1. The film cuts back and forth between the women's rooms here, as it did between their preparations to leave at the beginning of the film; otherwise they are shown together. A partial exception is Thelma's robbery of the convenience store. The camera holds on the waiting Louise while it is occurring, but later we see the event on the videotape from the store's camera that the police and Darryl are watching. In the police narrative strand, the viewing of Thelma in action is a present scene. In relation to the Thelma-Louise narrative strand, however, it is the filling-in of what Gérard Genette calls a lateral ellipsis (or paralipsis), in which a narrative does not skip over a moment in time but sidesteps an element of it. Thus the robbery scene has a dual status—a present scene in the police narrative and a filling-in of a lateral ellipsis in the narrative of Thelma and Louise. [BACK]

2. Thelma and Louise's destination changes several times in the course of the film: to get away from the scene of the crime; to get out of the state; to reach Oklahoma City where Louise's money is; to escape to Mexico without crossing Texas; then, with the police on their trail and their Mexican plan known, heading further west, and north, to what turns out to be the Grand Canyon. [BACK]

1. See Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). [BACK]

1. The following description of Messidor is influenced by Beverle Houston's essay " Messidor : A Post-Structuralist Reading," Women and Literature (Fall 1984). [BACK]