Thelma & Louise' Film: Gender Role of Women in Media

Thelma & Louise analysis of the movie. “Thelma & Louise” describes a story about two best friends that go on a trip to escape their exhausted lives. Thelma doesn’t even tell her husband that she is going on journey with Louise to relieve all the stresses at home. In their journey, Thelma and Louise going to bar and Thelma is nearly raped by man. Because of the bad man’s rude attitude, Louise become so impulsive that she shot and killed the man. They both panicked and left the bar. Louise was convinced that Thelma would be a terrible idea to go to police because they will not believe their situation. After that, Thelma and Louise begin to escape to Mexico. Louis contact to her boyfriend, Jimmy, to ask for transfer the money to her. However, Jimmy comes to the bank because he wants to know what happened. Meanwhile, Thelma meets handsome hitchhiker and spends one night together. The next day, the hitchhiker stolen Louise’s money and disappeared. Thelma decides to rob a store to make some money and trip to Mexico. They also lock the police who arrive to catch them in the trunk and run away. While this happening, police are looking for them to investigate about shooting. However, after Thelma robbed the store, the police investigate them become more serious. Finally, police found their location and surrounded them. They made a choice and the movie ends with Thelma and Louise driving into the Grand Canyon, choosing death over surrender.

After I watched this film, I found the connections to feminism in the film is female friendship. The friendship between Thelma and Louise is one of the main spotlights of the movie. In the movie, Thelma is the traditional female, housewife and everything is depending on her husband. In the beginning of the movie, Thelma wants to go to trip with Louise, but she needed permission from her husband. So, she was afraid talk to her husband, she just leaves him a note instead. In my opinion, she wanted to be released because she was oppressed by her husband and wanted to escape from patriarchal society. However, Louis is single and working in the restaurant as a waitress. Also, she knows how to take care of herself and protect herself. So, Louise has more life experience than Thelma.

Another interesting point of this film is the relationship between Thelma and her husband. A common problem of this film is that all the male characters were stereotypical. Thelma’s husband act towards her with disrespectful, and he thinks women must to do all the house chores. This stereotypical generalization permeates a society through years of reinforcement caused by public culture and social levels. Using textbook. Throughout the film, he never realized that the abuse of his wife contributes to her unhappiness. For example, when she calls to her husband right after men was killed. She tries to explain where she is, but he did not listen her explanation because he is watching food ball game. He never worries about her and order Thelma to come back home as soon as possible. Even the police feel that Thelma and her husband’s marriage is not warm and unhappy. One scene that I was remembered is when the police tried to track the location of Thelma and Lewis by telephone. The police recommend told him to Thelma “Say something sweet, women love that shit.” Which inferred that they think women are idiot. However, Thelma easy to notice about something is wrong because her husband is never gentle to her.

Overall, this movie gave us a strong message for women which was to stand up for themselves and to encourage women be more independent. They utilize their puissance to escape a patriarchal dominated society. Especially, “In the future, when a woman is crying like that, she isn’t having any fun.” This quote makes me very touching and extremely powerful about the women. The ending was very unexpected, but I think it was very good decisions for them. Thelma and Louis illustrations that women can be tougher than expected. 

Work Cited

• Scott, R., Polk, M., MGM Home Entertainment Inc. (1991). Thelma & Louise. Santa Monica, CA: MGM Home Entertainment.