If you have seen this summer's blockbuster movie ``Thelma & Louise,' liked it, and can't imagine why anybody couldn't, read on.
``This female buddy movie is ridiculous,' grumbles New York Daily News columnist Richard Johnson. ``It justifies armed robbery, manslaughter and chronic drunken driving as exercises in consciousness-raising.'He's not groaning alone. John Leo weighs in mightily with a June 10 U.S. News & World Report column: ``Here we have an explicit fascist theme, wedded to the bleakest form of feminism and buried (shallowly) in a genuinely funny buddy movie. Whew. No wonder the critics worked so hard to avoid confronting what is really going on in this film.'
If Thelma and Louise lack the gentility of better-educated women, it is because theirs is a working-class version of liberation and empowerment, not a college research project.
Hemmed in by an emotionally repressed boyfriend and buffoon of a husband, they hit the road, first for a weekend lark, but then, as fateful events happen, they find themselves becoming fugitives from the law in events driven by a world of rapacious (and raping) men.
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It is not everywoman's life. It is a worst-case scenario, close enough to the lives of many real women to give it a resonance that transcends its cartoonish script.
Violence? Thelma and Louise, as played quite attractively and persuasively by Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis, respond violently to a world that has been violent to them. Theirs is an allegorical tale of what happens when freedom becomes what Janis Joplin sang, just another word for nothing left to lose.
Besides, the violence in this movie is no more senseless than that to which we are exposed in Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger movies.
``All males in this movie exist only to betray, ignore, sideswipe, penetrate or arrest our heroines,' says essayist Leo contemptuously.
Well, that's not quite true. Harvey Keitel, in a version of Joe Friday that must have been inspired by Phil Donahue, plays a tough-but-sensitive cop who uncovers not only the crimes but the motivations that drive these two women on their mad spree. Ah, the message shouts to us, if only all men could be as cool as he.
Simplistic? Maybe. But in a summer full of movies along the lines of ``Don't Tell Mom, the Baby Sitter's Dead,' ``Thelma & Louise' may capture the sexual tensions of our times the way Spike Lee's ``Do the Right Thing' captured the racial tensions of 1989 and ``Easy Rider' captured the generational tensions of the summer of 1969.
Each was criticized justifiably for moral ambiguity, but each also became a movie milestone, a cinematic snapshot of its times.
I am most amused to see white men overreacting to this film's unflattering portrayal of white men the same way other social critics overreacted to the portrayal of black men in ``The Color Purple.' Some of us can't bear to see our worst sides portrayed on the screen without getting our wid-dow feel-wings hurt.
But some women also find this movie's feminist roller-coaster ride to be a bit too wild, John Leo writes. ``A colleague at this magazine said she could not come to terms with the themes and ideas so blithely unleashed in this movie, and that many of the women who sat in the audience with her seemed to leave the theater in something of a daze.'
On the other hand, a woman I know whose attempted abduction and rape almost 20 years ago remains one of her most vivid memories thought the movie spoke volumes. Maybe those women coming out of the theater weren't in a daze after all, John. Maybe their eyes were adjusting to the light.