Freedom Through Lawlessnes

A detailed Summary of Freedom Through Lawlessnes

The film Thelma and Louise, written by Callie Khouri, is a story about two ordinary women living under male domination in small-town Arkansas. Louise (Susan Sarandon), an unhappy waitress, and her best friend Thelma (Geena Davis), an unloved housewife, decide to go away for the weekend to get away from the monotony of their everyday lives. Louise's plan is to drive until they reach their destination, which is a cabin in the mountains. But, during a stop at a bar along the way, Louise fails to consider that Thelma has no experience with heavy drinking and sweaty aggressive cowboys. As events unfold, Thelma is nearly raped and Louise, in rescuing her, shoots and kills the drunken male aggressor. Instinctively, the two women run while trying to comprehend what had just happened to them. Before and after the shooting, the two main characters are surrounded by male figures that are sexist, domineering, and crude. Thus, the rhetorical criticism of Thelma and Louise's domination by a patriarchal society will be critiqued through the model of feminist criticism. This criticism will require in-depth analysis, which will examine gender roles as well as how patriarchy is constructed and maintained during

Instead of being unique in its promotion of feminism, it seems that the film copies other films in which stereotypical male rebels deal with their problems in romanticized "shoot em up" action thrillers. Throughout the film, instead of dealing with patriarchal paradigms, which is what the film originally appears to be doing at the surface, the film almost becomes another masculine action movie which "simply spruces up a well-worn genre, placing repressed females where you expect macho males" (Bosom Buddies Take to the Road, 19). According to Joan Smith, "Neither violence nor revenge films are the preserve of females and feminism. I believe the film to be little more than a masculine revenge fantasy in which the gender of the leading characters has been switched (Road Testing, 17).

Rybacki, Karyn and Donald Rybacki. Communication Criticism. New York: Wadsworth,

Campbell, Karlyn. Critiques of Contemporary Rhetoric. New York: Wadsworth, 1997.

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Approximate Word count = 2002
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Movies

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