I didn't know it then, but that film was just about the only thing put out by Hollywood in my lifetime that actually told the truth. I just felt its daring - from that helpless, half-desperate, half-laughing look of Geena Davis - that something is breaking through, the stake is raised way up, and we are leaving Kansas behind.
I guess you would call that a religious experience.
(I only felt this way with one other American film, much more recent: Fight Club - until it chickened out and turned into a lame thriller.)
What Thelma and Louise did for me was to open the door, and to show me a glimpse of the true beauty and terror of this land of the open road - beauty because it's open; terror because it sometimes leads up to the abyss (then the interesting part: you feel the true terror as you peer into the abyss and realize how beautiful it is ... like the Grand Canyon) As far as allegories go, you can't do much better than that.
And that prepared me for the craziness of L.A. and for Michael Ventura, who has a great term for the U.S.A. that this movie was set in: "The United States of Anything" (and its ingredients: Adrenaline and Abyss). Of course in real life death, no matter how dramatic, ain't no solution. His extraordinary book Night Time, Losing Time, which is all about the Thelmas and Louises trying to make it last, said it best, "You can't build a house on the river, you gotta build it by the river." But how? How do you live on the edge, and not fall off?
And that question, a few years later and 2,800 miles away, took me eventually to flamenco. I suppose women always knew this, because I see many Thelmas and Louises in those classes - mature women of all ages laying claim to a piece of life for themselves. But I myself didn't figure it out until much later: Yes, in flamenco you can hold on to your fire - it is celebrated and given space by your community whether you are 8 or 80. What a concept!
Still, it's a narrow road. Here in America the road goes in all directions, some in circles and some with no signposts. That "the highway ran through each and every one of their living rooms. All the time. Sixty-, ninety-miles-an-hour traffic. East, west, north, south. There was no side of the road." And half of the beauty about living here, I think, amounts really to watching all the myriad ways people come up to navigate through this - or fail to. As the Butch Hancock song goes: "You can drive all day and never leave Texas /You can drive all night and never leave home". Like it or not, knowing this alone was what made me an American in the deepest sense - and I have Thelma and Louise to thank.
(5/18/02, Red Bank, NJ)
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