Schiller Goes to the Movies: Locating the Sublime in "Thelma and Louise"

Abstract

troversy not only among audiences but also among media and film critics.1 Reviewers generally agreed that the movie borrowed from and made allusions to other movie genres, such as the Western, sundry types of road film ..., and the seventies 'buddy' movie.2 controversy, however, concerned the correct interpretation of these oblique references. As Sharon Willis states, it all turned on the question of its status as a feminist statement. Within this framework, objections emerging from feminist and anti-feminist quarters took several forms.3 Harvey R. Greenberg summarizes these opposing viewpoints: The film has been variously interpreted as feminist manifesto (the heroines are ordinary women, driven to extraordinary ends by male oppression) and as profoundly antifeminist (the heroines are dangerous phallic caricatures of the very macho violence they're supposedly protesting).4 Instead of reducing the movie to its supposedly progressive or reactionary intentions, Willis convincingly argues for abandoning a reading that imposes closure on what in fact is a polysemic narrative. She differentiates between fantasy and agency and insists on the complexity of fantasies that explore cultural anxieties.5 We can view this movie from yet another perspective, one we might not normally think of when analyzing a contemporary Hollywood film: that of Schiller's aesthetics. Employing the terminology of eighteenth-century drama production, especially Schiller's concept of the sublime, I will argue that we can interpret the film's ending in particular as a representation of a sublime act which engages our imagination or-in Schiller's terminology-