Is This What Feminism Is All About?

By MARGARET CARLSON

So few movies place women at their center that when one does it is held up to the light and turned every which way for clues about the state of the gender. This may be more freight than Thelma & Louise can carry. But not since | Fatal Attraction has a movie provoked such table-pounding discussions between men and women. Along partisan lines, men attack the movie as a male-bashing feminist screed, in which they are portrayed as leering, overbearing, violent swine who deserve what they get, from a bullet in the heart to being stuffed in a trunk. Women cheer the movie because it finally turns the tables on Hollywood, which has been too busy making movies about bimbos, prostitutes, vipers and bitches and glamourizing the misogynists who kill them to make a movie like Thelma & Louise.

Yet for all the pleasure the film gives women moviegoers who want to see the worst of the opposite sex get what's coming to them, it can hardly be called a woman's movie or one with a feminist sensibility. As a bulletin from the front in the battle of the sexes, Thelma & Louise sends the message that little ground has been won. For these two women, feminism never happened. Thelma and Louise are so trapped that the only way for them to get away for more than two days is to go on the lam. They become free but only wildly, self-destructively so -- free to drive off the ends of the earth.

They are also free to behave like -- well, men. For all the talk that Thelma & Louise is the first major female buddy movie, it is more like a male buddy movie with two women plunked down in the starring roles. The heroines are irresistibly likable: the gentle, bewildered Thelma, married to a smug, low- rent, philandering salesman who wears more gold jewelry than she does, and for whom, when she takes off, she leaves dinner on a child's partitioned plate in the microwave; and Louise, the world-weary, wised-up waitress who has waited too long for her lounge-singer boyfriend to marry her. But rather than finding their way with their female natures intact or even being able to reach out to the one decent man who could help them, they become like any other shoot-first-and-talk-later action heroes.

Thelma and Louise act out a male fantasy of life on the road, avoiding intimacy with loud music, Wild Turkey, fast driving -- and a gun in the pants. The movie has almost as many chase scenes per reel as Smokey and the Bandit. The characters don't confide in each other as real-life women would. When Thelma asks what happened in Louise's secret past in Texas that makes her murderous, Louise refuses to talk and warns her not to ask about it. She turns driving from Oklahoma to Mexico without going through the Lone Star State into one of the movie's running jokes.

The pair can't seem to just have fun with each other on this woman's weekend in which they are finally free of the men who hem them in. Thelma is still the teenager at the slumber party who gets bored and has to call a few boys to come over. Less than an hour out of town, she talks Louise into stopping at a raunchy bar, where she dances with a creep who then tries to rape her in the parking lot. The women are sympathetic enough characters by this time so that we leap over the hurdle many adventure movies present -- Why didn't they call the police? -- and rationalize what might be a cold-blooded murder as an act of self-defense. That way we can climb into that green Thunderbird, put down the roof and go along for the joyride.

But it becomes harder and harder to root for the heroines, who make the wrong choice at every turn and act more like Clint Eastwood than Katharine Hepburn. The day after her near rape, Thelma is begging Louise to pick up a hitchhiker. It requires a breathtaking midair somersault of faith to believe Thelma would be eager to take up with another stranger so soon and would let him into her motel room and go limp with desire after he admits he robs convenience stores for a living.

The turning point of Thelma's character rests on one of the most enduring and infuriating male myths in the culture: the only thing an unhappy woman needs is good sex to make everything all right. After a night of knock-over- the-nightstand sex with the hitchhiker, Thelma comes down to the coffee shop suffused with satisfaction and tells Louise, "I finally understand what all the fuss is about." Thelma is transformed, more confident and buoyant than she has ever been, reducing her angst to the simplistic notion that she was stuck with a husband who was insufficiently accomplished in the bedroom.

Despite such flaws, which leave you wondering if screenwriter Callie Khouri isn't just fronting for Hugh Hefner, Thelma & Louise is a movie with legs. Long after the movie is done entertaining, it stirs up questions about why men and women remain mysteries to each other. It has its small triumphs. Susan Sarandon makes Hollywood a little safer for older actresses; she fearlessly plays next to someone 10 years younger. And at least Thelma and Louise stop short of emulating Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, who use their remaining ammunition to go out in a blaze of testosteronic glory. The movie may not have the impact of Fatal Attraction, but next time a woman passes an 18-wheeler and points her finger like a pistol at the tires, the driver might just put his tongue back in his mouth where it belongs.