Get Your Reps In: “Thelma & Louise” Is Still Chasing Oxygen

Thelma & Louise (1991)

“Something’s like…crossed over in me, and I can’t go back,” confesses Thelma (Geena Davis) as she careens toward the end of her iconic, outlaw road trip with best friend Louise (Susan Sarandon).

While that line sounds a little like the character reading a journal entry aloud, that’s part of Thelma & Louise’s power. Our protagonists—long unappreciated and lonely in their Arkansas housewife and waitress roles—experience internal liberation made manifest across an unlikely fugitive saga.

Bringing polish and maximalism to Callie Khouri’s screenplay, director Ridley Scott lays the oppression of the masculine world on thick—roaring helicopters, swaggering cops, phallic big rigs, steel-blue coloring every time the story flashes back to the cops (namely Harvey Keitel) and husbands (namely Christopher McDonald) back home. Some critics have called Scott’s “MTV” visual style incongruous with Thelma and Louise’s story, but that incongruity speaks volumes.

Every time the film cuts to the front seat of Louise’s 1966 Thunderbird, you experience an oasis of feeling, possibility and self-realization. These two veritable soulmates can depend only on each other, and their journey could so easily be more flippant (certainly, their chemistry is beautifully silly at times).

But Thelma and Louise’s introspection and their “crossing over” is an antidote to a world that is hyperbolically, squelchingly bearing down. In the end, they’re chasing oxygen. Hollywood, Aug. 25-27 and 29-31.

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