Re-Thinking the Ending of ‘Thelma and Louise’

Welcome to The Queue — your daily distraction of curated video content sourced from across the web. Today, we’re watching a video essay that explores the controversial ending of “Thelma and Louise.”

Every now and then, you come across repeated visual ideas in cinema; echoes of the same feeling, image, and intent that feel related in some way.

There have been a number of triumphant airborne escapes across movie history. Elliott’s triumphant bicycle escape in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial springs to mind; so iconic that it became the logo for Amblin Entertainment. Or Bastian chasing down bullies aboard Falkor at the end of The NeverEnding Story.

The freedom flight that concludes Thelma & Louise is equally triumphant, but with a notable twist. Namely (and ironically), that its titular dynamic duo’s flight is also a shocking choice to embrace death rather than captivity. The ending, all these years later, still smacks of a certain degree of tragic camp. And we’ve all seen the scene reproduced and parodied to the point where both its downbeat power and its exhilarating edge have been lost in the sauce, so to speak.

Enter: Gestalt psychology, the idea that placing things beside one another creates a whole bigger than the sum of its parts. Below you’ll find a video essay that sets the ending of Ridley Scott’s 1991 classic alongside other iconic scenes of characters escaping into the sky. Enjoy, and don’t forget your parachutes.

Watch “Improbable Dialogisms or the Art of Flying”

Who made this?

The above video essay on the complicated ending of Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise is by Barbara Zecchi. Raised in Italy, Zecchi is a Professor and Director of the Film Studies Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a film scholar, film critic, and video essayist. You can check out her work on Vimeo here.

More videos like this

• For another taste of Zecchi’s work, here’s her video essay that queers the already outrageously camp classic Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
• Zecchi has also created content for Ariel Avissar’s “TV Dictionary” series. Here’s her look at the 2018–2020 coming-of-age show Baby.
• The ending of Thelma and Louise famously includes a car. Here’s the always-great Thomas Flight on why a car is just a car.
• For Entertainment Weekly, Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis sat down to reminisce about the film.
• And finally, here’s Davis on the Graham Norton Show discussing why Brad Pitt was cast in Thelma and Louise.

Related Topics: Ridley Scott, The Queue

Meg Shields is the humble farm boy of your dreams and a senior contributor at Film School Rejects. She currently runs three columns at FSR: The Queue, How’d They Do That?, and Horrorscope. She is also a curator for One Perfect Shot and a freelance writer for hire. Meg can be found screaming about John Boorman’s ‘Excalibur’ on Twitter here: @TheWorstNun. (She/Her).