Thelma and Louise.

WOMEN BREAKING THEIR CHAINS: THELMA and LOUISE

In Thelma and Louise, we encounter two women who break the chains of traditionalism by leaving the conventional female role and taking the male role in a male-dominated society. These two women, like Edna Pontellier in The Awakening, after several events awaken to see that there is no way back for them.

One of the protagonists, Thelma is a house wife who has a sexist husband. She has no real life of her own and lives it according to her husband’s pleasures. “He never lets me do one goddamn thing that’s any fun. All he wants me to do is hang around the house the whole time while he’s out doing God only knows what” she says about her husband. And also, we learn that the sexual relationship between the couple is not satisfying for Thelma. Because, after having sex with J.D. she tells Louise that “for once in [her] life [she had] a sexual experience that [was not] completely disgusting”. Her friend Louise is a woman about her thirties. She is a waitress in a coffee shop. She has a problematic relationship with her boy friend. Like Thelma, she too, is not pleased with her life.

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Thelma and Louise’s adventurous journey begins with the pair’s deciding to go to a two-day trip. At the beginning of their journey, Louise kills a man who tries to rape Thelma. After that point in the film, two women take the conventional male role and change into women who are completely different from the women at the beginning of the film. Thelma robs a market, they lock a policeman to the luggage and they punish the trucker in a way that he can not forget. And they use slang language all the time. These deeds are classic roles usually reserved for men. But they free themselves from the boundaries that the society determined as the women’s role and after these deeds they become awake. At a point during their flight, Thelma asks Louise if she is awake. “Yes”, she replies, “you could call it that. My eyes are open” . “Me, too” says Thelma “wide awake. I don’t remember feelin’ this awake. Everything looks different. I know you know what I mean. Everything looks new. Do you feel like that? Like you’ve got something to look forward to? “

At the end of the film, when they are surroundered by the police, they are forced to choose between captivity or freedom. Of course they choose freedom. Louise says “we’re not giving up Thelma” and Thelma responds “then let’s not get caught” and shows the Grand Canyon and says “go!”. They smile each other. And the film finishes with the scene when the car is still the air and with B.B. King’s song named “Better Not Look Down”:

Better not look down, if you wanna keep on flyin’

Put the hammer down, keep it full speed ahead

Better not look back or you might just wind up cryin’

You can keep it movin’ if you don’t look down.

To sum up, in the film Thelma and Louise, the two protagonists Thelma and Louise release themselves from the “prison” of the society’s rules and begin to live their life as they want to. They do what ever they want to do, like blowing up the trucker’s truck for behaving in an ill-mannered way, no matter these things are not “proper” for women’s role according to the society.

Work Cited

Thelma and Louise. Ridlet Scott. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures, 1990.