It is “the first movie I’ve ever seen which told the downright truth,” says Mary Lucey, a lesbian activist in Los Angeles.

It is a “paean to transformative violence . . . An explicit fascist theme,” writes social commentator John Leo, who went out prospecting for a column in U.S. News and World Report and discovered a mother lode of fool’s gold.

It is, according to Cathy Bell, a Houston environmental communications specialist who was once married to “a redneck control freak” and found the courage to dump him after a liberating weekend trip with a girlfriend, “like seeing my life played before my eyes.”

“It justifies armed robbery, manslaughter and chronic drunken driving as exercises in consciousness raising,” charges New York Daily News columnist Richard Johnson, who also finds it “degrading to men, with pathetic stereotypes of testosterone-crazed behavior” and half-seriously proposes a ban on it.

It is, according to Miami Herald movie reviewer Bill Cosford, “a butt- kicking feminist manifesto . . . which sweeps you along for the ride.” No, says Sheila Benson, a Los Angeles Times film critic, it is a betrayal of feminism, which, as she understands it, “has to do with responsibility, equality, sensitivity, understanding — not revenge, retribution or sadistic behavior.”

Whole lot of heavy thinking going on out there. Some pretty heavy journalistic breathing too. Hard to believe that the occasion for this heated exercise in moral philosophy and sociological big-think is a modest and, at its most basic level, very enjoyable little movie called Thelma & Louise, which is so far a moderate commercial success. It has earned about $20 million in its first 3 1/2 weeks of release — less than a muscular big-boy movie like Robin Hood or Terminator 2: Judgment Day could expect to make on its first weekend.

No matter. Thelma & Louise is a movie whose scenes and themes lend themselves to provocative discussions. What business it’s doing is in all the right places — the big cities and college towns where opinion makers are ever on the alert for something to make an opinion about. For their purposes, this movie is a natural. In the most literal sense of the word. For the picture has a curiously unselfconscious manner about it, an air of not being completely aware of its own subtexts or largest intentions, of being innocently open to interpretation, appropriate and otherwise.

This, indeed, is its salient redeeming quality. If it were as certain — and as clumsy — about what it was up to as its more virulent critics think it is, it might easily have been as overbearing — and as deadly — as some of their interpretations are. It is not, though, and anyone with a sense of recent film history can see Thelma & Louise in the honorable line of movies whose makers, without quite knowing what they were doing, sank a drill into what appeared to be familiar American soil and found that they had somehow tapped into a wild- rushing subterranean stream of inchoate outrage and deranged violence. Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider, Dirty Harry and Fatal Attraction — all these movies began as attempts to vary and freshen traditional generic themes but ended up taking their creators, and their audiences, on trips much deeper, darker, more disturbing than anyone imagined they were going to make.

These are not the big-budget movies that solemnly announce the importance of their subject matter and often totter off into oblivion clutching a Best Picture Oscar — emotional irrelevancy’s consolation prize. The true genre- bending films are less pretentious, less carefully calculated entertainments that may have only a hazy idea of their objectives. And (best thing about them, really) they have a way of driving some people — the ones who think movies ought to be a realistic medium or an ideologically correct one — crazy.

Consciously or not, these films tend to serve as expressions of the values or confusions jangling around in their society, or occasionally as springboards for earnest discussions of them. At a time when moral discourse has been reduced to the size of a sound bite and rapid social change has everyone on edge, the messages conveyed in even the most frolicking of these movies stir peculiar passions. Such films often have an astonishing afterlife, not only in popular memory but as artifacts that vividly define their times.

These times, in movies as in American society, seem defined by perilous, off-balance relationships between men and women. The year’s two top box-office winners, The Silence of the Lambs and Sleeping with the Enemy, dramatize the ( judicious revenge that a woman takes on a brutalizing man. In another new film, Alan Rudolph’s dour and inept Mortal Thoughts, two women (Demi Moore and Glenne Headly) kill a hateful husband (Bruce Willis, who lately can’t seem to get a break). The trend straddles oceans too: Luc Besson’s stylish French thriller, La Femme Nikita, is about a woman (Anne Parillaud) whose romantic life conflicts with her career as an espionage hit person.

The movie summer promises more women who take their life — and a gun — in their own hands. Kathleen Turner will play a tough private eye in V.I. Warshawski. Even the budget-bustin’ action-adventure Terminator 2 offers a strong female figure: Linda Hamilton is an embattled mother powerful enough to square off alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The success of these films as popular entertainment and as clues to the zeitgeist remains to be determined. But they will have to go far to match Thelma & Louise. “Ten years from now it will be seen as a turning point,” says Peter Keough, film editor of the Boston Phoenix.

He is more than likely right. Movies achieve this kind of historic stature not because they offer a particularly acute portrayal of the way we live now or because they summarize with nuanced accuracy the opposing positions in an often flatulent quasi-political debate. They work because somehow they worm their way into our collective dreamscape, retrieve the anxious images they find there and then splash them across the big screen in dramatically heightened form.

That’s why most of the questions raised about Thelma & Louise seem so weirdly inappropriate. Does it offer suitable “role models”? Is the “violence” its heroines mete out to their tormentors really “empowering” to women, or does it represent a feckless sacrifice of the high moral ground? Is its indiscriminate “male bashing” grossly unfair to an entire sex?

Should we care? As Barbara Bunker, who teaches psychology at the State University of New York, Buffalo, very sensibly notes, “It’s a dramatic piece, not a ((literal)) description of what’s going on in our society. It seems to me that drama is supposed to make things larger than life so you get the point.” Agrees Regina Barreca, who teaches English at the University of Connecticut and is the author of They Used to Call Me Snow White but I Drifted, a book about women and humor: “It has got to be seen not as a cultural representation but as a fairy tale.” In other words, as a dream work, full of archetypes and exaggerations.

This does not mean that Thelma & Louise is or was ever meant to be a sweet dream, a comfortable, comforting movie like, say, City Slickers. “Screenplay idea,” jotted Callie Khouri in her notebook one day in 1987: “Two women go on a crime spree.” Khouri, whose first screenplay this is, had the notion that if a female couple were somehow forced by circumstances to take up the outlaw life, they would, under the suspenseful impress of life on the lam, undergo the same kind of bonding process — sweet, funny, appealing — that male protagonists customarily experience in this kind of movie. But she also seemed to sense that just because of its off-casting, it could have a jagged edginess that its models had long since lost.

Khouri’s idea was, to borrow a term from old-time Hollywood writers, a nice little switcheroo — logical, easy to explain and not too threatening in its originality. Moreover, the times were right for it. Everyone was complaining that there were too few good roles for women in American movies — especially roles that permitted their characters to make their own decisions, control their own destiny. In fact, according to Mimi Polk, Thelma & Louise’s producer, the movie did not “pitch well” to studio executives: “The script was full of subtlety that was lost in a two-sentence description.” Polk feels, as well, that had she and her partner, Ridley Scott, proposed two male stars in the lead, they could have got a budget heftier than the $17.5 million they ultimately spent.

It is possible, of course, that the Suits were just as nervous about the story that Khouri developed as some of the film’s latter-day critics have turned out to be. Hollywood is not, after all, the world capital of the new masculine sensibility.

Be that as it may, the movie, which Scott (Alien, Blade Runner) eventually decided to direct himself, starts out in a low, ingratiating gear. It looks like a “buddy romp,” as Geena Davis, who plays Thelma, puts it. Thelma is married to a carpet salesman named Darryl, who represents everything stupid and stupefying about traditional masculinity, keeping Thelma in a state of near childish dependency. Her best pal, Louise (Susan Sarandon), lives with an oft traveling musician named Jimmy, who is nice enough but suffers from the other great modern male defect — a maddening inability to make permanent commitments. Both women feel more than entitled to shed their mates for a long weekend at a friend’s vacation retreat.

On the way, they stop at a roadhouse for a drink. One of its resident lounge lizards mistakes Thelma’s naive flirtatiousness for a come-on, follows her to the parking lot and almost succeeds in raping her. Louise rescues her at gunpoint. Then, just as you are figuring that this is an unaccountably dark passage in an otherwise sunny film, Louise kills the would-be rapist. In cold blood. With malice aforethought, however briefly considered.

It is a remarkable mood swing, one of the few authentically daring narrative coups in the cautious recent history of American film. And it is by no means a carelessly considered one. “It was a goal to make that resonate throughout the film,” according to Davis. It does, and it has a transforming effect on Thelma & Louise. It lifts it beyond the reach of gags like columnist Ellen Goodman’s characterization of it as “a PMS movie, plain and simple.” More important, it lifts it beyond the effective range of ideologically oriented criticism. “The violence I liked, in a way,” says Sarandon, “because it is not premeditated. It is primal, and it doesn’t solve anything.”

It is also blessedly unexplained. In the aftermath of the killing, we do learn that something dreadful happened to Louise years ago. Obviously it was some kind of sexual assault, but she never reveals its exact nature. This, of course, runs counter to the conventions of popular culture. If this were the TV-rape-movie-of-the-month, a hysterical revelation of the exact nature of the abuse — especially if it were, say, gang rape or years of incest — would be obligatory in order to balance the moral scales.

Such an explanation would have quelled much of the “male bashing” criticism leveled at Thelma & Louise. But it would also have cheapened the movie in some measure, suggesting that some kinds of sexual violence grant their victims murderous entitlements while others do not. By leaving Louise’s mystery intact, the film implies that all forms of sexual exploitation, great or small, are consequential and damaging.

Within the moral scheme of the movie, writer Khouri’s choice of this particular crime as the motive for the women’s “crime spree,” instead of, say, grand theft — auto, has other advantages as well. For one thing, it ironically restores Thelma and Louise to equality with men — at least in one realm of action. Says Martha Nussbaum, a philosophy professor at Brown and an expert on women in antiquity: “I think the modern idea that women are gentle and sweet is parochial. Just look at Medea.” The Greeks, Nussbaum suggests, understood that crimes are committed by those with the least access to power, which then, as now, included women. “As the ancients said, ‘No force in nature is stronger than a woman wronged.’ “

Or, perhaps, a woman who has had a taste of revenge and would like to gulp down more of it. Believing that no one is likely to accept their account of what happened in the parking lot, Thelma and Louise decide they have no choice but to make a run for the Mexican border. This long concluding passage of the film, rich in irony and ambiguities, is fueled dramatically by a slow, steady shift in their relationship. As Sarandon notes, Louise suffers “great remorse” about the murder. “It doesn’t change the world, and in the long run it doesn’t serve to her advantage.” Indeed, fear of her act’s consequences slowly undoes her former take-charge capability. She gradually cedes leadership of their little expedition to Thelma — possibly because she sees that it can end only in tragedy, while Thelma can’t see anything because she is having the time of her life.

It is Thelma who spots a really cute hitchhiker by the side of the road and decides she just has to have him. With him she has great sex for the first time in her life. To him — he’s a convenience-store bandit — she loses all the getaway money that Louise had scraped together from her life savings. But what might have seemed yet another rape, this time of a more symbolic kind, turns out to be a fair exchange. The hitchhiker, using Thelma’s hair dryer as a gun substitute, teaches her the tricks of his dubious trade; soon she is doing hold-ups. It is Thelma too who gets the drop on a cop who stops the two women for speeding, orders him into the trunk of his squad car, and gently warns him to be sweet to his wife, adding, “My husband wasn’t sweet to me, and look how I turned out.”

Literalists criticize Thelma’s erotic awakening because, they say, it could not happen so soon after the trauma of near rape. Doubtless that would be true in circumstances less special than the ones the movie sets up. The point it’s insisting on is that a sudden access of freedom is eroticizing as well as empowering.

By the same token, some representatives of the world’s largest minority, the humor-impaired, regard the women’s response to an oil-tank trucker with whom + they keep playing fender tag as excessive. Every time they encounter him, the guy proves by word, smirk and obscene gesture that he’s a chauvinist dinosaur. When he inquires if they’re “ready to get serious,” they reply encouragingly. What he doesn’t know, of course, is that they’re thinking metaphorically, with a little help from director Scott, with whose surrealistic reinvention of the West — one-third desert, one-third industrial wasteland, one-third unzoned strip development — this oil-truck rig fits right in. In Scott’s eyes, and his heroines’, it is a gigantic penis. And, yes, they are ready for that. Ready to blow it to smithereens with their little guns.

It is, as SUNY-Buffalo’s psychologist Bunker says, “a fabulous move dramatically, a catharsis for all those times you’ve taken something and couldn’t give it back.” But taken together with some of the women’s other acts, does it represent an excessive response to the provocation? Sarandon insists not. She says the charge shows “what a straight, white male world movies traditionally occupy. This kind of scrutiny does not happen to Raiders of the Lost Ark or that Schwarzenegger thing ((Total Recall)) where he shoots a woman in the head and says, ‘Consider that a divorce.’ ” Sarandon insists that all concerned spent a lot of time making sure Thelma & Louise didn’t turn into “a bloodlust-revenge film.” Certainly, compared with the typical male- action film, the violence here is spare and rather chastely staged.

But that’s not really the issue. What people sense, particularly in Davis’ performance, is that she is getting off on her newly discovered taste and talent for gun-slinging outlawry. It’s a kick, not so very different from, maybe part and parcel of, her newly discovered pleasure in sex. This is something nice girls — nice people, nice movies — are not supposed to own up to, let alone speak of humorously. But as Bunker observes, violent assertiveness is “basically unrestrained expressiveness,” and, let’s be honest about it, we all enjoy our opportunities, all too rare in the real world, to partake of its pleasures.

The cost, though, is high. It is toward self-destruction that Thelma and Louise’s road inevitably winds. For all the time they have been out there expressing themselves, a posse has been relentlessly closing in on them. By a pleasing irony, it is led by the only thoroughly nice guy in the picture, detective Hal Slocumbe (Harvey Keitel). A patient, sympathetic man, he is this myth’s wise father figure. By the time Thelma and Louise finally see him, however, he is one of a small army of cops who have hemmed them in against the top of a sheer canyon wall. Hal advances toward them, arms outstretched, in a last-minute plea for reason.

Fat chance. The women eye him, eye the drop ahead of them, imagine a prison stretch, contemplate the last free choice available to them — life or death — and floor the accelerator, sailing off the cliff into the movie’s concluding whiteout.

Unlike most of the plot points that have stirred debate, this one actually deserves it. Sure, everyone recognizes it as a straight steal from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but what final meaning does it impose? Sarandon thinks it’s “the least compromising ending. You built this whole film to have these people not settle anymore, and then you’d toss them back into the system?”

It’s hard to find anyone who thinks the women should have turned themselves in. It is equally hard to find anyone who detects a note of triumph in their suicide. Novelist Alix Kates Shulman quotes La Pasionaria on this point: “It’s better to die on your feet than live on your knees.” But as Brooklyn Law School professor Elizabeth Schneider points out, the message here is that “self-assertion and awakening lead to death.” Or, as film scholar Annette Insdorf puts it, “When death is your only choice, how free are you?”

All of which is a way of saying, “Baby, you’ve still got a long way to go.” And a way of saying that, seen in narrowly feminist terms, Thelma & Louise advances the women’s movement only a few hesitant steps. But perhaps the film should not be looked at that way. Davis, for one, resents the connection: “Why, because it stars women, is this suddenly a feminist treatise, given the burden of representing all women?”

A good point. In its messy, likable way, Thelma & Louise is getting at even larger, more mysterious issues. Carol Clover, a film scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, says the movie is trying to study, among other topics, “the distance between men and women, the desire for each sex to separate itself.” It also attempts to look at the opposite side of that coin: the increasingly dangerous ways in which the sexes come together. Novelist James Carroll wrote last week in the New Republic that “when men and women reduce each other to sexual objects, they take the first step toward beating each other up.”

Since this movie demonstrates Clover’s point, and since it places that point in a context that is satirically aware of the violent and depersonalizing traditions of our visual popular culture, it just may be that Thelma & Louise is in fact better than any of its exegetes have made it sound. It remains the most intriguing movie now in release. No other cheers one’s argumentative spirit, stirs one’s critical imagination, and awakens one’s protective affection in quite the way Thelma & Louise does.

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