Thelma and Louise (1991)

Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon star as two best friends looking for a fun weekend in the mountains. Louise (Sarandon) is more level headed than her flaky friend and often acts more like an older sister. When apart from her annoying husband (Chris McDonald) trapping her, Thelma (Davis) reverts to a childish immunity without any sense of responsibility perhaps as a means to fell free. Thelma is lucky to have a friend like Louise to take care of her.

At the start of their adventure, Thelma is about to be raped when Louise steps in and threatens to shoot the man. The guy prompts her with a snarky comment and in a fit of rage, Louise shoots him dead on the spot. The audience is shocked yet liberated and it’s clear Louise is not messing around. With that, the girls stumble around for a day trying to make sense of what just happened and what they need to do next.

After a series of mishaps and an armed robbery from Thelma, the girls are headed to Mexico. Thelma’s character development was incredibly well thought out. At the start, she’s married to a man with a short temper that’s she’s been dating since she was fourteen. Thelma had never known another life. Thelma is visibly changed after spending the night with sexy cowboy J.D. (Brad Pitt), the first time she’s been with a man that wasn’t her husband. With the encouragement from Louise and the experience with J.D., Thelma’s confidence visibly shifts. Thirsty for freedom, Thelma develops an almost reckless personality. For the watcher, this is satisfying to see.

A reoccurring character was a truck driver they passed in their T-Bird Convertible multiple times. The first time, Thelma remarks about how nice and polite truck drivers are only to find that the truck driver was a disgusting pig. The second time, the girls ignored his remarks. The last time they see him, they all pull over and the girls attempt to explain to this man how disrespectful he’s being. When he does not apologize, the girls do not hesitate to blow up his truck and steal his hat, teaching him a valuable lesson.

Throughout the movie were incredible lines that will stick with the watcher long after. For example, the start of Thelma’s freeing is when she’s on the phone with Darryl and he’s yelling about how she needs to come home. Out of frustration she tells him to go f*** himself. This is an amazing moment because she finally stopped caring what he had to say. Or maybe she stopped caring long ago and finally had the confidence to say it to him. Or when Thelma says to Louise: “I don’t ever remember feeling this awake.” At this point, the watcher can try to sympathize with Thelma’s situation. She had been feeling trapped for so long, and now she’s finally alive and free.

The clearest symbol of how this trip changed these girls was their physical appearance. Starting the trip with lipstick and perfectly curled hair and ending with cut off sleeves and sunglasses on, they learned what they were capable of. In the final scene, when the girls are surrounded, with guns pointing at them from all directions, one of the girls remarks “All this for us…” They saw themselves as average women at the start of this film. They were accepting the way men treated them for so long and they finally realized how suffocated they felt. Their final decision to die rather than face a sentence in jail or even submit to the police was the ultimate sign of freedom. Maybe they were crazed with new found power or maybe it was out of desperation. Either way, the moviegoer is left feeling liberated. 

By Haley Dougherty