Not only is Thelma & Louise the first movie Callie Khouri's ever written, it's the first fully realized movie about women Hollywood's made in a long time.
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"Women," says Callie Khouri, "have the right to be whole human beings." But Hollywood has rarely portrayed women as whole." More often than hot, Hollywood portrays Woman as "hole." Either the bottomless hole of sin, moral anarchy, and death (Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction), or simply a hole--a vagina (Annette Bening in The Grifters), a mouth (Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman), a tear duct (Demi Moore in Ghost). There are exceptions (Blue Steel, The Silence of the Lambs), but the percentages are insulting. That's why the new Thelma & Louise comes as such a bizarre surprise. This moving, hugely entertaining film is unusual for its clever, raunchy, real female protagonists, and for its story of how they run for their lives. It's also unusual for the extremely unlikely combination of artists involved in its making.
It was directed by Ridley Scott, who, though highly respected for Alien and Blade Runner, has more recently come to represent everything depraved about contemporary Hollywood--Black Rain was one more big-budget, visually stunning, boy-boy-boy blow-out, and Someone to Watch Over Me was plot-stupid, character-poor genre shtick. With Thelma & Louise, Scott succeeds spectacularly filming material you'd think would be utterly foreign to his sensibilities and talents. Scott's about-face is not the most amazing element of the story behind Thelma & Louise, however. It's screenwriter Callie Khouri who's the biggest surprise. Not only had Khouri never had a script produced before this one, she had never even attempted to write one. Thelma & Louise is Khouri's first completed screenplay.
"I wrote Thelma & Louise because I just got fed up," Khouri tells me. "I wanted to put two women on the screen that you haven't seen before. I'd had it with going to the movies and seeing women I do not relate to. I don't know who they are."
These are the kinds of characters Khouri likes: Thelma (Geena Davis) is a housewife living a life of silent suffocation with her husband Darryl (Christopher McDonald), a carpet salesman who expects his meals on the table every day even though he philanders half the night. Louise (Susan Sarandon) works as a waitress in a coffeeshop, sustained by the hope that someday her unreliable boyfriend Jimmy (Michael Madsen) will propose to her. Thelma, sweet-natured and defiant; Louise, sharp and wound too tight. The two of them decide to take off for a weekend of fishing and confession. When they stop at a honkytonk along the way, Thelma gets drunk and dances with a stranger. And when the guy tries to rape her in the parking lot, Louise shoots him. Knowing they won't get justice in a court of law, Thelma and Louise drive-- broke, exhilarated, scared--90 miles an hour down the deadend highway of their lives, chased by husbands, lovers, a sympathetic homicide detective (Harvey Keitel), the FBI, and their fate.
Although Khouri complains that there are no decent female role models, she clearly didn't intend Thelma and Louise to serve that purpose. "They're criminals," she says. "But there's this book called Writing a Woman's Life by Carolyn Heilbrun where she talks about how you have to break with convention so that you can never go back. When she breaks the bonds that society puts on her, that is the point in a woman's life when it becomes her own."
With background reading like this as inspiration, it's no wonder Khouri's story defies categorization.
"The best description I've heard so far for Thelma & Louise," Khouri laughs, "is '9 to 5 meets Easy Rider.' "That is, it's a tragic road movie with comic female protagonists in it. There's an old joke about how every woman who goes to film school dreams of making a road movie. Khouri never attended film school, however, and maybe that's why she managed to get Thelma & Louise written where thousands of other women didn't. A film school credential doesn't, after all, guarantee that someone will be a good or interesting moviemaker. It does practically guarantee they'll be well-versed in cinematic models and precedents, at least in the arena of American commercial filmmaking. But when you're aiming to make something nobody's seen before, an education can hinder more than help. A well-schooled, budding female filmmaker might be convinced, however subtly, that what hasn't been done can't be done. In writing Thelma & Louise, Khouri didn't think to herself, "I'll do 9 to 5 meets Easy Rider--a comedy about feisty dames with a beef overlayed with a tragedy about two people who go searching for America and get gunned down by it." She wanted to write something different and worked consciously outside any cinematic models. Sometime in 1988, Khouri simply looked at a couple of screenplays to see how they were laid out, thumbed through Sid Field's how-to-write-a-screenplay book for a few nuggets of wisdom, and launched right in.
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.
Having finished the script in late 1988, Khouri showed it to a friend who showed it to producer Mimi Polk to get Polk's opinion on which companies might be interested in such an "offbeat" project. Polk read it and took it straight away to her own boss--Ridley Scott. Polk has worked with Scott for eight years and, for the past four, has served as the executive vice president of Scott's company, Percy Main Productions. When she showed Thelma & Louise to him, he loved it. "Ridley felt really strongly that he wanted to make a break from the kind of movies he's been doing," Khouri says. "Directors run the same risk of getting categorized as actresses or writers or anybody else does."
Scott could have easily turned Thelma & Louise into a romp, two wacky dames with guns running wild in the Southwest--Bonnie & Bonnie. But he didn't. He worked with Khouri on the script, consolidating scenes and so on, but filmed it essentially as written, respecting her purpose.
At their initial meeting, Khouri says, she sat down at the table with Scott and he said, "I want you to understand that I know the ending can't be changed." Khouri replied, "Keep talking." In a manner that is probably as mysterious to his fans as to his detractors, Scott clearly feels deeply for Thelma and Louise. His empathy is palpable on the screen. The film is vivid and stylish without being slick (Utah's Canyon Lands at night are breathtaking, but the beauty is pertinent); it moves with grace and energy without sacrificing dialogue or revelations of character. Scott is sensitive but not too; he never cheapens the action with that giggly, maudlin "just us girls" tone you often get when films try to portray women's intimate secrets. And he gets stupendous performances from his stars. Davis and Sarandon don't act like they've got their monthly female trouble. They act like they should, like they're neck-deep in life-changing shit. Davis's Thelma grows visibly from a gawky, uncertain housewife into a person seeing herself and the world for the first time; Sarandon, in the middle of her transition to character actress, gives Louise a grim, doomed weight as she heads for a new life in Mexico.
Khouri says she loves film and the visual aspects of moviemaking, but that her artistic influences are more literary than cinematic. She admires J.D. Salinger and Frederick Exley because they peel away psychological layers of their characters to get at the bitter, bitter truth of life. Critical and audience reception of Thelma & Louise will depend, I think, on how people react to the film's bitter, bitter truths. It expresses women's anger, their sense of being persecuted, chased, monitored and stalked by violent men, whether it's the husband who won't let them go away for the weekend or the roadhouse Romeo who can't take no for an answer. And the film's also pessimistic about the possibility of women being whole and free in this society. Although Khouri criticizes the kind of women we see in films, and wrote Thelma & Louise in reaction to those images, her characters aren't exactly shining role models for women--unless, of course, you hanker for the life of a fugitive or want to make armed robbery your career.
For Thelma and Louise, freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. But Thelma and Louise are novel and inspiring anyway because, unlike so many female protagonists, they drive the action solely through their own decisions. Caught in life-or-death events, they assume responsibility for their crimes and their lives, taking their fate in their own hands like true heroines of an existential tragi-comedy. And in doing so, they and their movie express a radical opinion about the limitations on a woman's freedom in a man's world.
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Helen Knode is a staff writer for the L.A. Weekly. This is her first piece for Movieline.