A Woman and Her Car: Vehicular Vulnerability in Thelma & Louise
This is an unpublished essay I wrote for a class in the fall of 2023.
The car — or any mode of transportation — is an integral part of the road movie. Thelma & Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991) is no exception with its vintage Thunderbird that symbolizes, as is common in this genre, freedom.
Film scholar Tim Corrigan described road movies as films about the subject evading “all those things that prohibit movement… domestication, responsibility, and the routines of work” via automobiles (Archer 31).
Thelma & Louise’s screenwriter, Callie Khouri, emphasized the car as an icon of autonomy, where driving it meant driving the story (Willis 125).
Meanwhile, film scholar Sharon Willis identified the car as a “private theater” where one feels “safe performing a theatrics of contained aggression” (126).
In line with all these interpretations, the Thunderbird in Thelma & Louise serves as a means of escape, control, and performance. Additionally, in a scene around the halfway point of the film, the use of camera movement, mise-en-scène, and framing transforms the car into a refuge for true emotional vulnerability.
In this scene, Thelma (Geena Davis) leaves Louise (Susan Sarandon) alone in the car while she robs a convenience store. At its beginning, the windshield — a physical barrier limiting her expression — separates Louise from the camera and, thus, the audience.
Once Thelma exits the frame, the camera moves in a tracking shot to eliminate this barrier, allowing the audience a closer and unobstructed view of Louise, signaling the start of a moment of vulnerability.
The recent theft of Louise’s money, leaving her and Thelma with an uncertain future, has set the usually self-assured woman adrift. Her distraught attitude is visualized by Louise discarding a cigarette, an object that had routinely been associated with her maturity, toughness, and rejection of expectations for feminine behavior.
Louise then notices two old women staring at her through the window of what is potentially a restaurant, but certainly a space that “prohibits movement” with its domestic or professional demands. The camera moves closer to them and their indescribable expressions trapped behind glass and barred in the window’s wooden frame.
Where Louise is free in her car to escape the patriarchy, map her own journey, enact revenge, and emotionally flounder, these women are not. They are static and stoic. This characterization is shown through the choice to frame them behind glass, with the camera’s zoom highlighting their limited space and freedom.
When one of the onlookers smiles softly, perhaps knowingly, at Louise, the titular character seems confused. Spurred on by the knowledge that she is not as alone as previously thought, Louise attempts to perform an act of “feminine masquerade,” as Willis may call it (124). She begins to put lipstick on, an act that had been associated with Thelma — and her acceptance of sexist expectations — like how smoking was associated with Louise and her rejection of it.
However, just as with the cigarette, Louise discards the lipstick. In the semi-private refuge that is her Thunderbird, she cannot perform — especially not when faced with women trapped behind the glass while she is free. She places her head in her hands.
The audience’s moment of vulnerability and honesty with Louise is interrupted as Thelma tears out of the convenience store, and the car is again transformed into an escape pod. The camera slides back to its initial position, with the windshield separating us from Louise, enabling her to slide back into her self-assured persona as she retakes control of her car and life.
Works Cited
Archer, Neil. “Looking for America — Part One: The US Road Movie.” The Road Movie: In Search of Meaning, Wallflower, Colombia University Press, London, 2016.
Willis, Sharon. “Hardware and Hardbodies, What Do Women Want?: A Reading of Thelma and Louise.” Film Theory Goes to the Movies, Routledge, New York, 1993, pp. 120–128.