Friendship Can Save Us - "Thelma & Louise" A Kind of Review

One of the aspects about Thelma and Louise, directed by Ridley Scott in 1991, that I would like to describe in this writing is the major role that plays friendship at the time of embracing our destiny, I mean how the coexistence with others can provide us tools to analyze life, death, or even further by getting out of ourselves showing us a path of liberation and freedom.

 A lot has been said about the feminism about this movie, but now I want to talk like a man, not a woman, about a universal thing: human relations, human interactions, and for that it doesn't matter if you are a man or a woman, because all people in the world are susceptible of being an object of the relationship called "friendship."

The initial shot in the movie is the scene with the credits. There we can see an open road with a hill at the background, a quiet landscape, the music (composed by Hans Zimmer) immediately transports us to a state of feeling of melancholia, it is a guitar riff the one in charge to set the mood about the (until this moment) unknown end of the movie. When I say "melancholia" I don’t refer to a bad thing but to the feeling of change, the sensation of leaving behind a past that we don't want to live anymore, and of course that liberation can produce some kind of sadness. We can interpretete that open road like life itself; it is our duty to go through it, sometimes we don´t know what the destination is but we walk as if we knew it.

Later, we as spectators, are confronted with the chaos: the chaos of a waitress and the chaos of a housewife, two subdued persons: one by her work, the other by her husband. Director Ridley Scott makes this confrontation as a way of demonstration how things are: in a moment, we are in peaceful mood, later not peaceful anymore. When I write this I hear about the feminicide in México; it is a painfull issue to confront, violence against women, only because they are women. It is absurd and I believe in the power of sensibilitation that Art can provide. We all are humans and can feel pain and the most we can do to avoid it, the best. In this aspect the movie has a point about the empowerment of women.

The movie is a road movie: which object do they choose to travel on that road?  a car, and  friendship. In life we have to choose friends to help us to walk into this sometimes hard road; once we got friends this road seems to be easier. But there is also the other side; when we don´t choose the right friends, then the road becomes a nasty passage. A friend can be a relative like a brother or a sister, they say that friends “are the family we can choose”, but when we choose a relative like a friend we are building a beautiful bond, a bond that can be stronger than a rock; it can be a shelter in the wildest storm.

We could choose isolation but... how far we can go in that way?  I remember now the poem "No Man Is an Island” written by John Donne:

"No man is an island entire of itself; every man

is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;

if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe

is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as

well as any manner of thy friends or of thine

own were; any man's death diminishes me,

because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom

the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

We are part of something greater, and it is up to us recognize that.  In friendship we can find the perspective, the view of what is behind in our own subjectivity. Even when we choose the wrong friends, they are the opportunity to rethink ourselves, our needs, and our cries.