Thelma and Louise – 1991
What does the Bride from the Kill Bill movies have in common with Ellen Ripley from Aliens? The root-motivation of both women is children. In Ripley’s case she has “lost” one child and isn’t going to lose another – the little girl, Newt. In the Bride’s case she’s taking revenge on those who allowed her former boss to steal her child and she’s working her way through all of them to get her child back. Aliens ends with the now classic fight between Ripley and the alien queen: a fight between two females, both of which are determined to protect their young. Underneath the sword-fights, the pulse-rifles, the gravity-defying Kung-Fu and the remote-sentries is something which is true: females defend their young from threats.
With extreme prejudice.
This is what it means for a character to have motivation. These films don’t explicitly tell the audience, but they don’t need to. The viewer understands human nature enough to know this without thinking consciously about it. Subsequently the characters don’t grate on the viewer: we don’t feel as if we’re being lectured or hectored by any feminist “message” hiding behind the narrative, because we’re not. We know what we’re watching is ultimately true.
It’s the lack of ultimate truth which is the core problem with the “feminist” message in modern cinema and television. It might be Ghostbusters 2016 or Charley’s Angels – or any number of TV spin-offs or cinema re-boots which offers the audience the surface “strong female character”. But these characters are husks, empty of any realism because they’re empty of genuine motivation. They exist for no reason other than a writer or director wanted to imagine them into existence to help further the fashionable message. But audiences know when the characters are motivated by no more than fashion – and audiences dislike it.
In the first Alien movie – directed by Ridley Scott – Ripley is motivated by the instinct to survive; she does survive, barely, blowing the alien out of the goddamn air-lock. Her motivation for the second movie is different – but even more understandable.
Where Ridley Scott seemed to have dropped the idea of fully-rounded (or even well-rounded) characters is in his “feminism” movie, the considered-a-classic Thelma and Louise.
This movie is a diamond wrapped in shit. The two leads get themselves deeper and deeper into trouble in a way that is utterly believable: their reasoning to get away from the first incident is plausible and understandable. The problem with Thelma and Louise isn’t Thelma or Louise, it’s every male character in the movie – including the supposedly “sympathetic” cop played by Harvey Keitel.
There is not one positive male character in this movie. Not one. Thelma’s husband is meant to be some sort of bully, but is played like a comical imbecile, who’d most likely stub-his toe and howl in pain when trying to fly-across the living room to give her a smack.
Louise’s boyfriend – the closest the film gets to a “nice guy” – has an unnecessary explosion of temper and throws some stuff about a motel room just to tick the asshole box. To cement his asshole credentials Louise doesn’t flee from the room when he does this but instead stands by the door, letting us know that there’s a history of violent temper enough that she may need to make a quick getaway.
No male is allowed to escape the “all men are shits” script. The beautiful and charming Brad Pitt turns out to be a shit, responsible for their deepening trouble when he steals their money. The truck-driver they pass on the road has to be a tongue-wagging letch, and is barely a character. He exists for no reason other than to have the audience feel good when his truck gets destroyed. The idea he’d pull off the road, thinking he was about to have a “good time” with the ladies is ludicrous.
The cop who pulls the ladies over is weirdly stern and robotic – a bit like the first time we see Gorman in Aliens – and he’s told to act this way to show a stark contrast, when, moments later at gun-point, he begins blubbing like the bitch-male the script insists he has to be. The cops / FBI tracking the fugitive females are order-takers, without concern for how the ladies got into the mess they’re in. Indeed, it’s suggested that the law-enforcement guys are all a bunch of sexists. There isn’t time for a line of dialogue for all of the extras playing cops and FBI, so the script takes care of this by showing an extra, in a room full of law-enforcement, reading a porno-mag. This guy doesn’t even get a line, he’s placed in shot so we can see him reading a porno-mag. Job done.
Harvey Keitel’s Arkansas cop does or says nothing actually positive. We perceive him as positive because every other male is a shit, an asshole or both. It’s like putting a petty-fraudster next to a couple of mass-murdering child-rapist torturers, the guy looks decent by comparison. He displays no more than basic common sense in speech and action. He understands that the two ladies wouldn’t decide to shoot a bloke in a bar car-park for the hell of it; he understands they wouldn’t have robbed the store if Brad Pitt hadn’t nicked their cash and so on. He isn’t actively positive – he’s just not an obvious asshole.
It’s interesting that Thelma and Louise was a success. I think it shows that audiences will forgive rubbish if there’s believability lurking deep-down at the main characters core-motivation. In this film there is. But that diamond of believability comes wrapped in shit.
The modern version of the “feminist” movie is shit all the way down.
JDA 