Two for the road: a new DVD release revisits Thelma & Louise, which starving queer audiences embraced as their own in 1991

Thelma & Louise (special edition DVD) * Written by Callie Khouri * Directed by Ridley Scott * Starring Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis * MGM Home Entertainment * $24.98 When Thelma & Louise was released on May 24, 1991, it connected with audiences with such visceral power that it was credited with transforming roles for women in movies forevermore (yeah, in our dreams). Even now I remember the thrill of being part of an audience virtually levitating with the euphoria of empowerment. Thelma & Louise created a new hybrid genre that broke through the wall separating romantic comedies from the grown-up world of road movies and buddy pics and found a way to validate women's experiences without compromise. The conservative media had a field day claiming that the movie preached man-hating and would incite women to violence. If only!

The movie's timing was interesting--it opened less than three months after the end of the Gulf War, the first American war in which women on the battlefield gave interviews about their kids back home, sparking a lot of hand-wringing over women's place in society. For those who'd opposed Operation Desert Storm, T&L was the perfect way to blow the lid off a pressure cooker of political discord.

You, dear reader, may remember something else: the phenomenon of a lesbian audience claiming a mainstream film as an artifact of lesbian culture. Evidence? Weren't Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon reason enough? OK, they did play Thelma and Louise as unambiguously heterosexual women, but that was only on-screen. True, the film's major plot points also revolved around men--in particular, Thelma's sexual awakening at the hands of J.D. (Brad Pitt, in a star-making role) and the sentimental attachment of policeman Hal (Harvey Keitel) that led the cops and bureau straight to them. Ignore that facade--those men were there as cover, for what politicians call "plausible deniability." The guys were put there, as one scholar had it, to disavow lesbianism.

Remember, this was the spring of 1991. Even Fried Green Tomatoes wasn't yet released, and the divisive Claire of the Moon was another year away. And the scripts for real lesbian features like Go Fish and The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love were barely, or not even, being written. In that wasteland, Thelma & Louise became "our" movie.

So it was that the tragic tale of heterosexual female friendship got rewritten in a number of feverish lesbian brains as an offscreen love story, constructed through the same kind of wishful thinking that contended they managed to reach Mexico. The scenes inevitably held up as evidence of their carnal lust were the Polaroid photo that fluttered into the air, the kiss that Sarandon planted on Davis's lips, and the close-up shot of their hands entwined as the pedal hit the metal. That's it. Crumbs, sure, but lesbian crumbs, goddarn it!

Sad to say, while the new DVD offers the chance to reassess T&L as a cultural artifact and to cull the out-takes and commentaries, it produces no smoking gun. No excised lesbian sex scenes or subliminal messages. We do learn that two of the famous signature moments--the Polaroid and the kiss--were spontaneous improvisations by Sarandon, not scripted by Callie Khouri or directed by Ridley Scott. Otherwise, most of what fills the commentary track is the lingua franca of production: location hardships, numbers of takes, and lots of sighing over the wardrobe that got away: "Hey, what happened to that jacket?" We do see an alternate ending in which the car falls slo-mo down the canyon, but Scott's commentary on this footage won't spark any revisionist readings.

No, the real shock of revisiting the film now is to see how quickly a truly radical gesture can disappear back into genre, leaving only the faintest ripples of original importance. We're left with an interesting footnote, but it's no revolution, just a well-done road movie with period touches that struck a chord back in the day.

The DVD's commentary track makes it clear that even the actors, screenwriter, and director didn't realize what they'd wrought until audiences began to go wild. To their credit, they know now. Sarandon tells a story of taking one of her kids on a sight-seeing trip to the Grand Canyon on what turned out to be, coincidentally, the film's 10th anniversary. In a gift shop she encountered a group of fans who were suitably astonished to find Sarandon at the scene of the crime. "They must have been relieved," comments the voice of Davis or Khouri (ganging the girls together on one commentary track wasn't the best idea). "Now they know you made it out alive."

Rich is the author of Chick Flicks (Duke University Press).

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