You don’t need to sell me on Thelma & Louise; it’s been on my list of favorite movies as long as I’ve had one. When we studied it in my college screenwriting class, the professor rightly called Callie Khouri’s Oscar-winning screenplay “flawless.” When it appeared on the schedule for Movies at H’art Museum—a charming summer program that screens movies in the museum courtyard—it was a no-brainer.

Which made me all the more surprised that, seeing it for the first time in a decade, I just couldn’t believe how great it was. It might be Ridley Scott’s best. We should be talking about this movie all, the, time.¹

My memory of the movie had a specific flaw that directly related to how I was managing to underrate it. To simplify, there’s two categories of “buddy” protagonists: you’ve got your odd couples (Kermit and Fozzie, Eve and Villanelle) and your peas in a pod (Bill and Ted, Romy and Michele). Thelma and Louise start the movie as best friends and are literally never separated by more than a few feet, so in my memory they were a lightly-bickering pair of peas, complete with with a green convertible as their pod. 

I was wrong.

Despite their superficial similarity, the ladies are chocolate and vanilla from the opening scene: Thelma (Geena Davis) is naive and chaotic, Louise (Susan Sarandon) world-weary and controlled. They ride the same roller coaster—a weekend getaway that literally detours to manslaughter and life on the lam—but they enter the track at very different places. Thelma needs to realize how dark the world is and then learn to fight the darkness. Louise knows the darkness too well; she needs to stop running from it and start running for herself.

I could spill another thousand words on the acting work. Geena Davis has me searching for adjectives with her freight-train performance of a repressed housewife who first defines herself without her shithead husband, then redefines herself without any man at all. Susan Sarandon’s performance is easily overlooked (an absurd thing to type!), but she smolders while Davis burns and occasionally explodes while Davis cowers. It’s a marvelous tango to witness.² The actors competed against each other for Best Actress at the 1991 Oscars, and too bad they couldn’t both win, though I can’t fault the eventual winner (Jodie Foster for “Silence of the Lambs”). (Longstanding gripe of mine: the Oscars needs an ensemble category.)

From the opening shot of the empty Arizona desert, Ridley Scott introduces the American Southwest as the third lead of the movie. You don’t need to lift a finger to make this landscape look cinematic, but Adrian Biddle (Aliens, The Princess Bride, V for Vendetta) did the work anyway. There’s this scene where Thelma and Louise drive through Monument Valley in the dark, the zillion-year-old buttes towering silently over them. I’m no expert on 1991-era film lighting, but I know Biddle would’ve needed to wheel out some tremendous, NASA-grade spotlights to pull that off. 

But the mise-en-scène isn’t just postcard images. In shot after shot, anonymous men lurk in the background or at the edges of the screen—sometimes leering, usually simply existing—and remind Thelma, Louise, and the audience that even in some of the emptiest land on earth, women are almost never left alone. 

At some point, of course, our heroines run out of fucks to give. They buy a bunch of Wild Turkey, shed lipstick and jewelry, and start tossing those men in trunks and blowing up their big rigs. Local cop Harvey Keitel realizes just how stacked the deck is against them and despairs: “How many times, Max? How many times are they gonna be fucked over?”

But Thelma and Louise have already transcended. Says Thelma: “I feel awake. I don’t remember ever feeling this awake.” They wreck an almost-comical number of police cars before sharing an ambiguous kiss³ and driving off into glory. The movie freeze-frames and fades to black. Thelma and Louise will literally never hit the ground; they’ll be soaring on the back of their Thunderbird forever.

Last week in Amsterdam, a 17-year-old girl called Lisa was murdered by a stranger as she biked home. On Tuesday night, buildings throughout the city were lit orange in Lisa’s honor with the defiant message “Wij eisen de nacht op” (“We demand the night back”). It was an amazing coincidence that, of all the movies on the calendar, the film being screened on Tuesday was Thelma & Louise. When it paused for intermission, “Wij eisen de nacht op” glowed on the screen and fiction blurred with fact.

A feminist revenge fantasy can’t bring back Lisa. But it can remind us that this has always been a problem, that it probably always will be, and that the good and moral way to feel about that is pissed off.

1. If the two leads were male, we probably would be.
2. I feel a bit guilty for not keeping up with their careers. Did you know Geena Davis did 13 episodes of “Grey’s Anatomy?” Did you know Susan Sarandon did 4 episodes of “Rick & Morty”?
3. I’m sure the movie would be much more gay-coded if they made it today, but it’s better this way. The point is for them to learn to rely on themselves, not each other.