Thelma & Louise Live!: The Cultural Afterlife of an American Film

This is a case of taking the wider societal politics that the film deconstructs and instigates narratives about and subscribing it to the personal.

Thelma & Louise Live!: The Cultural Afterlife of an American Film by Bernie Cook

A viewer may not be wholly aware of the significance of the film culturally and may chose to object on different grounds other than a disagreement with the egalitarian pursuit of genderless worlds, but yet this is presented as though its an obvious banality and something that all people would ultimately be aware of. Surely the books existence is in question then if everyone is immediately erudite on the topic of performativity and ergo Judith Halberstam, Judith Butler et al, dropping it within dinner conversations like the weather.

There is also numerous denotation issues to be had with how the particular author utilizes 'patriarchy' which seems to be ultimately thrown around without true meaning and indeed the term itself is subject to serious methodological flaws. Its a clumsy way of articulating real issues in our world and ultimately something which segregates us further, not just in attempting to understand the connotations each time the author utilizes it but also in creating a fissure with men, who are also important in the whole 'equality' thing, wouldn't you think?

Thelma & Louise live! : the cultural afterlife of an American film

It's infuriating how the author attempts to subsume all the men working on the set as not really getting the significance or point of the film. The author attempts to assert that Scott probably didn't care about the characterization of the characters in favor of big masculine explosions, thus insinuating standard stereotypes of male barbarianism and chauvinism on nothing wholly substantial at all. The author already mentioned how he was prepared to in his previous films intersect gender roles and deconstruct standard cinematic narrative in providing anachronisms and decontextulizing normal heroic portrayals but yet his direction on this film is presented as a power grab as an attempt at using his phallus power to steer the direction of the film in numerous ways.

The very fact that he was on board and money was going to the film seems like a point of lament for the author who insisted the writer wanted an independent film of less than one million! So the fact that the film received 16 million pounds to produce was obviously the attempt at a recuperation as the situationists would say to banalize the reactionary narrative right?

The author doesn't even say that, which would make sense in a medial way! The essay ultimately doesn't present us with anything that is distinctly incongruous to the standard understanding and provides elongated sequences of describing the marketing campaign and thus the photographs used on each release.

This does showcase how interpretation is contingent upon numerous factors mainly cultural as Wolfgang Iser showed and the points made regarding this are good but the author's insistence that the film posters and marketing leave out the sinister societal critiques is absurd. This surely is not an isolated case where film studios have engendered excuse the pun interpretations in a way to appropriate them to specific audiences otherwise the movie wouldn't sell and it would be a waste of time for all those invested in it but yet its presented as though this is an isolationist patriarchal powerful mafia intervening to attempt a rewriting of history by making the lead characters look hot and on the road for freedom, both of which are true and not even disputed by the author!

It certainly would not have been as powerful as a mainstream film if the cover was splashed with intimations of rape, murder, suicide et al and therefore have nowhere near the impact it had. The author seems to lament this though and I understand where this is coming from theoretically but its ultimately predicated on an insanity for it subscribes to the idea that there is one interpretation, something the author candidly attempts to unhinge earlier. I suppose the author's ideas of what the film constitute are way more important than everyone else and the poster should showcase the 'truth' already.

The author's analysis of gender performance is strong however and ultimately resonant with the films content and purpose but is not a deductive and closed account but rather something that changes with time and as social attitudes and mores reconstitute themselves, something that is suggested for other writers but not oneself. The author delineates and analyzes numerous letters written at the time in an attempt to gage public option and to showcase positive response from a wide range of people crossing different performantive identities and dispositions. The Internet Movie Database segments though are quite vacuous, they do provide intermittent and brief contemporary understanding and response to the film but its largely irrelevant to the analysis and therefore is merely repetitive, reiterating the same point that was established really early on within the piece, that gender is performed.

A contentious sentiment early on reads as such: Apparently this is the case because the movie centralizes the audience as female. Therefore by laughing one becomes complicit and collaborative within "a feminist world view" This gendering of humor is ultimately incongruous with the preceding statement that humor largely is amorphous and has no deducible factors which would fit within a syllogism every time, indeed what I find funny within the film probably differs from the critic here, so to blue print a formula which insists that when we laugh we are always doing so at the male expense, is detaching from the context and individuality that the author already insisted was a key prerequisite.

Her comments regarding "physical bliss" seem to be truthful though, but also it should be remarked that not only was the humor an attempt at allowing the audience to participate somewhat in the cinematic fictional bliss of the characters within specific moments but also to understand the seriousness involved in their journey.

It was Wittgenstein who said the path to seriousness is always strewn with jokes, therefore humor is a device within the film which is used to teach a much more valuable lesson. Reading the film as a rejection of this is rather illuminating and offers new possibilities for the parodic use of violence and performance. I think we can arrive at the same conclusion however by discussing socially deterministic mores and anomie.

The cultural disconnect within reality creates a place within the fictional world for exploration of the theme further, it's what is called the political use of fantasy. It means we can explore a theme to its very end without repercussions.

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So in that reading, we could also present the film as a way for feminists to live out their fantasy within the fictional space and therefore dislocate themselves from the troubles facing them; we have fought the battle on screen, let's go home. This ruminates about the music used within the film and echoes brilliant sentiments about how the sheer hybridity of the score bridges spatial and temporal gaps between sequences.

Not only that but it reinforces metaphors and elaborates on complexities on screen inviting an active reading from a distance, rather than mere orchestral underscoring. The score is non diegetic meaning that the score is outside the narrative space and comprehension of the characters on screen.

Discussion moves on to the split focus but instead of deconstructing the various ways in which this hybridity is utilized within the context of this film, the author seeks instead to discuss other films instead. While this may instantiate the theoretical point it ultimately is a lost opportunity and delineating a plethora of situations within the film itself whereby this split focused thinking may be at work in further accentuating themes of performativity etc.

The soundtrack in this movie is thus of extreme importance when interpreting how the characters listen or do not listen and how this reflects standard cultural cues. Scott apparently was thinking of the soundtrack before the actors were cast and so some scenes were constructed specifically around music.

The analysis appropriating this within the film itself and speculating on the songs used is good and fairly engaging. What seems incongruous about this sentiment is the alternative reading in this moment of the cultural outsider "winning" somehow against the symbol of the patriarchal and oppressive cop is that the ethnic minority involved here is a cameo who never makes an appearance again for the entire film.

It also could be stated that Thelma and Louise doesn't actually address these issues since the lead casting is not women marginalized and on the periphery, instead we have two white middle class women on a road trip discovering that they are oppressed. Your list has reached the maximum number of items. Please create a new list with a new name; move some items to a new or existing list; or delete some items.

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