Thelma & Louise (1991)

Everyone knows the story of Thelma & Louise (1991). Even if you haven't seen the film, you know it. Two women set out on a party weekend and end up fugitives is one version. A woman kills a man who is raping the other woman is what makes them fugitives. Without knowing what for, a boyfriend lends one of them money for their getaway and another man steals it is what leads one of the women to rob a roadside store. The woman who robs the store learned how to rob a store from the man who stole from her. The man who stole from her tells the police where they are headed (Mexico). The man leading the police investigation is sympathetic to the women. His sympathy means little once the FBI take over the case. For the viewer, the isolation of this man from the case changes him from a black-and-white man to a man of colour and dimension, like the landscape that opens the film (above). The entrance of these women into the ever-widening, ever-flowering landscape (in contrast to the cramped work and domestic spaces in which they are introduced) is their metaphysical flowering, which they recognize, and which makes them land artists. The last man to abuse these women is a trucker they keep seeing on the highway. They ask him to pull over and, rather than submit to him (as he believes they will), they admonish him, then shoot his tanker until it explodes. Finally hemmed in by FBI and local police,  the women choose to "Keep going," which means driving off a cliff, where their car is held frozen by the medium in which it was carried. This is a story of Thelma & Louise. To tell it again would be different. Stories on top of stories is something we, as a culture, pass like the landscape.