Callie Khouri: Against All Odds

Being interviewed in her cozy Santa Monica bungalow, her yellow Lab constantly leaping into her (and my) lap, Khouri gives the impression of being part Thelma, part Louise. Like Thelma, she radiates a warm, attractive goofiness and is full of traditional feminine urges. She lists her blessings all in a row--"I love my husband. I love my dog. I love to cook"--as though she says them in her bedtime prayers. Like Louise, she recognizes the bitter truths of how women suffer--the fear, anger, violence and thwarted potential that shape and destroy so many lives. In fact, Khouri's Louise side is very strong. We spend half the interview discussing, not Thelma & Louise, but real world events that have shocked Khouri and marked her thinking about the condition of women, thinking that informs every line of dialogue and every event in her movie. She remarks on the "bill of goods" that our society sells women, how we're told to fix ourselves up pretty but, if we get raped, it's our fault. (I tell her one woman is raped every six minutes in this country and half the women in L.A. County will be raped in their lifetimes. She gets a sick look on her face.) Khouri tells me that the highest incidence of depression is found among married women and why would that be, she asks, if being married and having children is supposed to be so fulfilling?

Louise would never say the word "feminist," but Khouri de-scribes herself as such without the slightest hesitation: "I'm a feminist and proud to say so." This is a rare admission in the entertainment industry, where women frequently weasel on the subject of their beliefs so they won't be labelled ideologues or castrating bitches. But Khouri's feminism is a very instinctive, tolerant kind that includes concern for the plight of men who are obliged to be tough when they aren't and forced to go to war when they don't believe in it. "To me, being a feminist is being a humanist. It's just that as a feminist I put slightly more emphasis on women's place in the world and fighting for their rights. I just don't want anybody to be limited. That's what feminism is about for me, just getting rid of the limits."

Nowhere in Thelma & Louise does Khouri make her feminist sentiments explicit; neither Thelma nor Louise delivers dogmatic monologues condemning the patriarchy or generalizing about the evil of men. Khouri wanted to avoid that and is such a resourceful, human writer that she can advance her points with plot rather than polemics. At the same time, Khouri avoids the cliches about women that abound in Hollywood films--for example, that they can't be good friends, that they're never important enough to drive the action, or that they're pure creatures of sex and emotion. When Khouri deals with inherently touchy material like rape and murder, she does it very care-fully: "It's really troubling to me how acceptable the idea of murdering and raping women is as a dramatic device," she says, "from Twin Peaks on down. I loved Silence of the Lambs but it's also just some more god-damn dead women."

With Thelma & Louise, Khouri wanted to use sexuality and violence in a different way by inventing a situation in which two women are pushed too far and react the way any intelligent person (read: man) would: desperately, cunningly, with humor and with hope. "I wanted to show how a film with an underlying feminist psychology can still be fun and still be real and have great things going on in it and still make you laugh and still make you cry and do all the things that movies are supposed to do. When you strip everything away, though, I'm saying these women have a right to be whole human beings but they don't have a chance because they don't live in that kind of a world." In the best tradition of genre filmmaking, Khouri makes a serious, depressing point using the form of a popular entertainment. The audience laughs itself silly until Thelma & Louise suddenly kicks them in the stomach.

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