two stories about women and power
thelma and louise should feel over the top. all of its male characters are unabashedly caricaturish and yet the movie never feels so cartoonish that it undermines its own points. that’s down to a couple things. the first is the certainty that thelma and louise (and the real-world women they represent) are saying ‘fuck you’ to something real and unjust. they are the manifestation of a valid anger and they are ennobled by that the way any good underdog is. the second is the sense of fun. it’s a story of two people getting magic powers. thelma and louise find an enchanted amulet (…murder), and suddenly find that they have agency. they are possessed with experimental glee: ‘look what you can DO with agency.’ the fact that the movie often feels about as fantastic as an enchanted amulet is what gives it bite. ‘you only have the fantasy. be angry about it.’
although things are constantly going wrong for its protagonists, thelma and louise is almost the opposite of a heroine’s journey story, because their failures don’t feel like dignity tests. they feel like the failures that happen when you’re trying something new. it’s more of a celebration of human dignity in the sense of, again, agency, rather than a statement on feminine dignity in the sense of virtue.
why is girls popular with men? especially men that date the kind of women that girls is about. and let’s be explicit: we’re talking about people in upper, creative, well-educated, mostly white classes here. the girls thesis is that women of this class have a lot of power, but squander it. they have nothing much to struggle against except themselves. they already have the magic powers.
(not that the men don’t also squander power, but that’s a side truth.)
this thesis is uncomfortable because in many ways it’s very true, but it’s also so totally delicious from the male sexual politics standpoint that you don’t really want it to be. when a woman acting righteous is revealed to have been behaving in a weak or morally lacking way, it always seems to end up feeling like a weirdly sexual humiliation of her. (one could argue that similar things happening to men is also full of female sexual politics, but in that case there’s less of a sexual gratification component and more of a sexual status component. as in, women do not get off but they do affirm whom they are sexually better than.). i think girls is satisfying for certain men to watch because it confirms the suspicion that women have exactly as much power as they thought, and they do not need to take it easy on them.
the thesis is also uncomfortable because the writing gives little indication that taking one’s power seriously would look like being a nice person. it would look like being selfish, but guileless and direct about it. isn’t that what adam is?
to people outside the girls class, i’m guessing the show is somewhat distasteful, because who wants to watch two groups of powerful people squabble about who has the sexual upper hand? i don’t think it’s a useful show to people that care about people who lack power. it is useful if you need to punish yourself into having power.
