Thelma and Louise

The genre being reshaped in Thelma and Louise is the male buddy film, a genre that has been growing in popularity over the last two decades and that has defined itself more and more as a subset of the action genre from which women are usually excluded except as victims or the love interest for the male protagonists. Thelma and Louise is a female buddy film, and it makes direct appropriations from its male-oriented counterpart as a way of commenting on generic conventions on the one hand and the place of women in art and society on the other. Critic David Denby notes that the film borrows from several conventions:

There are elements woven into the script from old Westerns, from doomed-lovers-on-the-run movies

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e for their wicked deeds (Schickel 64). There are only two times when Thelma and Louise fight back directly and successfully at the male power structure. The first comes when they shoot the rapist, and this is the cause of all the problems they have thereafter. The second time is when they are harassed over a period of time by a trucker who seems to follow them down the road, and they shoot at his truck and blow it up. In both instances, they attack by using the same violent means respected by the male-dominated society, and yet this is really a capitulation to that violence rather than a female solution to a problem. In this sense, the two women assert their equality by being as foolish and violent as the men, which is no real answer to the issue at all. There is only one male in the film who is portrayed as understanding and reasonable, and he is ultimately impotent to stop the destruction of Thelma and Louise or to slow the march of revenge on the part of the male-dominated society. He is also the police detective who is on their trail, and he understands them as no one else does. In spite of this fact and in spite of his ability to communicate his understanding, the two women never trust him enough to surrend
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Approximate Word count = 2054
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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