Thelma and Louise

I saw Thelma and Louise again this weekend, and with fresh eyes I realized it's a lot more socially prescient than I once realized.  It came out in 1991 - the same year William Kennedy Smith was acquitted of rape charges, the Tailhook scandal made headlines, and Anita Hill testified before the Senate at Clarence Thomas' Supreme Court confirmation hearing.

A single ugly truth drives the film: A waitress named Louise was once raped in Texas years ago.  Never acknowledged by the powers that be, the residual bile oozes out mindlessly, destructively and tragically throughout the film.  She shoots the man who had tried to rape Thelma not because he is still a threat, but because he looks at her with the same predatory eyes she saw in her original rapist.  Now a fugitive, she insists upon driving from Oklahoma City to Mexico without passing through Texas to avoid an entire state of bad memories.  Later, after she shares an intimate moment with her fiance in a coffee shop, a waitress says, "It's lucky he left when he did...we thought we were going to have to put out the fire." Louise can't give the natural conspiratorial of a giggling schoolgirl - and instead of laughing, she sits frozen and stricken in her seat.  The thrill is gone.  She is now just a soldier on a death march, not daring to avert her eyes off from the road ahead.

Louise has a number of random but revealing interactions with elderly people she encounters on the road.  They personify the path she will not, cannot travel.  She stares into the solemn, defeated eyes of elderly ladies in a dilapidated beauty shop, their hair beautifully coiffed in stark contrast to their lined, defeated faces.  Louise reflexively reaches to put on lipstick, but when she spies her reflection, she doesn't even bother.  From then on, the prim and pretty affectations we've seen up until now completely devolve along with the voided social contract.  The scarves, pearls, blue eye shadow and painted lips are gone forever.  These have become trappings of an oppression they have chosen to overthrow.

At the next stop, Louise sits down next to an old man at a truck stop, unemotionally removes all her jewelry and places it into his hands.  Stricken, he takes it.  This man seems to embody his entire gender, and we are to imagine that's he's spent a lifetime racking up institutional advantages - home-cooked meals, jobs, no-strings sex - and here he takes from Louise once again.  Louise is so resigned that she has resolved to render unto him what is his.  Or perhaps what was never truly hers.

If one type of man doesn't get them, another will.  While Louise fends off the advances of her sincere ex-fiance, Thelma exposes not only Louise's life savings, but their travel plans.  While Thelma is smart enough to know that her misogynistic ex-husband's phone is bugged because of his saccharine tone, Louise then gets on the phone with Harvey Keitel's "sensitive" cop, who turns out to be the bigger threat despite his good intentions: It is he who facilitates the relentless, mechanical march of the authorities to bring them to justice.  And while he sweet-talks her, his cold-blooded cohort is tracing her call and speeding their journey toward its end.  That he could say empathetically, "I know what happened to you in Texas," keeps her on the phone long enough for the men in suits to pinpoint the fugitives' location.  The moment that Louise finally gets validation from a man in power that she was raped is the same moment that the noose closes around her neck for the last time.  The crime is finally unearthed, but it is she who pays the price.  Again.

For Thelma and Louise, there's no way for them to live in the world on their terms.  Louise's rapist, it turns out, was also her murderer.  As an impersonal, disembodied voice crackles on the radio listing their crimes, the men who wronged them weep, the men who chase them close in, and Thelma and Louise come to grips with the reality of their endgame.  They dance precariously along the edges of the Grand Canyon, evoking the American wild west and all the danger that goes with it.  

The persistent imagery of Americana is there to remind us that these are just the girls next door, struggling to survive the circumstances into which they were born.  The Chrysler convertible, the open road, endless blue skies, the American flag hat - even the lewd truck driver wears an American flag, and when they blow up his big rig, it's as though the last clause of their social contract has been nullified in a cacophony of Fourth of July fireworks.  But they are all-American girls to the very end, taking the romanticized open road to the next level and plunging ahead into the Grand Canyon.  In their last moments, we see images of their mother's pearls, ammo, friendship bracelets, photos of happier times and a stetson boot on the gas pedal.  

As they take their last breaths, a man finally does something good for them: The sensitive cop blocks the snipers' shot as he runs after them, trying in vain to stop their fatal plunge.  In the end, they enjoy their moment of feminist glory only because a man makes it possible.

* * *

It's easy for us to look at Thelma's deadbeat husband or the degenerate truck driver and identify them as misogynists.  After all, they are mere caricatures.  But surely the flesh-and-blood women who abide characters like these can't consciously identify them as such.  We can only identify prejudice from afar, which is probably why the well-documented sexism against Hillary Clinton was only acknowledged by many after she ended her bid.  Salon's Rebecca Traister wrote thoughtfully about it here and here, methodically laying out the evidence of bias directed toward the candidate, sparking hundreds of angry letters resurrecting the poison.  I'm not a huge fan of Hillary's; I'm especially unhappy about her minions' heavy-handed latest attempt to wrest much-needed funds from Obama's coffers to line Mark Penn's pockets.  But the fact remains that a disproportionate amount of vitriol was hurled in Senator Clinton's direction, more than was ever directed toward a man stumping for the highest office in a blue suit and innocuous tie.  

Today, Clarence Thomas sits on the bench of the highest court in the land, but for many, his name remains inextricably linked to that of Anita Hill.  William Kennedy Smith is a free man today, but in 2005 he settled out of court over another sexual assault allegation.  And while sexual harassment laws have made most thinking men extremely careful about what they say at work, just about every woman I know has a story about a skeevy colleague who made life at work uncomfortable.  We've also been overrun by frivolous celebutantes like Paris Hilton who have found playing dumb to be extremely lucrative.  Much to the chagrin of mothers everywhere, little girls are still labeled "bossy" when they exhibit leadership behaviors we celebrate in boys.  And of course, the feminist movement never made it past our front doors; the plight of today's overworked mother is extremely well-documented.  And this is to say nothing of What. Still. Goes. On. Around. The. World.  

While it's tempting to think we vanquished the quaint caricatures of Thelma and Louise, sexism has adapted and evolved.  The path ahead is murky.  We have no clear plan.  Unfortunately, that's a strategy that turned out rather poorly for Thelma and Louise.