In this blog, I will be applying Michel Foucault's influential essay, Discipline and Punish, to the 1991 movie, Thelma & Louise. D&P works well in this example because T&L is about two women who are driven to subvert and flee the patriarchal/"democratic" authority that they have been subject to. Thelma and Louise had been living controlled, self-disciplined lives, without the need of being governed directly , much like the lives that Foucault illustrates with Bentham's Panopticon. In the opening, Thelma is confined to the home, a supportive wife to her philandering husband, and Louise is a productive worker at a midwest restaurant. They fit neatly into the societal and gender roles that have been pre-determined for them. Any propietor of "the gaze" could not find fault with either of them. The relevance of this is later emphasized by the fact that Louise had been raped years ago and that the perpetrators had never been brought to justice. Louise's intense discipline comes into play in the fact that she moves forward with her life in a highly regimented way, a prisoner of her earlier trauma.
When Louise "snaps" and kills a man that she stops from raping Thelma, the two women find themselves rejecting their former, disciplined roles and identifying with new roles that society will punish them for. Thelma and Louise are on the run from police who are searching them out in connection with the murder. Ironically, these law enforcement officials who are meant "to protect and serve" actually enforce an overarching ideology that has oppressed women. Justice was never served for Louise and it is unclear if she ever reported her own rape, since her socially instilled behavior of self-policing convinces her that she may have been responsible for it, in some way.
Thelma and Louise, as outlaws, leave the arena of "the gaze" and are sought by the federal police. They realize that prison and possible execution are one possibile future for them and that their prior oppressed lives are the other possibility. Fleeing the country proves to be a dream that is never realized. Ultimately, the film shows that these two women must fit into their predetermined, disciplined roles, because if they transgress those roles in any way, punishment will be meted out. Which begs the question, is a society that would punish Thelma and Louise, who have suffered under the patriarchal, panoptic gaze, a society that can be considered truly just and democratic?
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