Articles

Fighting Words

Honest discussions of changing sex roles prove too hot for pundits to handle.

Reason , November 1997

Ridley Scott makes movies about the frailties of human flesh and the capacities of human will. His heroes are not especially introspective. They cope in hostile environments. Sometimes, as in Thelma and Louise, they are heroic only in the tragic, Aristotelian sense--done in by fatal flaws. They are not the stuff of romanticism but of earlier, less subjective and emotion-centered art. Indeed, Thelma and Louise die because they cannot master their impulses