Thelma and Louise:A story not to be believed

Abstract

At its center, the fictive would of Thelma and Louise engages political issues concerning women's stories—as told by and about women—and why they are not to be believed. The film was released in 1991, a year of headlines devoted to women and sexual harassment (Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas) and date or acquaintance rape (the trials of William Kennedy Smith and the St. John's students). Like public response to these cases, critics and viewers of Thelma and Louise were polarized dramatically on two bases: gender and credibility. The film converged in the public mind and the popular press with a controversy about women and violence. The argument of this essay is that there are very good reasons, in terms of both narrative morphology and what feminist theorist Sharon Marcus defines as the “grammar of social scripts,”; for the disbelief often expressed by audiences for the film's handling of gender and genre. With parody and burlesque, the film flouts both cinematic conventions for the western and social norm...