The recent film Thelma and Louise presents two women who turn to criminal activity as part of their way of dealing with the world of males, and their way of dealing with men can be labeled deviant. Indeed, the film presents the development of this deviant behavior as itself a response to the deviance of males in American society. As presented in the film, this instance of female criminality is a case of crossing over, specifically indicating that these women are using countermeasures to male deviance that will themselves be deviant. This instance of deviant behavior will be used as the subject for the application of the ideas of crossing over and criminal organization and honor to illustrate the nature of, development of, and consequences of this deviant behavior.
It is interesting that the film under discussion is itself deviant, deliberately deviating from accepted norms and shifting them from males to females. 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 the 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 their cocoon. They do this in the context of a male action drama reshaped to a female and even feminist form, a not entirely comfortable transition made even more uncomfortable by the 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 fi...