed, and with some of the
ways the film either supports or challenges gender
portrayals in the context of the genre of American
films.

Thelma and Louise centers around the friendship of

two women and their adventures/ mishaps. The film
opens as the two are preparing to leave on a weekend
roadtrip to get away from their respective husband
and boyfriend. However, an incident at a roadhouse a
few hours later, in which a male customer, Harlan,
assaults and attempts to rape Thelma, ends with
Louise shooting and killing the man. The women panic
and flee. Louise does not want to go to the police
because she fears that they will not believe their story
so she decides she will go to Mexico. She arranges for
her boyfriend, Jimmy, to wire her life savings to her at
a place on the way, but Jimmy shows up at the
telegraph office because he wants to know what has
happened. Thelma is unsure if she wants to go with
Louise, but meanwhile she meets a young attractive
hitchhiker with whom she spends the night at the
same time Louise and Jimmy spend their last night
together. However, the hitchhiker steals Louise's
savings and Thelma not only decides to rob a store to
finance the rest of the trip to Mexico, but also decides
to go to Mexico with Louise. All of this is occuring
concurrently with a police inquiry which initially seeks
Thelma and Louise for questioning in the shooting but,
after Thelma robs a store, the police search for them
becomes intense. The police set up shop at Thelma's
house with the permission of Thelma's bumbling
husband and finally trace a phone call from the two to
their location. The police amass in force and corner
the two women: They must either surrender or shoot
their way out. The two choose another option and the
film ends with Thelma and Louise driving into the
Grand Canyon, choosing death over surrender.

The friendship between Thelma and Louise is the

consistent focus of the film and each woman seems to
epitomize a certain 'stereotype' of the American
female. Thelma is the 'traditional' female, somewhat
reminiscent of the 1950's, reinforcing the media
stereotype of women's dependence mentioned by
Wood (238): She is a homemaker, excessively
dependent on her husband, and somewhat infantile in
that she often does not think about consequences or
plan ahead. The audience learns in the first scenes
that she felt she had to ask her husband's permission
to go on a weekend trip with her friend Louise, but her
timidity leads her to leave him a note instead. Louise,
on the other hand, is single, supports herself as a
waitress, and has a cautious, sometimes cynical
attitude toward the world. Louise has more experience
than Thelma in the sense that she is used to taking
care of herself, thinking for herself, and thus seems to
epitomize the more modern woman, possessing the
stereotypical 'male' attributes of assertiveness and
self-reliance (Wood, 81).

The two women act out these roles with each other in
various scenes throughout the film, both verbally and
non-verbally. Louise owns the car they are travelling in
and does most of the driving while Thelma is the
passive passenger. When Thelma asks Louise to stop
at the fateful roadhouse, she takes on a whining,
pleading tone and Louise concedes like a parent by
saying "O.K., just for a minute." It is Louise who
rescues Thelma in the parking lot and shoots Harlan.
Immediately after the shooting, Louise has to babysit
Thelma like a child while Louise repeats to her that
she will figure out what to do. Also, later in the film,
when Thelma guesses that Louise must have been
raped in the past, Louise refuses to talk about it,
repressing her feelings in typical 'male' fashion
(Wood, 79). However, Thelma finally becomes more
assertive after the drifter, J.D., steals their money and
Thelma decides she must rob a store to secure funds.
From that point until the end of the film, the two
women interact more as equals, although Louise
sometimes slips into the parent/male role as when she
admonishes Thelma not to litter. Unlike an earlier
scene when Louise decides alone that going to the
police about the attempted rape would be useless, a
key scene occurs later in the speeding car when the
newly assertive Thelma decides together with Louise
that they have done the right thing in running
because the law would not have done anything to
Harlan anyway. A little later, Thelma tells Louise "I
guess I went a little crazy," referring to the robbery,
etc., and Louise replies, "Well, it's the first chance
you've had to really express yourself." Finally, to
reinforce Thelma's new maturity, it is Thelma who
tells Louise that they must keep going when they are
surrounded by police in the desert; Thelma proposes
that they drive off the cliff into the canyon and Louise
agrees.

The relationship between Thelma And Louise has

many of the qualities Tannen discussed in Chapter 9
(246) in which she claims that women's friendships
generally tend to be based on a more intimate sharing
of personal details and problems than are men's
friendships. More importantly, the fact that Thelma's
character changed and developed to become more
like Louise's, and Louise remained largely the same,
implied the positive feminist message that women
who express independence and assertiveness in
relation to men (and to each other) is more desirable.
In the film, each character exorcises feelings about
men that they were repressing. Thelma throws off her
yoke of dependence on her husband when she sleeps
with the hitchhiker, J.D., and Louise vents long pent-
up feelings of anger regarding her own rape when she
shoots Harlan. In fact, Louise's action of shooting
Harlan supports Wood's claim that "...the feelings that
accompany rape and sexual assault ... endure far
beyond the act itself" (254). In all these ways, the
friendship between Thelma and Louise contains both
older and more recent views of gender expectations
of American women, highlights the dynamics of a
female friendship, and serves as a vehicle for them
(and vicariously, the audience) to express anger
toward various, and still common, damaging male
behaviors such as treating women as sex objects,
which can lead to rape, or as property, which is simply
dehumanizing.

Another area of interest are the relationships of

Thelma and Louise to the men in the film. A common
complaint of male viewers of the film is that all the
male characters are stereotypical, but I think this
serves the story because by showing how the men
relate to Thelma and Louise highlights some of the
gender stereotypical ways men and women still treat
each other.

Thelma's husband, Darryl, is intolerant, selfish, and

narcissistic. Throughout the movie, he never realizes
that his treatment of his wife contributes to her
unhappiness and her subsequent rejection of him. A
classic example of his attitude toward her occurs
when she calls him shortly after Harlan's murder. She
is trying to explain where she is etc., but he misses
the explanation because he is watching a football
game. He does not express any love or tenderness,
but simply orders Thelma to come home. This also
brings home Darryl's 'double- standard' attitude
toward their marriage because the audience learns
that Darryl was out most of the night before and felt
no obligation to call or explain to Louise. Even the
police sense that Thelma and Darryl's marriage is not
a loving, close one. A funny, but telling, scene occurs
between the police and Darryl that keys in to what
men perceive women want, which can often be a
source of miscommunication between the genders. In
order to trace Thelma and Louise's location through a
phone tap, the police advise Darryl to be
uncharacteristically gentle with Thelma when she
calls, "Sound like you're really glad to hear from her.
Women love that shit." Of course, Thelma knows right
away that something is wrong because Darryl is never
nice.

Though Louise's boyfriend Jimmy is more sympathetic

in that he seems loving and helps Louise without
insisting on being in control or in the know about her
situation, the audience learns he is shy of
committment, which is a source of pain for Louise.
Apparently, Louise wants to go on this roadtrip with
Thelma because he has recently been ignoring her. Of
course, after the shooting when Louise is obviously in
trouble, Jimmy's interest in her is renewed. Louise
expresses her feelings about this often 'typical male'
reluctance toward committment when she tells
Thelma, "Jimmy's like any other guy, he just loves the
chase." Jimmy does come to Oklahoma City where he
gives Louise the balance of her savings and spends a
final night with her. This leads to an interesting dual
'relationship' scene where Louise and Jimmy are
relating on a mature level in one hotel room, honestly
discussing their feelings, while down the hall in
another room, Thelma and J. D. are interacting more
like children, jumping on the bed and playing
schoolyard games though they also finally have sex. I
enjoyed this scene for the contrasts it offered in
showing the different levels of maturity and intimacy
on which men and women interact.

The drifter, J.D., however, also uses and takes

advantage of the two women. When he tells Thelma
that he robs stores, he mouths a typically awful come-
on line: "I may be an outlaw but you're the one
stealin' my heart." His insincerity is made clear when
the two women realize the next morning that he has
stolen all their money. The other minor male
characters are similar in their views of Thelma and
Louise. Harlan, the man who attempts to rape
Thelma, first greets Thelma and Louise at the
roadhouse with the line, "What are two Kewpie Dolls
like you doing in a place like this. He objectifies them
right away with the term Kewpie Doll and Louise picks
up on it and is rightly suspicious. When Louise rescues
Thelma from his assault in the parking lot a few
moments later, he says "We're just having a little fun,"
and Louise replies "You have a real f...-up idea of fun."
This whole scene supports Wood's claim that one of
the stereotypical themes of the media is to portray
women as victims/sex objects and men as aggressors
(243), and Louise's reply speaks for all women who
demand that men treat them with respect. Finally, the
truck driver who keeps making lewd gestures toward
the two women exemplifies all the guys in any
woman's life who ever whistled or catcalled, etc., to
women they don't know. Finally, the policeman who
stops Thelma and Louise is another comical male
stereotype in that he is a big, macho guy with his gun
and uniform, but when his gun is taken away he
becomes a whimpering clown. In fact, even the
sympathetic policeman who speaks to Louise on the
phone and tries to avert the disaster at the end of the
film, consistently refers to Thelma and Louise
throughout not as women, but as 'girls.'

It is also worth pointing out at this point that even

near the end of the film when the two women are
becoming more comfortable asserting themselves
with the men in the film, they are still excessively
polite. They both use 'please'and 'thank you' and
apologize at the same time they are locking the
policeman in the trunk, robbing a store, or shooting at
the lewd truck driver's big rig. As in Dr. Jenkins
analysis of Shelley Long's character in Cheers
(Deming & Jenkins, 55), but in reverse, Thelma and
Louise are exhibiting non- stereotypical female
behavior while maintaining stereotypical elements of
what Robin Lakeoff calls 'women's speech.'

This film is a mixed bag in that it both reflects and

challenges gender stereotypes within the context of
American films. Thelma and Louise was originally
touted as the first female 'buddy' picture. True, the
film challenges stereotypes because like in Lethal
Weapon, the protaganists get to have an adventure
that usually only men get to have in films, i.e.,
shooting guns, blowing things up, big car chases, etc.
However, in Lethal Weapon and in every other recent
and similar 'adventure' movie I can think of, the male
protaganists are sanctioned by society. They are cops
or government agents or whatever, and never have to
pay any consequences for the destruction they cause.
On the other hand, Thelma and Louise are outside the
sanctioned power structure from the beginning and
thus the ending is inevitable. In fact, they both realize
that even though Louise may have been justified in
shooting Harlan from their point of view, the laws
regarding rape and assault are still weighted too
much in the perpetrator's favor. In this respect, the
film reinforces the continued powerlessness of women
in our society.
There are also some other mixed messages given in
the film. For instance, when the policemen and Darryl
are viewing the videotape of Thelma robbing a store,
their only respective comments are "Jesus Christ,
''Good God," and "My Lord." The concurrent looks on
their faces make clear that 'nice girls' like Thelma and
Louise don't do things like that and isn't it shocking?
Yet, in the final scene, the caring policeman begs his
colleague not to corner them and asks, "How many
times do they have to be f... over?" which is an
interesting acknowledgment that Thelma and Louise's
predicament has come about largely through the
injustice of a sexist society.

The ending, however, again reinforces stereotypes.

Even the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,
where the two male protaganists were also 'outlaws'
and die at the end, the male characters choose to
fight whereas Thelma and Louise choose to commit
suicide. Part of this may have been Hollywood's
squeamishness at showing two leading ladies getting
shot by an army of male policemen, but the
alternative is equally discouraging. The men have
already won so why fight back. I can understand that
perhaps the two women felt, in a weird way, that
death was the only way to preserve their freedom but
it also sends a message to women that if you get in a
situation like these women did or you challenge the
system you might as well kill yourself and not try to
fight back, all of which seems to reinforce Wood's
claim that the media does not let an aggressive
woman be a 'good' woman (237), i.e., they must pay
in some way for their aggressiveness. Regardless of
the reasoning for the end, the film is still ultimately a
negative message about how women are still seen by
men in our society and the limits of womens' power
within that society.

Thelma and Louise contains both positive and

negative messages with regard to gender. A main
focus of the film is Thelma discovering a new
assertivness and this is celebrated. Many issues are
brought out regarding common sources of anger that
women share when relating to men in various
situations. Also, women simply getting to have a
traditional 'male' adventure as mentioned above is
somewhat unique. However, men and women are still
portrayed stereotypically throughout and thus the film
sends contradictory messages. And the ending seems
most troubling and negative, indicating mainstream
Hollywood, like many other aspects of the major
media, still has a long way to go in portraying
characters and telling stories that are not rooted in
and dependent upon gender stereotypes.

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