Thelma and Louise: Visual Intentions and Cinematic Approaches in the Female Road Film

By Nina Gibb, Edited by Lucia Perfetti and Bea Heard

Ridley Scott’s 1991 feminist road film Thelma and Louise uniquely explores female freedom through the mode of a traditionally male genre. Often criticized for being an anti-male film, Thelma and Louise takes the traditional male gaze and turns it on its head, repurposing the common perspective of women as the sexual object and flipping the power dynamic between the sexes. By analyzing scenes throughout the film that depict the changing nature of Thelma (Geena Davis) and Louise’s (Susan Sarandon) agency, and using Laura Mulveys’s theory of the ‘male gaze,’ we can see the progression of their freedom as they inevitably escape their lives and the gendered space they exist within, ultimately choosing freedom and reinventing their ending rather than giving in to the patriarchal phallocentric power running after them. Using everything from panned shots to close-ups, the film creates a deeper insight into the depictions of female agency through its cinematic techniques, underscoring the narrative of empowerment and challenging traditional hegemonic codes of gender and sexuality of the female character. 

From the beginning of the film, Thelma and Louise are framed through their confinement in their lives, slowly breaking the seal of the heteronormative structure of the patriarchal system as the film progresses. Louise works her job at the dinner, confined to her entanglements with Jimmy (Michael Madsen), and Thelma is caught in her manipulative and controlling relationship with her husband Darryl (Christopher McDonald). They possess little power in their day-to-day lives, each seeking to escape and resist phallocentric power and spectatorship. Starting out on the road, the film inverts “point for point the formula of the classic road movie or buddy comedy,” such as those present in Easy Rider and Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, and explores the emotional dynamic between two female characters as the core of the narrative (Eraso 11). They seek an escape from their lives, banding together to find a new sense of freedom, and the moment their lives are put at risk and they seize control of their bodies, the narrative of the film shifts, transforming them into outlaws. The radical act of challenging the politics of the female body and fighting for their agency positions Thelma and Louise as a new road film, stepping away from the void left by the male road film and creating a new cinematic language of empowerment. 

As Thelma and Louise begin their road trip, their first stop is the local bar. This full scene presents a unique case of highlighting and critiquing the male gaze. Upon entering the bar, the camera invokes a wide pan as it follows the two protagonists, highlighting the staring men beside them. They stand almost as statues, with nothing moving but their eyes, vested with power. Mulvey, who coined the term ‘male gaze’ notes the “fixation into perversion, producing obsessive voyeurs and Peeping Tom’s, whose only satisfaction can come from watching,” a reality that is highlighted in this scene (Mulvey 9). The men find pleasure in looking at the women and watching them go, a moment the film will juxtapose as later as Thelma comments on watching JD go. By showing all the men looking at the two women, and holding their fleeting looks through the shot, the camera highlights the position of the “woman as [the] image, [and] man as bearer of the look” (Mulvey 7). Using a split between the “active/male and passive/female,” (Mulvey 10) and separating the female characters as the image, we have the chance to identify with the film's criticism of male desire and scopophilia that eventually leads to its tone of empowerment. Although the film is led by a male director, this first step helps reimagine mainstream feminist cinema through a subversion of the gaze.

While in the bar, Thelma is approached by Harlan. He repeatedly makes passes at her, and she eventually follows him out onto the dance floor. Wearing a white dress, symbolizing her purity and naivete, Thelma becomes a victim of the spectatorship that will transform itself into seduction and betrayal. She “mimics [his] relation to language” when following him across the dancefloor, and the shots of them dancing highlight the power dynamic between them. Harlan holds Thelma by her neck, beer in hand, a shot that looks as though he is ready to strangle her. We see more of his face than hers, his drunken haze juxtaposed with her innocent demeanor (Eraso 3). The shot of them dancing is off-center on the screen, warning us of his malicious intent. He takes Thelma outside, and what follows is the drive of the film. Harlan attempts to sexually assault Thelma, a scene so disturbing one forgets the structure of filmic language. Following his attempted sexual assault, we find Louise defending her partner. She pulls out a gun to stop him and shoots him when he mocks her. The murder of the male in this case “can be understood in terms of empowerment and subjectification from a postfeminist perspective” (Lecroft 43). This becomes the first step to piecing together the freedom they lacked, the very freedom that was morbidly oozing out of their partners and the few men in their lives. By embarking on their journey, and denying the overpowering male domination in their lives, they begin to take pleasure in resistance, pleasure in “saying no” (hooks 5). 

Prior to Thelma and Louise and the emerging feminist films that followed, several films of the late 60s and early 70s began to introduce female heroines, particularly in the road genre. Though they did not quite match up with the deep harrowed exploration of the complexities of character as male heroes usual of cinema, they still pushed forward the female film agenda and paved the way for the popularity and significance of films like Thelma and Louise. Films such as Rain People (1969), Wanda (1970), Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1972), and Bonnie and

Clyde (1967) first ushered in more representation of the female character and the equal quest for independence and freedom. Feminist film Wanda (1970) pushed back against the traditional image of the American wife and mother, though Wanda was still an appendage to the criminal she accompanied. It was not until Thelma and Louise in 1991 that the genre of women on the road would become more widely represented through empowered exploration. Six years earlier, Desert Hearts (1985) would notably create a female-centered narrative surrounding the road film, and usher in the exploration seen in Thelma and Louise, but its lesbian context would draw significant controversy and halt its timely significance. The quest for freedom in female characters through the road film would ultimately come much later than that of men. The success of Thelma and Louise ushered in a new perspective of women inhabiting male spaces and a new manifestation of female power in cinema. 

Thelma and Louise also presents skewed depictions of male characters, invoking a new female gaze and portraying the reality of the grotesque male ego, such as Harlan’s aggressive sexual violence. JD’s character, famously one of Brad Pitt’s earliest on-screen appearances, presents a new objectification of the male form, one previously preserved for women. JD represents Thelma’s newfound sexual freedom and discovery of pure lust. The shots of him portray his figure in a similar way cinema has been known to portray the female character as a sex object and soul of male desire. When speaking about the male gaze, Mulvey notes the “to be-looked-at-ness” of women on-screen, focusing purely on the body through the eyes of men (Mulvey 7). Thelma and Louise distorts this male gaze and objectification of the human form by using characters such as JD to create a new female gaze, where the male is looked at by the female, lacking the aggressive sexual violence attached to the male gaze. When Thelma and Louise arrive at a motel after picking up hitchhiker JD, Thelma watches him walk off into the distance, telling Louise “I love watching him go” (1:07:10) Walking under a bridge casting a shadow over his body, the shot of him in the distance highlights the silhouette of his body, flipping the sexual objectification towards the usual perpetrator of such sexualization. This rejection of the phallocentric gaze creates a new invention of a cinematic gynocentric gaze.

In the final scene of Thelma and Louise, the two protagonists face a crossroads: surrender to the suffocation of male power or pave a new path forward. With the line of male officers behind them, they decide to drive forward, into the unknown that lies within the vast canyon, bursting through the last of the barrier. They reclaim a sense of power by continuing forward rather than accepting the fate that has been decided for them. The final freeze frame of their car flying over the edge of the canyon immortalizes their freedom. As they drive off, and their polaroid flies off, that is the last visual signal we get that they are finally free of their past selves, no longer the same people they were when we first started our journey with them on-screen. As Thelma articulates to Louise,

“Something has changed inside me, and I couldn’t go back, I couldn’t. I feel awake, wide awake. I don’t remember feeling this awake. Everything looks different. Do you feel that too?”  (1:47:40)

This “denial of the regressive stereotypes qualifying women as unable to achieve freedom of mobility,” (Eraso 66) combined with the self-discovery of the power and agency to take charge of their own lives, creates the significance of representation through the evolution of female characters. 

While the final kiss has been deconstructed by scholars and viewers for its queer and lesbian connotations or hidden meanings, the personalities of the characters—Thelma as the “unempowered castrated woman” and Louise as the “all powerful phallic”—deepens the meaning between their relationship, not the supposed lesbian desire between them (Eraso 5). The way Thelma gradually transforms into a powerful force similar to Louise speaks more to the intimacy of their dynamic and the way their journey creates a vacuum of empowering experience that creates these transformations. Lynda Hart’s paper on “Impossible Spaces in Thelma and Louise” tackles the lesbian themes in the film leading up to the final scene, but her notion of lesbianism as the “‘aporia’ of the narrative” disvalues the underlying theme of empowerment and emancipation from male (17). She attaches the narrative of the film to be a “placeholder for the reproduction of male desire,” with its queer themes underscoring this, but the overlapping themes of female independence and subtle queerness act in direct opposition to this desire (7). While she makes a strong point for their criminal status being a product of their partnership and attempt to “escape from the masculine circuit of desire,” she still dilutes their reclaim of power to a symptom of masculine power (12). Instead, the film uses the pairing of a female partnership to achieve independence outside of this sphere. The film “makes the link between lesbian desire and crime utterly explicit, restore the male as the sole target of violence, escape punishment, and get to drive off into the sunset together” (Letort 42). Thelma and Louise ultimately performs and restores the lost female gaze and lack of female power we have historically seen on-screen. Much of this is achieved through carefully curated cinematic techniques highlighting the unequal power dynamics between the sexes, as well as creating a new gaze focusing itself on restoring a lost female power. Though left in the hands of a male director, the film achieves greatness in its depictions of female empowerment and crafts a new cinematic language that will set the tone for coming pictures of the multifaceted female experience.

Works Cited 

Dargis, Manohla. “Thelma and Louise on the Road to Freedom.” Sight & Sound. 1991. https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/thelma-louise-road-freedom

Eraso, Carmen Indurian. “Thelma and Louise: ‘Easy Riders’ in a Male Genre.” Atlantis.  

Hart, Lynda. “Til Death Do Us Part: Impossible Spaces in ‘Thelma and Louise.’” Journal of the History of Sexuality. University of Texas Press. 1994. 

hooks, bell. “The Oppositional Gaze.” 

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” 

Thelma and Louise. Dir. Ridley Scott. 1991.