Yesterday's Movies

Before watching the movie:

Well here it is, the one that was always going to be in this theme. Possibly the first one I thought of for title duos. And once again, what references are there other than the finale? How do they get there? I think they’re on a road trip and probably a crime spree, but I think they never intended for any of this to happen. I’m surprised this is a 90s movie, and I didn’t realize how many men I’ve heard of are in it as supporting characters to the two women who are the only ones anyone talks about. But the biggest curveball is that it’s directed by Ridley Scott.

After watching the movie:

Thelma Dickinson and Louise Sawyer are two friends living in Arkansas. Louise works in a diner kitchen and her relationship with freewheeling musician Jimmy isn’t going anywhere, while Thelma is married to domineering salesman Darryl. Louise managed to borrow a fishing cabin from the owner of the restaurant and has talked Thelma into coming with her for a weekend, which repressed and timid Thema never gets around to asking Darryl for permission to go on. On the road, the ladies stop at a bar where local flirt Harlan dances with Thelma much longer than they planned to stay, then takes her out to the parking lot and tries to assault her. Louise arrives with the gun Thelma brought for protection and they almost walk away clean, but Darryl runs his idiot mouth at the woman pointing a gun at him and Louise kills him. Louise insists they can’t go to the police because everyone saw Thelma dancing with him for hours and wouldn’t believe it was self defense, so the pair start running to Mexico. Louise asks Jimmy to wire her life savings to her, but Jimmy comes to Oklahoma City to give it to her in person, along with a ring, which she refuses. Thelma is taken with a charming hitchhiker cowboy called JD, an armed robber who skipped his probation, and then taken by him when he skips out the morning after with Louise’s savings. As the Arkansas police and the FBI hunt for the two ladies who are the prime suspects in the death of a lech nobody will miss, they receive surveillance video clearly showing Thelma holding up a convenience store for the money they need for their escape just in the way JD told her he did it. Seeming to be truly past the point of no return, they continue running to Mexico. But not through Texas. Louise is never going back to Texas, and never going to talk about what happened there.

This is one of those movies that feel like drowning. There’s an almost constant increase in insurmountable tension. The pair have almost no allies, and multiple times they’re let down by people who seem like allies. Jimmy is the closest they have to someone who’s completely with them, but he’s not just more concerned for his relationship with Louise than for Louise, but we also see him go from zero to flipping a table way too quickly, which in a story like this is definitely a sign that he’s not completely safe for them. The Arkansas detective comes to understand Thelma and Louise’s situation and works to do the most he can to help them, but it’s too little too late.

I wouldn’t say this is fully comedic, but for a movie dealing with such weighty topics, it does have a surprising amount of levity to it to break up the despair. As much as Darryl is an ogre, at least he’s more a pathetic ogre than a truly dangerous one. The best laugh in the movie is when he manages to show the police just what kind of husband he is through Thelma’s reaction to how they told him to answer the phone. In a world where Thelma and Louise are surrounded by truly despicable men at every turn, by the end of the movie Darryl is just a bit of litter.

I think I’ve seen this movie summarized as these two women going on a road trip where all men are bastards, and I think it’s a bit more subtle than that. You can’t always tell. Darryl is trash, but obvious trash, and he deflates the moment his power is denied him. Jimmy is a bum and potentially violent, but when the time comes, he goes above and beyond for Louise. JD may only give Thelma the care and attention she needed in order to steal from her, but he can be browbeaten into doing the right thing. And the detective who’s the last person you’d expect to be in these ladies’ corner ends up being the most sympathetic to them once he has the shape of what happened. Not all men are, but any man could be, I think is the best lesson.

I rarely have this much trouble pulling together things to say about a movie, but since it’s always easier to pick apart the art than to build it up, that probably says something positive about this. I don’t have much to say because it stands on its own? It’s solidly built and hard to classify. And one more legendary tragic ending passing with little context into the zeitgeist.