Women and Film Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Women and Film - Essay ExampleIn fact she is crack at the strictures that life has posed for her and Thelma, and the rest of the film shows them breaking out of them.Thelma and Louise starts with two shots that portrays women in a very ordinary, subservient roles. Thus LOUISE is a hold off in a coffee shop . . . she is in her early thirties, but too old to be doing this, while THELMA is a housewife . . . slamming coffee cups from the eat table into the kitchen sink, which is full of dirty breakfast dishes and some stuff left from last nights dinner. . . 1 They be both, at this stage at least, spare caricatures of the controlled and particular(a) lives that women are forced to lead.Most telling here is the fact that Thelma must ask her husband if she can go, rather than merely informing him that she is leaving on a trip with a confederate. Louises reaction is also very revealing as she, while the apparently more independent of the two, at least legitimizes the report that her friend should have to gain permission from her husband. She immediately expands it to the husband or father comment, but her initial (and thus perhaps instinctive) reaction is to annoyed because they are just about to leave and Thelma hasnt gained permission.The first The first sign of rebellion in these early minutes of the film comes with the screeenwriters note that Thelma decides not to tell him (her husband) that she is going on the trip. Her husband, along with nearly all the men portrayed in the film is vain and arrogant, without having the goods to back up either tendency. Men are shown in the same two-dimensional light that women are normally portrayed as in films. Thus all the men are vain, violent and/or pudden-head in the same way that women are often seen as money-grabbing, mothers or whores in most films. Thelma and Louise must break away from these two-dimensional caricatures in pose to find themselves. The hint that violence may be at least a possibility occurs wh en Thelma surprisingly puts a gun into her bag along with a box of ammunition, with the rather cryptic comment psycho killers. Whether she is referring to potentially violent men or whether this is perhaps a foreshadowing of the crime spree that she and her friend are just about to stumble into is unclear. The lack of clarity as to why what is about to occur does actually happen has perhaps contributed to the varied censorious opinion of this movie. Thus while Nick Schager, in Slant, argues that the films feminist call to arms winds up sounding woefully simple-minded3, Matt Brunson disagrees, saying this attractively realized picture remains a trenchant, almost mystical slice of Americana4Most critics seem to have fallen somewhere between the two, suggesting that the apparent glorification of casual violence that the film portrays is in fact a reflection of a certain segment of American society. As Wesley Lovell writes, Thelma and Louise is a