A Roadmap for a Road Movie: Thelma and Louise

Over a decade after being seen in movie theaters and cineplexes, the film now belongs to the geography of nonplaces, in the aisles in shopping malls and outlets such as K-Mart, Wal-Mart, or Target Stores where row after row of action movies and contemporary “classics” (including Casablanca and Thelma and Louise) are on display. A browsing customer in these spaces is wont to wonder if the two heroines will turn up at the checkout register. The plot might have led them either there or in the setting of the feature. To find brief relief from both oppressive or browbeating mates, and to be freed for a few hours from household and workaday drudgery, two women set off together to spend a weekend of fishing in the mountains (presumably the Ozarks). In the time-tested role of a cynical waitress who works in a local diner, Louise (Susan Sarandon) is shown knowing how to handle demanding clientele.³ She drives her Ford Thunderbird convertible (circa 1966) to pick up her younger friend, Thelma (Geena Davis), a confused (and abused) spouse married to a egomaniac (Christopher McDonald) who drives to work in a Corvette that sports a personalized license plate bearing the title “The-1.” Thelma packs loads of clothing into the trunk of the car. By chance she takes along a revolver she has placed in a plastic bag. Worried about Thelma’s own fear of the weapon, Louise stashes the gun into her purse.

They drive off in glee and find that the open road is congested with traffic. They no sooner stop in a roadside saloon to have a drink before they find themselves invited to dance: a charmingly disingenuous skirt-chaser addresses Thelma with seductive words and leads her to the dance floor. A hayseed under a black cowboy hat beckons Louise to take a turn with him. The skirt-chaser pursues Thelma, inebriated, who finds herself in a parking lot where he accosts and begins to rape her. Louise emerges from a crowded ladies’ room and walks into a parking lot where she discovers Thelma in distress. She suddenly aims the revolver at the man who refuses to apologize for what he has begun to do. When he crassly insults Louise (“I shoulda fucked her,” he snipes, before inviting Louise to “suck my cock”), she cocks the hammer and pulls the trigger. He dies almost instantly. Shocked at what they have wrought, the two women speed into the night aimlessly before they stop to take stock of themselves and get their bearings.

They decide to head for Mexico but encounter a variety of obstacles in a meander of misadventure. Along the way they meet a seductively vagrant hitchhiker (Brad Pitt) who teaches Thelma lessons in love and petty larceny. For a third time they pass a gasoline truck, driven by a crude and lascivious driver, who has repeatedly made obscene gestures to them from his cab. The women park their car and, like the sirens of The Odyssey, invite him to share their charms. Tricked, he watches them set his truck ablaze with bullets. They get away but soon discover that they are driving toward the Grand Canyon and are being pursued by an expeditionary force of police cars. They reach a high plateau where the forces of law—a battalion of policemen armed with telescopic rifles—are behind them while the depths of the canyon stand in front of their eyes. They go “rushin’ toward death,” driving their car over the edge of the canyon. The film ends in a freeze-frame, their car suspended in mid-air, at the zenith of the trajectory that will soon turn to a free fall into the abyss of the canyon.

One of the geographies on which their adventures is plotted belongs to the allegorical tradition of the gentle “Carte du Tendre,” that reaches, as we have seen earlier in Louis Malle’s Les Amants, back to the map that accompanied the publication of Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s Clélie. In Thelma and Louise feminism and gentility are vectored, it seems, from forces that come out of the past, from the women’s experience with men and the sentimental education they gain as they travel across America. We later learn that the sight of Thelma on the verge of being raped in the parking lot forces Louise to recall a similarly traumatic—and defining—episode earlier in her life. The vagrant youth whom the women meet on a mesa, a male prostitute who has a flair for preciosity, shows Thelma the Ovidean ars amandi (in the words of Louise, the pleasures of “a good lay”) while, at the same time, he teaches her how charming and decent words (“please,” “thank you,” “if you will,” and so on) can assist the basest of thieves. After watching his rehearsal in the bedroom (he wields a hairdryer as if it were an automatic pistol) Thelma performs a successful holdup of a roadside convenience store.

Jimmy (Michael Madsen), Louise’s male friend, who had first been uncouth with her upon learning about the ladies’ escapade, tries to understand their differences and allow her, in deference to Virginia Woolf, to find a space of her own.⁴ The “good cop” (Harvey Keitel) who works amid a bunch of uncouth males—more interested in masturbating over pulpy magazines than understanding the women—tries to tell Thelma’s husband that he ought not to browbeat her. The encounter with the trooper (Jason Beghe) is an episode of mirrored civilities. The policeman assumes a vigorous and gentle expression of authority when he apprehends them; they return the same words to him before incarcerating him in the trunk of his car that they have aerated after firing two shots into its hood. They enact a costly lesson in civility upon the truck driver who had made rude and lascivious gestures in transit. Thus, considered together, the meetings with the men engage lessons in tenderness. Assailed by at least five different males, they seek respite and kindness but find no such space outside of the nacelle of the Thunderbird. Tenderness, they discover, is hard to find on the arid and dusty badlands of the American Southwest.

The affective cartography is embedded in another, one in which a welter of allusions, citations, and references blend past cinema into the geology of the landscapes of Arizona and Utah. Various genres and styles of cinema inform the film. As in the work of French directors, many of the episodes of Thelma and Louise seem to be sedimentations of many films directly or allusively cited in dialogue, action, and the framing of the images. If we cannot exactly tell where we are, for some reason we know we have often been there before. Louise stashes in her purse the revolver that Thelma had packed with the rest of her things. Recall is immediate of the opening episodes of A bout de souffle, in which a hooligan, Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) discovers a gun in the glove compartment of the Oldsmobile he has stolen and is driving across the French countryside. He plays at shooting oncoming cars before the instrument determines his fate. Allusion to Godard ramifies to a similar episode in Taxi Driver that in turn informs La Haine.

When the ladies begin to dance to country music many conventional scenes of paroxysm come forward which determine the fate of dubious heroes and heroines of film noir. Behind the country music played in the Silver Bullet Lounge is recalled the piano music in the private club where pianist Lou Tingle hit the notes that made Burt Lancaster fall for Ava Gardner in The Killers (1946); the nightclub episode in D.O.A. (1949), in which Edmund O’Brien was fed a fateful drink powdered with luminous toxin that caused him to live only as long as the remainder of the movie that followed; the hallucinating dance that linked Burt Lancaster with Yvonne de Carlo to the rumba beat of Ezy Morales’s orchestra in Criss Cross (1949). Thelma, mollified by music and alcohol, falls prey to the evil of men. The grounding patterns of many films noir suggest that a desperate journey will shortly ensue. The pursuit itself seems to be fashioned from a number of classical Hollywood films. In High Sierra, as we have seen in chapter 4, the deep space of the desert and great vistas of the high Sierras cause the inexorable destiny of the hero to be played out, ironically, in a breathtaking setting under a sheltering sky. The couple in Thelma and Louise discovers endless horizons and thousands of “points of light” in the celestial vault over Monument Valley and the Grand Canyon.

Citations of other films begin to multiply. When the two women stuff the state trooper into the trunk of his car they reveal that they are far less sadistic than Cody Jarrett (James Cagney) of White Heat (1949), the crazed criminal, strutting and munching on the drumstick of a fried chicken, who tosses a stoolpigeon into the trunk of an old Packard. He slams down the hood and, hearing the man begging for ventilation, shoots two bullets into it. In Ridley Scott’s variant on the scene a black bicyclist examines the car, hears the policeman thumping and begging to be freed, and blows cigarette smoke into the bullet hole. At the end of Raoul Walsh’s film Cody Jarrett blows up the world when he sets ablaze the Hortonsphere on which he is perched. The great globe explodes and a mushroom cloud, clearly an allusion to the effects of an atomic bomb, goes skyward: as does that of the tank truck (one had also figured in White Heat) in Thelma and Louise that the two women ignite and leave in a conflagration.

The explosion recalls, no less, the episode of North by Northwest (1959) in which the crash of a cropduster into a tank truck ignites a conflagration on the badlands of the Dakotas. Prior to that allusion the women, singing merrily, are rushing off toward Oklahoma City. They wave at a cropduster that buzzes overhead and leaves a mist of spray in their midst before turning about and upward. The memory of North by Northwest inheres in the film, but with a new twist, and not merely because the women are traveling south by southwest: the sequence ends with a view from the airplane that flies over a highway that runs parallel to endless swaths of green fields of soybeans. The shot has no point of view that would be related to anyone in the film, unless it were that of fate itself, or a baroque perspective related to cartography that approximates a God-like point of origin. If it is understood as such, then the shot exceeds its allusion to Hitchcock by making point of view itself its own issue because for the baroque imagination point of view is not a matter of relativity, “not the variation of truth according to the subject, but the condition under which a subject perceives the truth of a variation.”⁵ By reference to Hitchcock a panoptic and controlling viewpoint, generally coded in terms of gender, is implicitly theorized. Through its diacritical relation with North by Northwest and other postwar films, two contrastive “spheres” of reference are given, and as a result no stable point of reference is ever apparent.

Surely the setting of Monument Valley ceaselessly refers to Stagecoach (1939), the western that produces the effect of a huis-clos in the wagon that transports its passengers across the expanse of northern Arizona and southern Utah. It is tempting to see how the two women find a monad, a capsule of happiness and security, in the vintage Thunderbird—whose emblem and name were a souvenir of Amerindian mythology in the package of what was, in 1991, an automotive fetish.⁶ The paradox of intimate enclosure and intolerable social constriction ties the spatial articulations of Thelma and Louise to these classical films. Constant and almost nagging reminders, the allusions configure a geography that seems to be plotted on a historical map of cinema. At the same time the allusions suggest that, like the characters in the narratives of their destiny, the viewer can never get off the map of cinematic citation.

After shooting the rapist, Thelma and Louise fall into a state of shock. They take to the road in the traffic of semi-trailers rolling onto interstate highways. Thelma, her lips bloodied by her assailant, gets behind the wheel of the car and drives away, swerving and spinning in every direction. They eventually stop in a diner for a cup of coffee and respite enough to find their bearings. In a two-shot in medium depth, in profile, they face each other from the opposite sides of a booth by a window—sliced by long horizontal lines of Venetian blinds—in front of a parking lot where a couple of pickup trucks seem to be lingering. The camera tracks in on the couple as Louise, sucking on her cigarette and blowing whorls of smoke in the air, utters, both to herself and Thelma, “Now’s not the time to panic, if we panic now, we’re done for. Nobody saw it . . . nobody knows the results. We’re still okay . . . we just have to figure out . . . what we’re gonna do next... we just have [Louise now looks more intently on the map while the blue smoke from the cigarettes whirls in the air] to figure out what we’re gonna do.” Thelma, disheveled and in tears, has no inkling about where they are, what they are doing, or which moral or literal road they might follow.

The roadmap does not offer an exit from their dilemma. Nor do three other maps, of a very different tradition, that appear in a motel room where the two women seek repose enough to find their bearings. A sequence crucial to the cartography of much of the entire film takes place in the room of a motel, adjacent to an interstate highway, in which are found three baroque wall maps. The montage and composition of the shots make little distinction between the road and the motel. A straight cut moves from a close-up of Louise facing the windshield as she drives (“We’re gonna need more money”) to another of Thelma, in a negligee, in front of checkered curtains (“Whaddayagonna do? Why’yall unpackin’? I thought ya said wez just gonna take a nap”) by a window. The film cuts to Louise in medium close-up, wrapped in a towel, standing in front of a mirror in a black frame and to the left of a beige lampshade. She comes forward, for an instant displaying in the mirror the reflection of her backside (“I’m tryin’ to figure out what to do”).

As she advances, a straight cut gives way to an establishing shot of the space of the motel room. The lampshade is on the left, adjacent to a television set whose screen is at an oblique angle, standing in front of the bulbous base of the lamp, its glass checkered with crisscrossed lines. On the wall behind both the shade and a pendant cylindrical lamp with a net-like design hangs a large planisphere of the New and Old Worlds. Each roundel holds a large cartouche. At the border of a glass door-window, open and to the left, stands a frame of eight vignettes behind its reflective surface. Louise stands in medium close-up, facing right, while a reflection of Thelma’s body and face in profile, seemingly attached to Louise’s back, is all that is visible of her until she moves right to grab a piece of dark clothing from the top of a bed. Then Thelma is seen, her body reflected on the pane of the door in front of the right border of the map and almost molded to the lines of Louise’s back.

She stands behind a small round table and in front of the outdoors behind the open threshold of the window. In view is a roadside landscape, bathed in bright hazy light, foregrounded by a frugal iron barrier at the cusp of a mountainous landscape of desert cut by a bridge and an interstate highway. The window-door on the right is opened at the same angle as the one on the left, its glass reflecting what seems to be the shrubbery of a landscape on the outside. The door stands to the left of a square frame that reflects light and has the shimmer of Plexiglas. Louise pirouettes, and Thelma moves right, emphasizing how each body, like the binocular spheres of the map on the left, seems to be the Siamese twin of the other. Louise, dressed in a white skirt and a shoulderless blouse (of a “Southern belle”) is reflected on the map to the left and in the window to the right.

Louise moves to sit down on the bed, her body seen through the diaphanous texture of her blouse as Thelma turns left and fidgets with her clothing. The camera pans slightly to the right as Thelma lies down. Her body supine, her head rests on a pillow and is framed by the dark line of the bedstead. Two pictures are on the wall behind her, their images reflecting ambient light and fluttering leaves or branches of trees, outside of the room, that shimmer on their surfaces. As Louise moves toward Thelma who lies on the bed as might a funerary sculpture of a dead queen on her tomb, a fifty-three-foot semitrailer rolls past in the background from left to right. As in the two-shot in the diner, the women take stock of their dilemma in a plan-séquence, As she lies down, Thelma jibes, “When y’all figure it out, just wake me up,” and Louise retorts, “What the hell’s wrong with you?” Thelma: “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Louise is now isolated in close-up against the beige-white wall. She looks down (presumably, at Thelma, in an expression of perplexity and fear). “Like what? How’m I supposed to act,” cries Thelma. The camera moves upward, holding on Thelma as she now sits upright and is haloed by the spherical map. To her right, the lens now reveals, is the edge of another baroque map that is partially occluded by the glass door. Thelma moves her head to the left and right, holding her legs in her arms, and exclaims, “Excuse me for not knowin’ how to act when you blow someone away.”

As she speaks the map becomes discernible. It is a framed copy of a map of the New World by Michael Mercator (circa 1620), in which North and South America occupy a large central sphere. Visible in the spandrels on the right side of the frame are inserts in circular frames of the Island of Cuba (above) and the title and attribution.⁷ The arcs that curve upward and downward of the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn on both sides of a median axis drawn by the Equator, along with the floral design in the left and right borders (of a texture that rhymes with the curls of Thelma’s slightly unkempt hair), emphasize the distortion of a curved or even bulbous surface of the globe on a flat plane.⁸ The map includes the extensive lands that the women will later cross. The American Southwest extends far and wide across the upper left of the map, above Thelma’s head, and thus seems to reflect in its composition a vast presence of unknown and unmarked spaces that go westward.

The sequence includes five shots and countershots in which Louise convinces Thelma to go outside to the pool (and it happens to be one of two aquamarine sites in the film, the other also an adjunct to a second roadside motel). A sixth shot, now of the landscape seen from the right, captures the desert and highway (another large semi with “Zip” printed on its trailer speeds along the road) by the sign of the “Motor Inn” on two pylons. The camera pans down by the iron balustrade and, in the lower distance, a parasol and an ice machine by the pool. We hear, voice-off, Louise, who is telephoning, “Jimmy, Hello, this is Louise, ya know, I’ve been tryin’ to call you,” as the “Zip” goes by.⁹ Louise enters into the frame from the point of view of the camera. She holds a telephone as we hear Jimmy answer (voice-off), “Louise, hey baby, where the hell are you at? Yallright?” and Louise responds (voice-off, her head above the upper edge of the frame as Thelma’s head is visible by the poolside below), “Yeah, long time no see.”

As she turns about, the camera cuts to an establishing shot of the space about the pool. Another semi drives by right in the background (“Freymiller” is printed on the trailer) while Thelma walks left, around the edge of the pool, pulling her valise, below the “Motor Inn” sign and the red, white, and blue chevrons of a marquee in the sky above). The conversation continues, off, Louise telling Jimmy that she is in “deep shit. Deep Shit, Arkansas.” The camera cuts to Jimmy, in a weightlifter’s t-shirt, speaking into the phone in the clutter of a room illuminated with two spotlights to the left. The next three shots are queued to the words, uttered in lip-synch, of each interlocutor before the camera suddenly frames Louise, in a medium close-up, between the mirror and lamp.

Louise has been speaking with her friend from the telephone. She sits between a large lamp and a television set on which is poised the bottle of Miller Lite (the label is in full view). Her back is against the wall (as the camera is now to the left of the window, giving onto a swimming pool below and an interstate highway in the middle ground in front of a mountainous horizon). Louise seems to be split in two: the shadow of her head and shoulders cuts across the lower corner of a Dutch mirror identified by its ample ebony frame. The dark silhouette of her head partially a reflection in the mirror, and partially a shadow on the frame and the wall), shoulders, and right arm behind her seems to be a Siamese twin of her human form. But at the same time the camera catches the left-hand border of a great wall map. A cut to Jimmy shows him in front of a punching bag, a sort of pear-like globe, that is the counterpart to the pendant lamp that, as the camera laterally reframes the setting, is set on an axis that is to the left of the area where the two spheres of the wall map intersect and seem, in their own way, to be two hemispheres attached to each other as might be Louise and her shadow. The camera holds with greater emphasis on this map than it had in the instance of Mercator’s “America sive India nova.” We now clearly see Claes Jansz Visscher’s “World in Two Hemispheres” (1617), a unique world map of the baroque age.¹⁰ Its lower orb of the lamp that hangs in front of the planisphere occludes the view of South America. The pendant is, literally, a cul-de-lampe that doubles the central spandrel between the two spheres of Visscher’s map.

Two shots later the camera pulls back to re-establish the composition. Visscher’s double sphere is in the background, framed by vignettes of scenes of the seasons of everyday life in early modern Europe. The pendant lamp stands in contrast to the beer bottle, on the television set, whose neck and tip are near Louise’s mouth. A plan-séquence, the shot ends when (to the sound of country music in the background), Louise, whimpering, murmurs into the receiver, “Do you love me?” She grabs the beer bottle when she hears Jimmy hesitate in his response to her question. She wants to know if he loves her enough to forward cash; he seeks to locate her. Louise indicates that the money can be forwarded to Oklahoma City, the mere mention of the place-name telling us that it has absolutely no correlate on the wall map. The sequence ends when the camera cuts to a medium shot, exterior, of recumbent Thelma on a deck chair by the pool in the foreground while Louise parks the Thunderbird in the background.

“Long time no see”: when Louise’s words are uttered neither of the women is in full view. The speech underscores the crushing irony of the woman trying blindly to gather her bearings in an unlikely map room. Visscher’s map, like Louise and her Siamese shadow, has a binocular effect that draws attention to the stakes of looking all over the depth and surface of both geographical and visual fields. It stands in elegant contrast to Mercator’s single sphere, or possibly monocular map, of the New World and its undiscovered regions. A tension is established between flat and curvilinear space on the one hand, while on the other the camera invents a paradoxically spaceless space in the room where the map bears promise of new and unknown worlds in an age anterior to the present.

An unconscious attraction to the map is shown where the tip of the bottle, the virtual nipple of the lamp, and the vaginal shape of the central spandrels (between the two spheres) are brought forward (the connection is made clearer after a close-up, in the first shot of the next sequence, taken between Thelma’s legs before she turns to cover the view by pulling her suitcase of front of her crotch). The intersecting circles depicting the new and old worlds have visual analogues in the myriad shots of characters wearing sunglasses, of hubcaps, of droplets of water on the windshield, of breasts pushing against the women’s blouses, and especially of medium takes of buttocks.¹¹ An itinerary comes to Louise’s mind in the next sequence. Behind the steering wheel, she looks ahead, plotting their trip to the “Vagabond Motel” in Oklahoma City, where they “gotta haul ass.” Two sequences later, as they await the passage of a freight train crossing their path, Louise tells Thelma to look at her roadmap in order to find all the “secondary roads that take us from Oklahoma City to Mexico. I think we should stay off the Interstate.”

The maps are part of a visual shimmer and play of reflecting surfaces that cause the women’s dilemma of being on the run to extend to that of being in the world. The many shots where Thelma and Louise look in mirrors—in ladies’ rooms and in the Thunderbird—have counterparts in the reflections of themselves on the glass surfaces of telephone booths, on fenders or automotive chrome. Their specularity implies that, as in Visscher’s map, an allegory prevails. When seen in what seems to be far more real than traditional process shots of people driving cars (as seen in High Sierra and Casablanca) the protagonists draw attention to the splashes of light on the bent windshield of the Thunderbird. They look forward and through the glass as the landscape recedes. Because the windshield wipers have cleaned the dust in their semicircular path, Thelma and Louise are framed in another planisphere such that their faces resemble the “continents” of the new and old world visible on Visscher’s projection. Rings of dust cast a blur on the area of the windshield untouched by the wipers that melds into the clouds on the horizon in the background. The ocular traits of the baroque world map find an analogue on the curved surface of the safety glass.

A double effect of forward movement (“there’s no goin’ back”) and regression is given when the rearview mirror occupies the center of the frame. The movement reflected on its glass runs opposite—and hence negates—that of the car that speeds ahead. The effect is “classical” insofar as it had been the trademark of a confined space in earlier road movies. In Scott’s film the effect becomes “baroque” through its obsessive reference to these films on the one hand, while on the other oblique and angled views supplement their classical style of representation.¹² In the midst of the melee the ladies turn left in a plume of dust and aim the car toward a rocky butte that seems both to be a landscape and a locus coming out of the distant past of the film. The convertible turns, the camera pans, and dust rises: behind the powdery mist extends the horizon that had been the background to the front credits, seen earlier as a topographical view, that now recurs. In an extreme long shot a minuscule car, leaving a trail of dust in its path, drives across the ledge of a great bluff.

As the car moves right the camera reframes itself laterally, then dips to display a helicopter that flies below and to the left, in pursuit. The camera zooms to bring the metallic bird into close-up, and then tilts up into the blinding light of the sky before the film cuts straight to a long shot picturing the cavernous reaches of the Grand Canyon. The helicopter now descends from above and over the camera. Following the extreme long shots in which the women drive across a landscape of an expanse beyond their ken, they screech to a halt at the edge of a cliff. A two-shot records them staring through the arcs of the windshield cleaned by the wipers. Thelma utters, not in obvious lip-synch (the women’s voices seem to be elsewhere than where their bodies are), “What in the hell is this?” The film cuts to an extreme long shot of the blue sky over vast patches of cumulous clouds that hang over a lower edge, near the bottom of the frame, of two great buttes. The image appears to respond to the question when it slowly pans to the right, as the voice of Louise, virtually emanating from the space on the screen that her speech identifies, utters, “Uh huh, I dunno . . . uh, I think it’s the goddamned Grand Canyon?” Then, voice-off, in the same panoramic that now displays the sky above two rocky towers, Thelma’s voice responds, “Isn’t it beautiful?”

The women are already disembodied, their speech momentarily located in the sky and the landscape they are naming.¹³ When the film immediately cuts back to the two-shot of the women staring forward and toward the spectators, they have just seen themselves in a mystical incarnation in the landscape prior to the final of the film moment when they drive over the cliff. Before they make their leap, Hal, the “good cop,” seen in medium depth in front of a rock formation that seems to have the mute faces of a classical chorus sculpted in the red-ochre stone, argues with his cohorts in order not to let the women be murdered: nonetheless, the posse cocks their rifles and aims them at their prey. Where the good cop, enjoining the women to return, runs after the car that speeds toward the precipice of the Grand Canyon, the Orphic theme of the film comes forward. In High Sierra and in other features that varied on the same ending,¹⁴ the hero seals his fate when he turns back. Duped and destined to die as he does, the Orphic hero reenacts a moment of mythic pathos. So too do Thelma and Louise, but in a way that would open the cinema to dialogue about feminine agency and its own “tender geography.” In Scott’s film the women do not turn back. “Let’s keep goin’,” cries Thelma.

A suicide of affirmation: many of the debates about the feminism of the feature have centered on this sequence. Did the women participate in a mystical voyage where they remain suspended, in a freeze-frame, their car just past the zenith of an arc, beginning to plummet into the Colorado River thousands of feet below? The question can be addressed through reference, first, to the “media event” that had been staged to document the Orphic moment in High Sierra and, second, to the toponymic character of Scott’s road movie. The film ends as the tale of a strange occurrence by a cliff of the Grand Canyon. Thelma and Louise masks the presence of the industry producing its effects of pathos and terror where the earlier feature did not. But in a less direct but more enduring way the finale belongs to a literary and cartographic tradition that one critic calls “the toponymic tale,” and another the “hagiographical variant” (Lestringant 1993, 109–27; Certeau 1975, 274–88). Thelma and Louise drive off into a myth, a new version of Orpheus, which they write by taking a high road to oblivion. In doing so they inflect the Grand Canyon, a glorious commonplace on roadmaps and touristic guides, with a tale that virtually baptizes the area in the name of the canyon of Thelma and Louise.

Thelma and Louise becomes a feminist hagiography based on a mythic voyage. It plots a variant of the Carte du Tendre in which two women are led from sites of “New Friendship” and “Tender-on-Inclination” across the “Dangerous Seas” of desert sands to self-affirmation in view of destiny. The end-credits recuperate the myth by replaying key moments of the story beneath the names of the players that scroll upward: the two women taking a picture of themselves, freezing themselves in a frame identical to that in which they have just been frozen; the sequence in the motel where Thelma reveals to Louise her bliss at having experienced eros as it ought to be; the moment when they map their getaway to Mexico; the ladies waving at the cropduster that buzzes by them as they drive across the green prairies; Louise awaiting Thelma at the curbside; the couple smiling from the cockpit of the Thunderbird. In the indirect discourse of the film all these memory-flashes, coupled with the Orphic gaze into the rear-view mirror—that had marked High Sierra, Gun Crazy, Les Amants, and especially Jean Cocteau’s Orphée—would be equivalent to the fabled instants of the totality of a life that we are supposed to see before our eyes at the point of our death.

Much of what happens at the end of the film is anticipated in the motel in which the two women seek their bearings. The long take of Louise sitting beside a Dutch mirror to the left of Visscher’s world map is clearly a variant on any of Vermeer’s paintings in which maps are set adjacent to women who seem to reflect on light, life, history, and time. The film begins to philosophize at the point where allusion is made to the Dutch artist. The tableau vivant in the unlikely setting of a non-place, or an “any place whatsoever,” affords further reflection on art, cartography, and cinema. To find Visscher and Vermeer in a roadside motel would be both likely and uncanny: likely, because early modern world maps are the stuff and substance of calendars and reproductions offering quaintly attractive images of the world for a general public. A traveler’s motel would be tastefully decorated with pictures depicting the discoveries of new lands in the western world. It is uncanny because of the size of each reproduction, especially that of Visscher, which makes obvious the unsolicited connection both with Vermeer and the stakes of finding strange beauty in areas that would seem to bear little visual attraction.¹⁵

An extended analogy is made between a mapping impulse and landscape as they are shown in deep-focus cinema. In a pathbreaking study of cartography in Vermeer’s paintings Svetlana Alpers (1987, 72) argues that the Dutch artist belongs to a properly northern tradition in which landscapes and maps are of the same texture. Both the canvas and the copperplate were surfaces on which the world was engraved. The panoramic view of the world resembled a “mapped landscape view” while the cityscape pertained to a topographical city view. Both the cartographer and the painter sought to describe, that is, to draw the world, to capture “on a surface a great range of knowledge and information,” and to create works compiling material seen not from a single point of view (as in Italian art), but in such a way that both map and canvas were surfaces” on which was laid out “an assemblage of the world.” Alpers insists that mapped landscapes were created by artists who traveled “on the road, looking, artists who were not staying at home listening to travelers’ accounts” (59, 81). Vermeer used Visscher the elder’s work in the construction of masterpieces that include “The Soldier and the Young Girl Smiling” (1657–58), “Woman at the Window” (1662), “Woman in Blue Reading a Letter” (1662–64), and above all, “The Art of Painting” (or “Ars pictoria,” 1667).¹⁶ In the background of that picture ten city-views comprise the decorative compartments that border a map of Belgium. Its resemblance to Visscher is so striking that the viewer of the film sees both the allusion to the Dutch artist’s complex reflection on mapping and painting and the presence of strips of celluloid, of photograms that bear strong likeness to the city-views in the paintings to which allusion is made.

The shot that portrays Louise next to Visscher’s map begs us to look at the relation of cartography and cinema as a supplement to that which Vermeer extends from graphic to painted media. For the draftsman and the artist, maps and pictures “describe” the world in literally graphic ways. The window that looks onto the highway over the blue mirror of a swimming pool outside the room is not seen in the shot, but it is present in reflection on the mirror and in the light that enters the frame from the right. “Light” is seen on one side and is named and written on the other, in “Lite” printed on the label of the beer bottle adjacent to Louise, which in her words with Jimmy she will clasp in her left hand and bring to her mouth to drink as she looks directly outward at the sunlit space outside. As the shot pulls back, the pendant lamp is seen lit only by a bar of light reflected on the right side of its gridded cylinder and the brass of the pendant boss on its bottom. As a reflector and an erotic shape it occludes and draws attention to Visscher’s wall map, showing that the decorative panel on the right side is extended in reflection on the glass door opened in front of it, its jamb on exactly the same axis as the right-hand border of the map. The lamp, itself gridded as a map, also stands in counterpoint to the neck of the beer bottle that Louise brings to her lips. The object is clearly, too, an uncanny avatar of the unlit chandelier in “Ars pictoria,” which also reflects light that emanates from a source hidden by the folded drapery in the foreground.¹⁷

Both the lamp and the beer bottle draw attention to the difference between the flat surface of the wall map and the curvature of the television screen. Her legs crossed, Louise pushes her right knee in front of the left side of the television set in order, it seems, to underscore a visual parallel between the black frame of the Dutch mirror and the black box and oblong surround of the television console. The attractive contour of her bare knee and calf, their outline illuminated on the right side, calls attention to an anamorphic image on the screen. On the curve of the screen there seems to be the reflection of the window off-frame, but it is a bent window that also reflects the knee (in the same way that the mirror above completes the shadow of Louise’s head, and the vertical span of the beer bottle is extended in the penumbral shadow it casts on the wall).¹⁸ Indiscernible, the anamorphic image of the television screen comes not from inside the set but from the window beyond (or even emanates from both areas at once). The detail calls attention to our own desire either to identify what would be emitted or, if the set is off, to glimpse the moving reflection of a technician or a cameraman who would break the spell of the illusion.¹⁹

The women in Vermeer—whether Clio, the woman in blue who reads a letter, the woman at the window who holds a pitcher, the lady hooded in white cloth who hears gallant words from a man dressed in a red coat—seem to live in full cognizance of the greater space and light infusing them with sensuous grace. They turn the places where they are into matrix-like space whose defining surfaces promise depiction of greater worlds to come. Their rooms are pregnant with potential of growth and inner travel. By contrast, in the film the motel room becomes an intimacy in which the women become victims of both agoraphobia and claustrophobia. Open space of the road in front of the window is the object of Louise’s gaze in a primal moment (she suckles the nipple of the beer bottle) as she hears Jimmy affirm that she is in Oklahoma. A new Orpheus, she cannot look back.

In Thelma and Louise the question concerning the displacement of women into roles usually granted to men is inflected by the cartographic image and its relation with Vermeer. In a lengthy take that immediately follows Louise’s last words in front of Visscher’s world map, we see a medium close-up of Thelma in a blue bikini. Supine, on an aluminum deck chair, as she had been on the bed inside the motel room, she holds a Walkman in her hands while, eyes closed, she seems suspended in a trance. She is plugged into a pair of yellow earphones and might or might not be listening to the music, off, that throughout the sequence plays in the background. The words, “I can feel it when I hear that lonesome highway” accompany the outdoor shot. They belong to an indirect discourse. When they become resonant they lead us to believe that Louise is led to press her head painfully with her right arm, the music apparently whetting a painful desire to be where she is not or simply being the cause of a migraine headache.

From the left the Thunderbird enters, its horn honking, Louise yelling, “Thelllma!” Louise jumps out of the car, runs forward in the deep space, and touches her partner. Startling each other, in vaudeville antics they jump while the music drones on, “So many miles to go before I die,” in view of semi-trailers rolling on the interstate on a line parallel to the cyclone fence between the poolside and the car. Louise runs back to the car, and Thelma jumps forward to get something—it will be her suitcase—in the foreground. The vocals continue, “We can never know about tomorrow,” just as she brings her belly and thighs forward enough to establish a sightline that run through her legs and below her crotch before she pulls the valise into view. When she raises the suitcase the sightline is blocked, occluding any viewer’s desire to see the road across the divide of Thelma’s thighs. The shot closes in on the gateway in following Thelma lugging the bag, tossing it into the back seat of the car, and jumping in while the music continues, “Still we have to choose which way to go.” As the line ends Thelma’s buttocks become the point where her movement is queued below a truck that passes by above her head. She has just clambered over the door and plopped into the seat as the car takes off and turns right (“You and I are standing at the crossroads . . .”).

Do Visscher’s map and the setting to which it drew attention plot two forms of spatial desire? Could one be said to be projective and the other introjective? Inside the motel room Louise looks with fear at a space that will not fulfill her or ever be bathed in pregnant luminosity. Outside, by the pool, the spectator’s point of view is one that gazes on an attractive body whose position compares with the nudes of Titian, Velasquez, and Tintoretto. Thus the response to the questions posed above is affirmative, in part because the cartography of the sequence begs the viewer to wonder who looks and who speaks. We see in the shot binocular forms—Thelma’s bilateral symmetry and the hubcaps of the Thunderbird—that resemble the composition of the world map. The area inside the motel is projected outward, but it remains unconscious, hence of a vaguely projective identification: what to look at, how to act, and where to go become questions that sum up the women’s plight. Point of view has become so unmoored and visual desire so mixed that we wonder if they are men playing women or women playing men.²⁰ The confusion may be part and parcel of the road movie and its geographies.

Gender in Thelma and Louise seems to be as unsettling as a baroque map in a roadside motel. The film tells much about what it means to get lost on the American road. The heroines never accede to an interstate highway where they would not be lost, nor do they take advantage of “welcome centers” at rest stops that would afford them free maps of the states (Texas excepted) in which they drive. The fact that they don’t know where they are going affords us, in turn, thanks to the story of their demise, to act out fantasies of getting lost in a world where cinema figures in a growing network of roads that foster illusions of boundlessness. In a brief, telling, and strange way Visscher and Mercator provide maps for that illusion.