Performances Of A Lifetime In Thelma And Louise
If the 1991 box office success of Thelma and Louise was unexpected, more surprising was the heated debate that followed its release, a debate over the film’s political status and social implications. While Joan Smith of The Guardian argued that the film’s “effect is perversely to reinforce the message that women cannot win,” Janet Maslin of the New York Times called the film “transcendent in every way.” Where Kathi Maio of Ms saw “powerful images of women who dare to feel anger against male violence and domination,” John Leo of US News and World Report saw “toxic feminisim.” Richard Grenier of Commentary ended his review asking, “Is the killer bimbo the way ahead?” (52)
The tension ...
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both feminist and antifeminist assumptions about gender, power, and subjectivity.
In Alice Doesn’t Teresa de Lauretis claims that feminist film theory has gone well beyond the simple opposition of positive and negative images, and has indeed displaced the very terms of that opposition to a sustained critical attention to the hidden work of the apparatus. It has shown, for instance, how narrativity works to anchor images to noncontradictory points of identification, so that “sexual difference” is ultimately reconfirmed and any ambiguity reconciled through narrative closure. (57)
In Thelma and Louise, however, the narrative impulse toward noncontradictory identification, resolution, and closure is disrupted rather than reinforced by the film’s imagery. But such disruption is difficult to perceive from a realist reading of the film’s narrative. From this critical perspective, the film is the story of two women trapped in the inexorable workings of patriarchal ideology. Every ...
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Scott, “shouldn’t we be forced to look at Thelma and Louise’s bloody bodies at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and thus to realise our complicity in their death”? (Taubin 19) Others discount the image of car superimposed against sky, arguing that we all know that, given the laws of patriarchy and gravity, the only place that car can end up is on the floor of the canyon. The snapshot chronicle of the women’s adventure that plays during the credits is in this context seen as a nostalgic review of the women’s drive toward destruction.
In Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre, and the Action Cinema, Yvonne Tasker warns that “A criticism which focuses on the development of narrative at the ...
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"Performances Of A Lifetime In Thelma And Louise." Essayworld.com. August 4, 2004. Accessed April 19, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Performances-Of-A-Lifetime-Thelma-Louise/12108.
"Performances Of A Lifetime In Thelma And Louise." Essayworld.com. August 4, 2004. Accessed April 19, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Performances-Of-A-Lifetime-Thelma-Louise/12108.
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