Gender101@Bowdoin

Thelma and Louise:

One of the central questions for my group when we watched our film, Thelma and Louise, was whether or not it was feminist. The argument could be made that the film is feminist because the producers did not objectify the women in it; these women were, instead, depicted as having their own agency and resisting the attempts of the men in film to objectify them (for example, early on in the film, Thelma decides to leave for the weekend against her husband’s desire). However, even films with female protagonists often subtly objectify them in depicted them as hyper-sexual or sexual objects. Despite granting them apparent agency, producers still objectify these female protagonists by representing them as sexual images for the audience to consume.

In answering whether or not Thelma and Louise are objectified, then, it is important to examine whether or not they are depicted as sexual images. Surprisingly, given the frequency with which women are sexually objectified in film, the producers did not appear to sexualize Thelma or Louise. For instance, there is a sequence in the film during which Louise trades some of her jewelry for a cowboy hat. The producers could easily have shot this sequence in a way that sexualized Louise, but when the angle seems to suggest that this will happen, the camera suddenly shifts upward towards the sky instead of remaining on Louise. In this sense, one could argue that the producers do not reduce Thelma and Louise into sexual objects.

However, while preparing for our presentation, I searched online for a photograph to demonstrate this lack of objectification, and I could only find photographs of the female protagonists which depicted them in sexually provocative poses. Perhaps these photographs are evidence of the advertisers attempt to use the protagonists sexual image to sell the film. Does this mean that Thelma and Louise is not as feminist as it appears? Or is the advertising campaign sufficiently separate from the film to not interfere with its message?

And, if sexual objectification is a method utilized to market products such as films, is it a gender issue or an capitalist issue? The men in Thelma and Louise are certainly sexualized; as one author described, “In one scene, director Ridley Scott inverts the usual Hollywood film and allows Geena Davis’s character to erotically objectify Brad Pitt’s. Between objective shots of her lustful gazing, the film offers the audience her subjective shot of Brad Pitt’s glistening torso” (Harry Benshoff, America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, page 246). Is Thelma and Louise a feminist film because it inverts this gendered process of objectification?