Thelma & Louise - (Reel West) by Susan Kollin (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Thelma & Louise, the 1991 film directed by Ridley Scott and starring Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis, has been described as a road movie, a buddy movie, a feminist parable, and only incidentally as a Western. An Oscar winner for first-time screenwriter Callie Khouri, Thelma & Louise catalyzed a national conversation about women, violence, and self-determination in a Hollywood still shrugging off the West of John Wayne and in an America that still viewed women as accessories to the national mythology.

In this latest volume in the Reel West series, Susan Kollin recreates this watershed moment for women's movies in general and women's Westerns in particular.

Review Quotes

"Susan Kollin's use of the Western genre to reexamine Thelma & Louise is timely, relevant, and very welcome. Kollin has crafted a very thoughtful analysis that resists easy answers and allows the film's full complexity to shine through, leading to even deeper conversations and new questions."--Cynthia J. Miller, author of The Encylopedia of B Westerns

"Kollin's crucial innovation (in Thelma & Louise) is to move us beyond considerations of how the genre alludes to conventions of Western fiction to a much more sophisticated analysis in which the Western emerges as the key to understanding not only the film itself, but why it so resonated, and continues to resonate, with audiences."--Andrew Patrick Nelson, author of Still in the Saddle: The Hollywood Western, 1969-1980