Thelma rushes out into the middle of the road to flag them down. Suddenly, the engine loses power and the car slows to a halt.Īpproaching from up ahead, the travellers spy the headlights of another vehicle. Through the windscreen, Thelma and Louise gape at the dense masses of Black Eyed Susans lining the edge of the highway, their yellow petals fluorescing against the ultraviolet light. Louise is driving and can feel the resistance come back into the steering column. The sky has turned a rich amethyst, casting a violet glow over everything. CAR (THE ARID LOWLANDS OF THE UNDERWORLD) - DAYįrom the white nothing that enveloped them, a new landscape bleeds into view. What gets lost in such projects is the nuance, fluidity and general unruliness that constitutes a queer identity. For this reason (and many more) I would like to argue for remaining in the in-between, to be apparitional, free to drift between all time and space.Ģ. In the contemporary struggle for visibility, concrete definitions and full incorporation into mainstream society - what Lisa Duggan and Michael Warner call “homonormativity” - there has evolved a demand for overt representation. Speaking to the histories of lesbian and queer women’s representation in mainstream visual culture, Terry Castle proposes that the lesbian is, and always was, apparitional. This is the precise moment where Thelma and Louise leave their flesh bodies for the spectral avatars they will inhabit in the underworld. In the freeze frame both realities exist, placing our protagonists in an eternally liminal space between living and dead: the (un)dead. They are going to die, and they are already dead.

In the collective consciousness, they remain forever hanging in the air and forever falling. The image freezes and the screen fades to white before we see the car crash into the canyon below.

With the long arm of the law at their backs, they choose to keep going.Īccelerating off the cliff, they take flight. This is the final sequence of the film, Thelma & Louise a film about two small-town working-class women turned outlaws, set against the backdrop of the American Mid-West.

Vampires and Violets by Andrea Weiss