The
opening of any film is rife with visual and thematic information and clues that
anticipate and inform the rest of the movie. With Thelma & Louise (1991), director Ridley Scott puts a new and
gendered spin on both the expansive road movie and the intimate buddy film.
Teeming with thrilling, life-affirming energy, exuberant comedy, warmth, and
wit, the movie focuses on the two title characters, utterly ordinary,
working-class women fleeing the monotony of their lives and discovering
unexpected, untapped wells of feeling and strength. Not unlike the Western hero
of Hollywood classics, these ordinary women encounter situations and conditions
that make them extraordinary. The Western is also invoked through Hans Zimmer’s
mournful, tough, galvanizing country tinged score. Even before the first scene,
over the opening credits, the music creates a poignant mood that is at once
earthly and ethereal, like Thelma &
Louise itself—or should it be “themselves”?
