How the West Was Won

As Khouri’s screenplay accelerates deliberately through all its different terrains, Scott, a genre polyglot versed in conceptual world-building, keeps pace. The filmic language morphs from one form to the next as seamlessly as the view changes through the windshield on a days-long road trip. Thelma & Louise becomes a western only in increments, just as Hans Zimmer’s score gradually incorporates more cowboy elements over its synthy bed: a twangy guitar, a honky-tonk harmonica, an occasional rattlesnake hiss. But the film is always heading west.

That these two models of traditional femininity—the waitress and the housewife—will soon occupy behavioral territories notionally dominated by men is foretold in deceptively chatty, casual style. Louise serves coffee and pancakes in a clattering diner while Thelma negotiates the morning-time temper of her horrible husband, Darryl (Christopher McDonald), in her kitchen—both are bustling through feminine, domestic routines. But the weekend they’re planning is the ultimate boys’ getaway: a fishing trip. Neither of them knows how to fish, but as Louise wisecracks, “Darryl does it—how hard can it be?”

When they set out, they’re hardly tomboys: Louise channeling Grace Kelly in her hairdo-protecting headscarf; Thelma in a white top that plays frilly peekaboo with her shoulders. Both hide privately weary eyes behind glamour sunglasses; both emphasize bright public smiles with cheerful lipstick. Soon they will be different women, forged in violence, pursued by police: in a fateful parking lot, Louise will become a murderer, spitting “You watch your mouth, buddy” through pursed lips at the dying rapist she has just shot. Thelma’s clothes will be torn and her mouth red, this time from blood. You can trace the trajectory of their whole transformation through their lessening lipstick alone, right until the scene where Thelma commits their second crime while a dazed Louise goes to reapply hers but then, shocked by the unfamiliar face in the T-Bird’s mirror, tosses it away instead.

The makeup goes the way of the headscarves, which are replaced by battered hats bartered or stolen from men. Plain tanks and sleeveless tees come to be favored over girlish blouses and crisp shirts. Soon, the two rangy, tanned, double-denimed redheads in the dusty blue Ford are almost camouflaged against the stonewashed desert skies and the pink-orange sandstone bluffs. The agents who pursue them in desk-job suits, the police officer in his ironed uniform, the Rasta cyclist in his acid-neon spandex: the guys stick out sorely against the roughed-up splendor of the scenery. But the women, driving with the warm wind whipping through their loose hair (Thelma’s rollers barely a memory, Louise’s chignon long gone), are as open to the elements and as at one with the environment as if they were on horseback.