Thelma and Louise is a film that makes use of certain accepted movie images and generic conventions to recast a male genre in female garb. The structure of them film is designed to place what seem to be two normal, unremarkable women in a position where they have to show their adaptability by breaking out of the mold into which they have been placed by men all their lives and show themselves as capable individuals who can escape from the cocoon in which they had been living because they had no choice but to do so. They do this in the context of a male action drama reshaped to a female and even feminist form, a not entirely comfortable transition that muddies the theme by certain contrivances in the plot and a grandiose resolution that is no resolution at all.
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 like Gun Crazy, They Live by Night, and Bonnie and Clyde, and also from such road movies of the late sixties and early seventies as Easy Rider and Scarecrow (Denby 55).
By using the conventions of a genre from which women are usually excluded, Thelma and Louise directly faces the fact that this is a man's world. The film does this by having two women enter a man's world--the world of the male action genre--and show that such daring evokes a direct and viole...