Discover Your Own Story at the Movies: Thelma & Louise

Discover Your Own Story at the Movies: Thelma & Louise
What the heroine’s journey and flow can teach you about freedom, and what it costs

What Are You Settling For?

A column by Peter de Kuster

A weekend that never ends

Some films begin small. Thelma & Louise begins with a weekend away. Two friends in Arkansas, one a waitress and one a housewife, throw a few things in a car and head for a cabin to go fishing. By the end, they have crossed half the American Southwest, and the film has become one of the most argued-over stories in modern cinema.

Ridley Scott directed it in 1991 from the first screenplay by Callie Khouri, who was then working in music videos. She won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Susan Sarandon plays Louise Sawyer and Geena Davis plays Thelma Dickinson, and both were nominated for Best Actress. The film earned six nominations in all, including Best Director, and it launched a young actor named Brad Pitt in a small role as a charming hitchhiker. Adrian Biddle’s camera turns the desert into a third character, and Hans Zimmer wrote the score.

Here is the outline. Louise is careful and controlled, a woman who has arranged her life so that nothing can surprise her. Thelma is married to Darryl, a man who treats her like a child. She is so unused to deciding anything for herself that she leaves a note rather than ask. On the first night, they stop at a roadside bar called the Silver Bullet. Thelma, wanting for once to have fun, dances and drinks with a man named Harlan, who takes her outside and tries to rape her. Louise arrives with a gun and stops him. When he insults her, she shoots him.

From that moment they are running: toward Mexico, away from the law, and toward something neither of them can name. Along the way we meet Louise’s musician boyfriend Jimmy, a hitchhiker named J.D., a state trooper, a lewd truck driver, and Detective Hal Slocumb, played by Harvey Keitel, a policeman who understands them better than anyone and tries to reach them before it is too late.

Like the other films in this series, it is fiction, and it is a parable. When it came out, some critics called it a landmark and others called it dangerous. I will not settle that argument here. The women’s choices, including the violence, are not a model to copy. I use the film because it shows something rare: two people waking up, and what waking up costs.

This column follows the heroine’s journey, and this film may be its clearest case on screen. It holds two journeys that cross. Louise begins in control and slowly loses it. Thelma begins with none and slowly finds it. Somewhere in the middle of the film they pass each other on the road, and that crossing is where the deepest lesson sits. Here is what I want to show you: you cannot find flow in a life you did not choose, but choosing has a price, and the film insists that we count it.

Why we do this

Before we walk through the film, a word on method. Why analyze a movie through a mythic structure, and why ask you for stories? Why not just hand out tips for better focus?

Because tips do not stick, and stories do.

Advice about performance and happiness usually arrives as abstraction: set clear goals, get feedback, stay present. All true, and almost useless in the abstract. You nod, you close the tab, and on Monday nothing has changed. A story works differently. When you watch a woman leave a note because she cannot say a sentence out loud, something in you recognizes it. You do not learn a rule. You remember a moment from your own life that looked like this, and once you have remembered it, you can look at it. Recognition beats instruction.

Second, the journey is a map, and maps are useful because they are simplified. The mythologist Joseph Campbell argued in 1949 that stories from many cultures share a skeleton: a person leaves the familiar world, is tested, is transformed, and returns with something to give. The story consultant Christopher Vogler condensed Campbell’s seventeen stages into twelve, and that is the version I use. No life fits a template perfectly. But a map lets you say, “I am somewhere around here,” and half of feeling lost is having no name for where you are.

Campbell called the traveller a hero. I believe in the double journey: the hero’s journey and the heroine’s journey are one and the same path. The call, the refusal, the ordeal, the reward and the return are the same for men and for women. What differs is the traveller, and the world she has to walk through: the cages she is placed in, the doors that open for her or stay shut. That is why I call this journey the heroine’s journey. It is the same map, walked by a woman. In this series, two films follow a hero and this one follows two heroines, and you will see the same stages appear in all of them.

Third, psychologists of narrative identity, notably Dan McAdams, have shown that the story we tell about our own life shapes who we become. If your story is “things happened to me,” you are a passenger. If your story has a call, a refusal, a struggle and a return, you are the author. Asking for your story at every stage is an invitation to pick up the pen.

The fourth reason is the one this film makes vivid. Many journeys begin not with a call to adventure but with a slow realization that the life you are living was written by someone else: a parent, a partner, an employer, a habit. Waking up to that is frightening, and it is easier to face inside a story than inside your own kitchen. Stories let you ask “what am I settling for?” safely.

What flow is, and what it isn’t

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (roughly “chick-sent-me-high”) spent decades asking people when life felt best. Surgeons, chess players, climbers, dancers and factory workers described the same experience: total absorption in a demanding activity, effortless yet difficult, in which time seemed to vanish. He called it flow. Its conditions are strikingly consistent:

  • Challenge matched to skill: hard enough to stretch you, not so hard it crushes you.
  • Clear goals: you know what you are doing, moment to moment.
  • Immediate feedback: you can tell how it is going.
  • A sense of control: your actions matter.
  • Deep concentration, with action and awareness merging.
  • Loss of self-consciousness: the inner critic goes quiet.
  • A transformation of time: hours pass like minutes.
  • An autotelic quality: the activity is its own reward.

One of these conditions matters most for this film: the sense of control. Csikszentmihalyi did not mean domination. He meant the feeling that what you do makes a difference, and that you have a say. He noticed that people in flow often feel this even in risky activities, because they are in command of their own actions.

Now imagine a life in which you have no say at all. No goal is yours, no feedback is honest, and no action feels like your own. Flow cannot begin there. It is not that the person lacks talent or discipline. The ground is missing.

In the first column of this series, on a bridge in the jungle, I argued that we must check flow’s direction. In the second, on a sled in the snow, I argued that we must check its source. This film adds a third check: freedom. Was the goal yours? Did you have a say? And if you take back the say, what does it cost, and who pays?

The cast of archetypes

Campbell borrowed archetypes from Carl Jung: recurring roles that appear in stories everywhere. We will meet the Heroine, who grows; the Mentor, who guides; the Herald, who announces change; the Threshold Guardian, who tests whether you are serious; the Shadow, what the heroine could become or refuses to face; the Trickster, who teaches by cunning and chaos; and the Ally, who walks beside. Archetypes are roles, not people. In this film the two heroines are also each other’s mentor and mirror.

Now, the journey.

1. The Ordinary World

Louise waits tables in a diner, precise and watchful. Thelma stands in her kitchen, waiting on a husband who barely looks up. They live in the same town and in different cages. Louise’s is her own making, all order and caution. Thelma’s was built by someone else, and she has learned not to notice the bars.

Archetypes: Louise begins as the guardian, heroine in waiting; Thelma is the Innocent. Flow lens: neither woman is in flow. Louise has skill and discipline but no joy. Thelma has neither skill nor control, only obedience. Louise has too much of the wrong kind of control, and Thelma has none.

Your story: Where did you live by someone else’s rules, or by your own rules so tight that nothing could get in?

Try this: List three things you have never asked for, and three things you have never allowed yourself to want.

2. The Call to Adventure

Louise proposes a weekend: a friend’s cabin, some fishing, two days away. Thelma cannot believe her luck. It is not a grand call. It is a weekend. Most callings arrive that way, not as a thunderclap but as a small invitation we are tempted to decline.

Archetypes: Louise is the herald, without knowing it. Flow lens: here is a clear goal, and for Thelma it is the first goal in years that is hers. It is modest, but the seed of an autotelic experience is already there. She is not going for a result. She is going because she wants to.

Your story: What small invitation did you nearly turn down, and what was hiding inside it?

Try this: Put one day on your calendar that belongs only to you, and tell no one why.

3. The Refusal of the Call

Thelma cannot bring herself to ask Darryl. She leaves a note. She packs by throwing things into a bag, and, just in case, she slips in her husband’s gun. Louise packs with care, folding and arranging, as if order could keep the world out. They are already opposites, and both are already refusing something.

Thelma’s refusal is not a no. It is a yes with the exits kept open: she goes, but she cannot say it out loud. Many of us say yes in secret. Louise’s refusal runs deeper. She will not admit what she is running from.

Archetypes: the Innocent and the Guardian, each protecting a wound. Flow lens: control is under threat. Thelma has learned that asking for what she wants is unsafe, so she avoids the conversation, and with it the feedback. A life without honest feedback gives flow nothing to work with.

Your story: What did you do quietly because you could not say it out loud?

Try this: Write the sentence you have not been able to say to someone. Do not send it. Read it aloud once, alone.

4. The Mentor and the Threshold Guardian

Louise mentors Thelma without ever trying to. She is the one with plans, rules and a steady eye. She says a sentence that could be the film’s motto: “You get what you settle for.” A good mentor gives you something to steer by, and that line gives Thelma one.

Then the Silver Bullet. Music, dancing, a drink: Thelma, for the first time in years, is happy and free, and the camera lets us feel it. But every gateway has a guardian, and this one is Harlan, who mistakes her freedom for consent.

Archetypes: Louise as mentor; the bar as the gate to the special world; Harlan as a threshold guardian of the ugliest kind. Flow lens: Thelma’s dancing is the first autotelic moment of the film, done for its own sake. The film then makes an uncomfortable point: freedom without safety is not yet freedom.

Your story: Who told you a truth about your life that you were not ready to hear?

Try this: Ask one person you trust: “What do you think I have been settling for?” Listen without defending.

5. Crossing the Threshold

In the parking lot, Harlan attacks Thelma. Louise arrives with the gun, and he stops. Then he says something contemptuous, and Louise fires. The film does not celebrate it. It lets the silence afterward do the talking.

They flee. Thelma wants to go to the police. Louise refuses: who will believe them, given that Thelma was drinking and dancing? The film hints, without ever spelling it out, that Louise has a history of her own in Texas. She will not go there, and the route to Mexico takes them around the whole state.

Neither can go back now. Archetypes: the heroines enter the special world, where the old rules no longer work. Flow lens: the stakes are total and attention narrows, but this is survival, not flow. Flow needs a challenge you chose. This threshold was crossed by an event, and that difference matters.

Your story: What was your point of no return, and did you choose it or did it choose you?

Try this: Write down one threshold you crossed by choice and one that was forced on you. Note what each taught you.

6. Tests, Allies, Enemies

Jimmy arrives in Oklahoma City with money and a ring. He loves Louise, and she cannot take the ring. Something in her will not let anyone in yet, and she lets him go. Then J.D., a young hitchhiker with a smile and a story, charms Thelma. He gives her a night she badly needed, and in the morning he is gone, along with the money.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the chase, Detective Hal Slocumb begins to understand what happened at the Silver Bullet. He is officially their enemy and quietly their ally. And Darryl, on the phone, shows Thelma exactly what waits for her at home.

Archetypes: Jimmy and Hal as allies; J.D. as the trickster who teaches by accident; Darryl as the shadow of the old life. Flow lens: skill is not yet matched to challenge, so the feedback is harsh. Notice that the teacher was the thief: J.D. also shows Thelma, by demonstration, how a robbery is done. Tricksters teach in disguise.

Your story: Which of your teachers arrived in disguise?

Try this: Choose one painful lesson about trust and write two lines: what you would do differently, and what that person taught you, however unintentionally.

7. The Approach

Now the goal is plain: Mexico. Louise plans the route, counts the money, chooses the roads. The film tightens around the two of them; they are a team now, and Louise is at her best, planning.

Archetypes: the heroine preparing; the mentor at full strength. Flow lens: goal clarity spikes: a destination, a route, a deadline. But look at the goal itself. Mexico is less a place than an escape, and this matters. We often confuse goals we move away from with goals we move toward. Flow is much easier to find when there is something ahead of you to reach, not only something behind you to flee.

Your story: When was your goal an escape, and when was it a destination?

Try this: Write your current goal twice, once as “away from ___” and once as “toward ___.” Notice which sentence gives you more energy.

8. The Ordeal

J.D. is gone with the money, and Louise, who held the whole plan together, breaks. She sits in the motel room, drained and silent, the plan and the control that kept her upright both gone. Thelma, who caused it, feels the weight of it. The two women have quietly begun to trade places: the controlled one is coming apart, and the childlike one is starting to take charge.

Archetypes: the heroine faces symbolic death; the roles reverse. Flow lens: challenge now exceeds skill, feedback has stopped, and control is gone. What you feel here is anxiety, and it is honest. It is also the moment the story turns, because the person who was carried is about to do the carrying.

Your story: When did your best-laid plan collapse, and who carried you when it did?

Try this: When you are in your own valley, ask one person for one small thing: a call, a meal, a ride. The point is not to fix the problem. It is to be held while it is unfixed.

9. The Reward

Thelma robs a convenience store, using J.D.’s patter almost word for word. The film does not pretend this is right. But it shows something startling in her: energy, laughter, a woman discovering her own voice, even in the wrong place. Then comes the road. Top down, desert stretching on every side, the two women drive and laugh.

Here is flow in its rawest form. A clear goal (the next mile), immediate feedback (the road), a sense of control (the wheel), time dissolving into distance. It is the most alive the two women have ever been. And, as in the bridge film, that is exactly what makes it dangerous, because a feeling this total hides its price.

Here is the mirror I most want you to try. Put this stage beside stage 11: your most alive stretch, and what it cost. Same person, same road. Ask who paid.

Archetypes: the heroine takes the prize, and the shadow rides along. Flow lens: nearly every condition is present, but the source is a crime and the cost is not yet visible. Aliveness is real and does not prove the road is right.

Your story: When did you feel most alive, and what did it cost?

Try this: List which flow conditions were present during your most alive stretch. Then, honestly, list what it cost and who paid.

10. The Road Back

The net tightens. A state trooper stops them, and they lock him in the trunk of his own car and shoot out his radio. A truck driver who has been harassing them along the road is lured to a stop, and his tanker is destroyed. Each act carries them further from the women who left Arkansas. Hal begins to piece the trail together, and the FBI closes in behind him.

Somewhere in these hours, Thelma says that something has crossed over in her and she can’t go back. It is one of the film’s truest lines. The landscape empties, the sky widens, and the air thins.

Archetypes: the heroine is pursued; Hal, the ally on the wrong side, closes the distance. Flow lens: attention narrows and time compresses, but flow is starting to falter, because the challenge is no longer one they are choosing.

Your story: When did you realize you had become someone you could not un-become?

Try this: Write a short note to your earlier self beginning “The person who left is now ___.” Read it as a letter, not a verdict.

11. The Resurrection

At the edge of a great canyon, the police arrive: cars, a helicopter, guns. Hal runs toward them, pleading. There is a way out here: surrender, and live. Louise says only, “Let’s keep going.” The two women kiss, take each other’s hands, and Louise presses the accelerator. The car sails over the edge, and the film freezes in mid-air. We never see it land.

This is the most argued ending in modern film. Some see a refusal to be caged. Others see a tragedy. The film will not tell us, and I do not think it should. I do not read it as a model. I read it as a story about what happens when a person is offered complete freedom and only one door out.

Here I return to Nicholson. His fall onto the plunger was a correction, the late repair of a lifetime’s wrong direction. This is a refusal, a decision that the old life, on the old terms, is no longer available. Neither is a strategy. Both are parables about stories that run out of doors. In real life there is nearly always another door, and this stage is an invitation to look for it early.

Archetypes: the old selves die; the new selves refuse to return to their old roles. Flow lens: the ultimate act of control, and flow’s blind spot at its widest. Total freedom, and a total cost.

Your story: When did you have to choose between safety and yourself, and what did you choose?

Try this: Write down three doors you did not take. What would each have cost, and what would each have given?

12. The Return with the Elixir

Hal reaches the edge and stands in the dust, unable to follow. The film cuts to images of the road: the two women at their happiest, laughing in the car, the whole desert open ahead of them. It is not a happy ending. It is something stranger: a reminder of what those hours were.

The elixir is not the freedom itself, and it is not the cliff. Look at what the two women carried out of the story: each other. Louise learned to trust and Thelma learned to lead. They woke each other up. As with Clipton’s “Madness!” in the bridge film, the closing view belongs to the witness, and the elixir is a question handed to us: what are you settling for?

Archetypes: the witness carries the story home; the audience receives the gift. Flow lens: the elixir is awareness. Freedom, chosen goals and real companionship make life vivid, and you can seek them without destroying everything else.

Your story: What has your journey taught that you would hand to someone else?

Try this: Write two paragraphs to a friend: where you woke up, and what you would ask them to check before they leave.

What I ask of you

Across this series I have offered you three checks on your best hours. The Bridge on the River Kwai asks about direction: who is this for? Citizen Kane asks about source: am I moving toward something, or trying to get something back? Thelma & Louise asks about freedom: did I choose this, and what am I paying to keep choosing it?

Notice, too, that the map never changed. Two films walked it with a man at the center and one walked it with two women, and the stages arrived in the same order: the call, the refusal, the ordeal, the reward, the return. The journey is the same for all of us. Only the traveller and the terrain differ, and knowing that lets you borrow courage from any story.

Find the life that is yours. Not by burning everything down, but by asking early and often what you are settling for, and by taking small, chosen steps before the world forces a large one. A sense of control, one of flow’s oldest conditions, is not a luxury. It is where everything begins.

So here is my invitation. Take one stage, the one that stung when you read it, and write your own story. Two hundred words is enough. What was the call, what did you refuse, and what did the road look like when you finally chose it?

Some of you will do this alone, and that is a good start. But a story is easier to see from the outside. Thelma had Louise, and Louise had Thelma, and each woke the other up. Most of us do not get that from a stranger at a bar. We can get it from a guide who knows the map.

Walk your own journey with me

I offer online story coaching, one to one, in a single 90-minute session. Together we will lay your own story over the twelve stages of the heroine’s and hero’s journey: where you are on the map, where flow already shows up in your life, and where it is missing. Then we ask the questions the film asks: what am I settling for, and what would it take to choose differently, without losing what matters?

You leave with a clearer view of your own journey, and with one or two concrete next steps toward a life you have chosen.

Send me a short email with the stage that stung the most, and we will find a time. You do not need to have your story figured out. That is what the session is for.

Ask what you are settling for, and if you would like company while you look, I would be glad to walk through your film with you.

Peter de Kuster

Peter de Kuster is the founder of The Hero’s Journey & Heroine’s Journey project and the author of the Hero’s Journey and Heroine’s Journey book series. For over 20 years he has combined storytelling and marketing expertise to help professionals build careers and lives around the story that is most their own. He holds MBAs in Marketing and in Financial Economics, and a university degree in Sociology and Communication Sciences. More at www.theherojourney2016.com.