This Day in Film History (“Thelma and Louise” Premieres as Cultural Flashpoint)

May 24, 1991—Fresh from a triumphant reception at the Cannes Film Festival, Thelma and Louise was released to U.S. theaters. Other films made more money that year, but few sparked more water-cooler debates or critical commentary than this movie that dramatized unilateral female punishment of male violence.

(In addition to debates and commentaries, the female “buddy” movie starring Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis also inspired parody, in the form of an episode the following year of the TV dramedy Sisters. In this particular episode, Swoosie Kurtz’s Alex, traumatized by a mugging, seeks out the services of a female self-defense instructor with definite ideas on how to render the male of the species harmless. Her name--wink, wink—is Thelma Louise.)

The central dilemma of Callie Khouri’s Oscar-winning Best Original Screenplay—the fateful consequences of waitress Louise’s decision to shoot—execute, really—Thelma’s would-be rapist, might seem the product of the late 20th century, impossible to imagine without the social and legal revolution following Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will.

But in many ways, the film is a throwback to films of the Thirties and Forties. I don’t mean simply the previously mentioned “buddy” film (at points, the farcical elements make the two female friends a distaff version of Crosby and Hope), nor the screwball comedy (the absurdities pile higher and higher the farther the women drive in their ’66 Thunderbird), nor even the more durable and adaptable “road” movie.

No, I’m talking about crime films early in the talkie era, years of desperation in which ordinary Americans, with no other recourse, took to a life of crime. Thelma, struggling to make sense of their experience, finally blurts it out to Louise: “You know, something’s, like, crossed over in me and I can’t go back, I mean I just couldn’t live.” If you want a good example of what I mean, catch sometime the 1937 Fritz Lang film You Only Live Once, starring Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sidney as doomed lovers forced to go on the run.

This type of movie, like the later Bonnie and Clyde, features escapes deep into the American Heartland. Danger bonds the two lovers ever more tightly together.

And so it is again, a half-century later, in this drama directed by Ridley Scott. Originally set simply to be executive producer, the creative force behind Alien took the helm of the film himself when he realized that nobody else shared his vision that this material formed, in a way, an American epic.

In the patriarchal America of this film, every man is found wanting in some way, either commitment-phobic (Louise’s eternal boyfriend, the musician Jimmy), infantile (Thelma’s husband Darrell, who likes his wife to stay quiet while he takes in football games on the TV), deceitful (Brad Pitt’s career-making role as easygoing bank robber J.D.), or exploitative and violent (Thelma’s attacker). The one sympathetic figure, Harvey Keitel’s law-enforcement officer, is, at least as far as his power goes to save the women from jail time, impotent.

And so, Thelma and Louise can only depend on themselves. Before they drive off the cliff, in their own version of Butch and Sundance’s decision to go out shooting against a Latin American posse waiting for them, the two longtime friends declare their mutual love—something they haven’t been able to enjoy in a world outside deeply inimical to their elementary desires.

This past March, Vanity Fair published a 20-year retrospective of the film, “Ride of a Lifetime,” by Sheila Weller. Among the juicy tidbits of trivia in the article:

* Holly Hunter, Frances McDormand, Jodie Foster, Michelle Pfeiffer, Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn were all considered for the two roles that went to Sarandon and Davis.

* Billy Baldwin beat out Pitt for two roles that year. He gave up his role in Thelma and Louise to take on the second of the two movies, Ron Howard’s Backdraft. When he saw what Pitt did with J.D.--and the film’s success--he was undoubtedly sorry for his decision.

* As he has continued to do with females the world over in the two decades since, Pitt had a discombobulating effect on Davis. She had performed perfectly well with a couple of actors who preceded him, but when he auditioned he was so cute that she kept flubbing her lines. Finally, as Scott and the casting director considered the choices, she couldn’t resist chiming in: “The blond one--duh!”

Thelma and Louise, as I indicated earlier, though it did well enough at the box office, with a gross nearly three times its estimated budget, was hardly the greatest blockbuster that summer (Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and Terminator 2 grossed five and ten times, respectively, its U.S. total).

But it was a much greater cultural landmark than those other movies. Later in 1991, the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings would take up the issue of how far a male could go with a woman. But Thelma and Louise had already fired the first feminist shot across the bow.