1. INT. CAR - DAY
THELMA
Okay then listen. Let’s not get caught.
LOUISE
What’re ya talkin’ about?
THELMA
Let’s keep going’.
LOUISE
What d’ya mean?
Thelma turns to face forward and gestures with her head toward the cliff ahead.
THELMA
Go.
LOUISE
You sure?
THELMA
Yeah. Hit it.
They smile at each other, then Louise leans forward and kisses Thelma.
In 1991, two women in a ‘66 Ford Thunderbird drive off a cliff.
This is the final sequence of the film, Thelma & Louise; a film about two small-town working-class women turned outlaws, set against the backdrop of the American Mid-West.
With the long arm of the law at their backs, they choose to keep going.
Accelerating off the cliff, they take flight. The image freezes and the screen fades to white before we see the car crash into the canyon below. In the collective consciousness, they remain forever hanging in the air and forever falling.
They are going to die, and they are already dead.
In the freeze frame both realities exist, placing our protagonists in an eternally liminal space between living and dead: the (un)dead.
The fade out = a ghostly vanishing.
This is the precise moment where Thelma and Louise leave their flesh bodies for the spectral avatars they will inhabit in the underworld.
Speaking to the histories of lesbian and queer women’s representation in mainstream visual culture, Terry Castle proposes that the lesbian is, and always was, apparitional. [1]
In the contemporary struggle for visibility, concrete definitions and full incorporation into mainstream society - what Lisa Duggan and Michael Warner call “homonormativity” - there has evolved a demand for overt representation. [2]
What gets lost in such projects is the nuance, fluidity and general unruliness that constitutes a queer identity. For this reason (and many more) I would like to argue for remaining in the in-between, to be apparitional, free to drift between all time and space.
“The colour ultraviolet, like most of lesbian history, is located just beyond the visible spectrum. Violet, as a sign of love between women, serves as an indicator of what lies beyond the visible spectrum and as a means by which to become visible to each other.”
~ Andrea Weiss [3]
2. INT. CAR (THE ARID LOWLANDS OF THE UNDERWORLD) - DAY
From the white nothing that enveloped them, a new landscape bleeds into view. The sky has turned a rich amethyst, casting a violet glow over everything.
Louise is driving and can feel the resistance come back into the steering column. The car is no longer airborne. They’re back on the road. Through the windscreen, Thelma and Louise gape at the dense masses of Black Eyed Susans lining the edge of the highway, their yellow petals fluorescing against the ultraviolet light.
Suddenly, the engine loses power and the car slows to a halt.
THELMA
What’d we do now?
LOUISE
What is this place?
Approaching from up ahead, the travellers spy the headlights of another vehicle. Thelma rushes out into the middle of the road to flag them down.
Making a u-turn before pulling up in front of their convertible, the tow truck driver kills the engine and jumps out of the cab. Unsurprisingly, in this alternate reality of deep lez subtext, the tow truck driver looks like Lucy Lawless in the little-known 1996 New Zealand short film, PEACH. [4]
With mouth agape, Thelma devours the figure of the woman standing before them.
THELMA
Gosh almighty, you’re the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen.
3. EXT. ROADSIDE - DAY
The tow truck driver extends a hand to Thelma in greeting.
CHARON
(in a thick New Zealand)
accent)
The name’s Charon. Less like Sharon, more like Karen.
Charon and Thelma shake hands. Before Thelma has a chance to reply, Charon moves toward the bumper of their Thunderbird and vanishes below the hood.
Many previously unknown unknowns make themselves known to Louise and Thelma as Charon tethers their car to the tow bar. Without a dime, after being swindled by Brad Pitt’s six pack, Thelma and Louise have no choice but to take the long road. To get to the Styx - the ring road that encircles the underworld - they have to detour down Acheron Avenue.
By embarking on this katabatic journey, Thelma and Louise have turned their backs on chrononormativity, choosing to be with and become the queer (un)dead… †
INT./EXT. CAR - DAY
Louise cracks open her eyelids just as a large green highway sign comes into view. It reads: “The Styx”. They pull over and Charon unfastens their car from the truck.
Louise sleepily fumbles for the door handle, hurls her legs out like two dead weights and staggers up to Charon.
LOUISE
But our car won’t start.
CHARON
It should be fine now. They all break down when folks first arrive.
LOUISE
What way do we go?
Charon, swaggering back to her truck replies without so much as a backward glance.
CHARON
Left. Right. Which way you travel don’t make a difference. Wherever you’re headin’, you’ll get there no matter which way you turn.
LOUISE
That all sounds mighty vague.
CHARON
Well, that’s nowhere for ya’.
Charon tips her red leather cap before jumping into the truck and taking off.
“The history of Western representation is littered with the corpses of gender and sexual deviants. Those who are directly identified with same-sex desire most often end up dead; if they manage to survive, it is on such compromised terms that it makes death seem attractive.”
~ Heather Love [5]
(UN)DEAD
The ‘(un)’ is parenthesised to augment the condition of the literal dead with the fictional creature of the undead, often a monstrous figure – such as a vampire, zombie or ghost – who is dead but still animate. The undead monster of horror cinema and literature has long been associated with queer, minority and outsider subjectivities and modes of desire. [6] As equally liminal, abject and aberrant figures that hover between life and death, the undead stand for all those who operate outside normative social and spatiotemporal systems.
5. INT. CAR - NIGHT
The duo are now driving in darkness, save for the brilliant assembly of stars above them.
Too tired to speak, they venture into their respective inner monologues. Thelma fusses with a loose thread on the neck of her t-shirt while contemplating who she would fuck, marry or kill in a choice between Kenny Rodgers, Dwight Yoakam and that curly haired lady who sings about Elvis.
Louise is feeling more philosophical. Sex and death being a recurring theme as she muses on the similarities between fucking and time travel.
Both muddle up inside and outside, yours and theirs.
There are holes: arse holes, cunt holes, wormholes.
They’re all portals: gateways, thresholds.
How much of you are you when there is someone else inside you?
Flesh-bodies in flesh-bodies
Flesh-bodies on flesh-bodies
Ghost-bodies in flesh-bodies
All signify an openness to being haunted.
Past, present and future converge in the body of the haunted subject, disturbing linear time.
Prosopopoeia is the act of giving voice to the dead. It may involve someone taking on the identity of a deceased person in an attempt to speak from their perspective; or the personification of an inanimate object, collapsing the distinction between animate and inanimate, human and more-than-human.
Sliding into the skin of another we become hybrid.
Calling on ghosts to enter us, we are at once being with and becoming the (un)dead.
“A grave is spreading its legs
and BEGGING FOR LOVE”
~ Kathy Acker [7]
6. INT. CAR - NIGHT
Thelma is now behind the wheel and Louise is half asleep. Lurching around a tight bend, a concrete box flushed in blue light comes into view.
THELMA
Yea-haw!
LOUISE
(jolted awake)
Heck, Thelma!
THELMA
Louise, look there. What’s that sign say?
Thelma squints to get a clearer view of the neon sign mounted to the front of the building. She floors the accelerator in the direction of their salvation.
LOUISE
Sulkys.
THELMA
What’s that poster on the door say?
LOUISE
If you weren’t drivin’ so fast, I’d be able to read it.
(beat)
It says: “Biggest jugs this side of the Aegean".
THELMA
Sounds like a good time to me.
Thelma pulls up with a screech six paces from the front door, leaps out of the car and goes full hell for leather toward the entrance.
“Ah,
to die
in order to stop Time.”
~ Marguerite Yourcenar [8]
7. INT. SULKY’S DYKE BAR - NIGHT
Thelma strides through the door. Louise, curious but cautious, follows close behind. The energy in the bar feels raw and unpredictable. The walls are clad in a deep mahogany, handsomely embracing the patrons cloistered in the dimly lit booths. A single warm white light hangs above each table, spotlighting the territories of encounter.
Across tabletops, thumbs circle the rims of schooner glasses; fingers worry at cardboard coasters, tearing them to pulp; a hand reaches out to clasp another; two faces momentarily come into view before joining at the lips. It’s LEATHER & DENIM NIGHT, but so is every other night. ”NEVER LOVED A MAN” BY ARETHA FRANKLIN is playing from a juke box in the corner of the room.
LOUISE
Whole lotta ladies in here.
THELMA
It’s a dyke bar, Louise.
LOUISE
I know that, Thelma. Don’t patronise me. Ain’t the first time I heard that word.
THELMA
Which word is that?
LOUISE
You know which word.
THELMA
I know you know. I just wanna hear you say it.
LOUISE
Thelma, quit teasin’ me!
THELMA
Why can’t you say it?
LOUISE
Shut up and get me a drink.
Thelma makes her way toward the bar, leaving Louise standing wide-eyed in the middle of the room. Louise slowly begins to turn her body, taking it all in.
Louise finally angles herself in the direction of the bar and watches Thelma flirting with the bartender. A woman (DOROTHY) notices Louise looking toward the bar and approaches from behind. She leans in to whisper in Louise’s ear. Before Dorothy can get a word out Louise gasps and jumps three feet in front of her.
DOROTHY
Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you. Thought you might’ve seen me coming in your periphery. I’m Dorothy, and you are?
LOUISE
Louise. And that there is my friend Thelma.
DOROTHY
Your friend. What kinda friend?
Louise doesn’t answer. She watches Dorothy’s eyes undressing her, her gaze slowly painting its way down to her boots and back up to her face, stalling at the lips. Louise nervously pivots her gaze back toward the bar and watches the bartender pass Thelma two shots of rum.
DOROTHY
(pointing to the bartender)
That’s Dolores. Our Lady of the Sorrows. Patron Saint of Sapphic Yearning.
LOUISE
That’s a lot of titles.
DOROTHY
She had a lot of titles upstairs too. Her name was Stormé DeLarverie and she was guardian of the lesbian bars in New York City.
(beat)
She used to patrol the streets, making sure there weren’t any sisters in trouble. It’s rumoured she threw the first punch at Stonewall. I’ll introduce you.
Dorothy takes hold of Louise’s hand and leads her to the bar.
DOLORES
Well well. It’s been a long time, Dorothy.
DOROTHY
How you doin' Dolores?
DOLORES
Like shit.
(beat)
Well, now that we're all caught up, can I fix you a drink?
DOROTHY
Dolores, this is Louise.
DOLORES
Welcome home, Louise. Any friend of Dorothy is a friend of mine.
8. INT. SULKY’S DYKE BAR - NIGHT
Thelma and Louise are both perched on stools at the bar. With five fingers of rum inside her, Thelma is restless and jumps up from her seat.
THELMA
Aaack! I want some action.
As Thelma strides up to the group of leather-clad women shooting pool in the corner, Louise watches from the bar. She observes a look of wicked delight on Thelma’s face. Louise recognises this look. Louise gave her the same look the night after she robbed the Bedrock General Store. In their shared motel room, Thelma re-enacted the scene.
They laughed as Thelma passed the bottle of Wild Turkey to Louise. Louise’s hand clasped the neck of the bottle. Thelma held her grip, grinning and cocking her head to the left as she pulled the bottle and Louise closer to her.
A glass rolls off the bar and smashes on the floor.
9. EXT. SULKY’S BAR CAR PARK - NIGHT
The blanket of sky above them is that of deep space. Every dead star’s light punches holes in the black vacuum: into other worlds, other times, times long past.
Louise has the driver’s seat reclined, drinking in the firmament as her left index finger traces the lip of the wound-down window beside her. Thelma is splayed across the bonnet, her boots hanging off the right fender as she hums the chorus of “IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE” BY DUSTY SPRINGFIELD over and over. She can’t remember the rest of it.
Louise casts her eyes down to a black and white square poking out of the ashtray beside her. She pulls it out and flips it over. It’s a polaroid photo they took at the start of their trip.
LOUISE
Huh. I was so sure we lost this.
THELMA
What’s that?
LOUISE
This photo of us. Remember, we took it before all this. I barely recognise us.
Thelma swings her legs over and jumps off the bonnet. She leans into the driver’s side, resting her left arm on the car door while reaching for the photo with the other.
THELMA
Hmm, yeah. They kinda look like us.
LOUISE
They look like ghosts.
END.
“The photograph does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been.”
~ Roland Barthes [9]
** Katabasis: Ancient Greek κατάβασις, from κατὰ "down" and βαίνω “go”. Is the journey to the underworld most commonly figured within classical Roman and Greek mythology.
Chrononormativity: “the use of time to organise individual human bodies toward maximum productivity.” [10]
Jade Muratore is a researcher and artist based in Sydney, Australia.
She works across performance, installation, and video, with a specific interest in queer performance and visual culture, alternative historicising practices and fandom methodologies.
Jade has a Bachelor of Art Theory (Hons Class 1), a Graduate Diploma in Cultural Leadership and is a current PhD candidate, all at UNSW Art & Design, Sydney. Her PhD project titled Going Down, is a practice-based research project on anarchival and temporally disruptive methodologies in contemporary performance and moving image practice. Jade is a core and founding member of the art collective Hissy Fit (with collaborators EO Gill and Nat Randall) and has exhibited works at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Performance Space, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Arts House, and Carriageworks among others.
Professionally, Jade has over 10 years’ experience in the arts, cultural and community sectors. She is a casual academic teaching in art history and theory, fine arts, and screen culture, and works freelance as a producer and production manager on independent productions and arts events.
Endnotes
1. Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: female homosexuality and modern culture, 1993
2. See: Lisa Duggan, The twilight of equality? : neoliberalism, cultural politics, and the attack on democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003); Michael Warner, ‘Normal and Normaller: Beyond Gay Marriage’. In GLQ, 5, 1999, 119–171. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-5-2-119
3. Andrea Weiss, Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in the cinema (London, UK: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1992), 2.
4. Peach, directed by Christine Parker (Oceania Parker Ltd, 1996), https://vimeo.com/171270628.
5. Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 1.
6. See: Jack Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995); Rosi Braidotti, ‘Cyberteratologies: Female Monsters Negotiate the Other’s Participation in Humanity’s Far Future’ (2003); Patricia MacCormack, Cinesexuality (2008); and Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds (2010).
7. Kathy Acker, New York City in 1979 (London, UK: Penguin Random House, 2018,) 6.
8. Marguerite Yourcenar, Fires (Trans. Dori Katz, London, UK: Black Swan Books, 1974), 64.
9. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (Trans. Richard Howard, London, UK: Vintage Books, 2000), 85.
10. Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 3.
Issue 46: Ghost
Guest edited by Xanthe Dobbie.
These works were commissioned for the issue:
best viewed on Desktop
1. INT. CAR - DAY
THELMA
Okay then listen. Let’s not get caught.
LOUISE
What’re ya talkin’ about?
THELMA
Let’s keep going’.
LOUISE
What d’ya mean?
Thelma turns to face forward and gestures with her head toward the cliff ahead.
THELMA
Go.
LOUISE
You sure?
THELMA
Yeah. Hit it.
They smile at each other, then Louise leans forward and kisses Thelma.
In 1991, two women in a ‘66 Ford Thunderbird drive off a cliff.
This is the final sequence of the film, Thelma & Louise; a film about two small-town working-class women turned outlaws, set against the backdrop of the American Mid-West.
With the long arm of the law at their backs, they choose to keep going.
Accelerating off the cliff, they take flight. The image freezes and the screen fades to white before we see the car crash into the canyon below. In the collective consciousness, they remain forever hanging in the air and forever falling.
They are going to die, and they are already dead.
In the freeze frame both realities exist, placing our protagonists in an eternally liminal space between living and dead: the (un)dead.
The fade out = a ghostly vanishing.
This is the precise moment where Thelma and Louise leave their flesh bodies for the spectral avatars they will inhabit in the underworld.
Speaking to the histories of lesbian and queer women’s representation in mainstream visual culture, Terry Castle proposes that the lesbian is, and always was, apparitional. [1]
In the contemporary struggle for visibility, concrete definitions and full incorporation into mainstream society - what Lisa Duggan and Michael Warner call “homonormativity” - there has evolved a demand for overt representation. [2]
What gets lost in such projects is the nuance, fluidity and general unruliness that constitutes a queer identity. For this reason (and many more) I would like to argue for remaining in the in-between, to be apparitional, free to drift between all time and space.
“The colour ultraviolet, like most of lesbian history, is located just beyond the visible spectrum. Violet, as a sign of love between women, serves as an indicator of what lies beyond the visible spectrum and as a means by which to become visible to each other.”
~ Andrea Weiss [3]
2. INT. CAR (THE ARID LOWLANDS OF THE UNDERWORLD) - DAY
From the white nothing that enveloped them, a new landscape bleeds into view. The sky has turned a rich amethyst, casting a violet glow over everything.
Louise is driving and can feel the resistance come back into the steering column. The car is no longer airborne. They’re back on the road. Through the windscreen, Thelma and Louise gape at the dense masses of Black Eyed Susans lining the edge of the highway, their yellow petals fluorescing against the ultraviolet light.
Suddenly, the engine loses power and the car slows to a halt.
THELMA
What’d we do now?
LOUISE
What is this place?
Approaching from up ahead, the travellers spy the headlights of another vehicle. Thelma rushes out into the middle of the road to flag them down.
Making a u-turn before pulling up in front of their convertible, the tow truck driver kills the engine and jumps out of the cab. Unsurprisingly, in this alternate reality of deep lez subtext, the tow truck driver looks like Lucy Lawless in the little-known 1996 New Zealand short film, PEACH. [4]
With mouth agape, Thelma devours the figure of the woman standing before them.
THELMA
Gosh almighty, you’re the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen.
3. EXT. ROADSIDE - DAY
The tow truck driver extends a hand to Thelma in greeting.
CHARON
(in a thick New Zealand)
accent)
The name’s Charon. Less like Sharon, more like Karen.
Charon and Thelma shake hands. Before Thelma has a chance to reply, Charon moves toward the bumper of their Thunderbird and vanishes below the hood.
Many previously unknown unknowns make themselves known to Louise and Thelma as Charon tethers their car to the tow bar. Without a dime, after being swindled by Brad Pitt’s six pack, Thelma and Louise have no choice but to take the long road. To get to the Styx - the ring road that encircles the underworld - they have to detour down Acheron Avenue.
By embarking on this katabatic journey, Thelma and Louise have turned their backs on chrononormativity, choosing to be with and become the queer (un)dead… †
INT./EXT. CAR - DAY
Louise cracks open her eyelids just as a large green highway sign comes into view. It reads: “The Styx”. They pull over and Charon unfastens their car from the truck.
Louise sleepily fumbles for the door handle, hurls her legs out like two dead weights and staggers up to Charon.
LOUISE
But our car won’t start.
CHARON
It should be fine now. They all break down when folks first arrive.
LOUISE
What way do we go?
Charon, swaggering back to her truck replies without so much as a backward glance.
CHARON
Left. Right. Which way you travel don’t make a difference. Wherever you’re headin’, you’ll get there no matter which way you turn.
LOUISE
That all sounds mighty vague.
CHARON
Well, that’s nowhere for ya’.
Charon tips her red leather cap before jumping into the truck and taking off.
“The history of Western representation is littered with the corpses of gender and sexual deviants. Those who are directly identified with same-sex desire most often end up dead; if they manage to survive, it is on such compromised terms that it makes death seem attractive.”
~ Heather Love [5]
(UN)DEAD
The ‘(un)’ is parenthesised to augment the condition of the literal dead with the fictional creature of the undead, often a monstrous figure – such as a vampire, zombie or ghost – who is dead but still animate. The undead monster of horror cinema and literature has long been associated with queer, minority and outsider subjectivities and modes of desire. [6] As equally liminal, abject and aberrant figures that hover between life and death, the undead stand for all those who operate outside normative social and spatiotemporal systems.
5. INT. CAR - NIGHT
The duo are now driving in darkness, save for the brilliant assembly of stars above them.
Too tired to speak, they venture into their respective inner monologues. Thelma fusses with a loose thread on the neck of her t-shirt while contemplating who she would fuck, marry or kill in a choice between Kenny Rodgers, Dwight Yoakam and that curly haired lady who sings about Elvis.
Louise is feeling more philosophical. Sex and death being a recurring theme as she muses on the similarities between fucking and time travel.
Both muddle up inside and outside, yours and theirs.
There are holes: arse holes, cunt holes, wormholes.
They’re all portals: gateways, thresholds.
How much of you are you when there is someone else inside you?
Flesh-bodies in flesh-bodies
Flesh-bodies on flesh-bodies
Ghost-bodies in flesh-bodies
All signify an openness to being haunted.
Past, present and future converge in the body of the haunted subject, disturbing linear time.
Prosopopoeia is the act of giving voice to the dead. It may involve someone taking on the identity of a deceased person in an attempt to speak from their perspective; or the personification of an inanimate object, collapsing the distinction between animate and inanimate, human and more-than-human.
Sliding into the skin of another we become hybrid.
Calling on ghosts to enter us, we are at once being with and becoming the (un)dead.
“A grave is spreading its legs
and BEGGING FOR LOVE”
~ Kathy Acker [7]
6. INT. CAR - NIGHT
Thelma is now behind the wheel and Louise is half asleep. Lurching around a tight bend, a concrete box flushed in blue light comes into view.
THELMA
Yea-haw!
LOUISE
(jolted awake)
Heck, Thelma!
THELMA
Louise, look there. What’s that sign say?
Thelma squints to get a clearer view of the neon sign mounted to the front of the building. She floors the accelerator in the direction of their salvation.
LOUISE
Sulkys.
THELMA
What’s that poster on the door say?
LOUISE
If you weren’t drivin’ so fast, I’d be able to read it.
(beat)
It says: “Biggest jugs this side of the Aegean".
THELMA
Sounds like a good time to me.
Thelma pulls up with a screech six paces from the front door, leaps out of the car and goes full hell for leather toward the entrance.
“Ah,
to die
in order to stop Time.”
~ Marguerite Yourcenar [8]
7. INT. SULKY’S DYKE BAR - NIGHT
Thelma strides through the door. Louise, curious but cautious, follows close behind. The energy in the bar feels raw and unpredictable. The walls are clad in a deep mahogany, handsomely embracing the patrons cloistered in the dimly lit booths. A single warm white light hangs above each table, spotlighting the territories of encounter.
Across tabletops, thumbs circle the rims of schooner glasses; fingers worry at cardboard coasters, tearing them to pulp; a hand reaches out to clasp another; two faces momentarily come into view before joining at the lips. It’s LEATHER & DENIM NIGHT, but so is every other night. ”NEVER LOVED A MAN” BY ARETHA FRANKLIN is playing from a juke box in the corner of the room.
LOUISE
Whole lotta ladies in here.
THELMA
It’s a dyke bar, Louise.
LOUISE
I know that, Thelma. Don’t patronise me. Ain’t the first time I heard that word.
THELMA
Which word is that?
LOUISE
You know which word.
THELMA
I know you know. I just wanna hear you say it.
LOUISE
Thelma, quit teasin’ me!
THELMA
Why can’t you say it?
LOUISE
Shut up and get me a drink.
Thelma makes her way toward the bar, leaving Louise standing wide-eyed in the middle of the room. Louise slowly begins to turn her body, taking it all in.
Louise finally angles herself in the direction of the bar and watches Thelma flirting with the bartender. A woman (DOROTHY) notices Louise looking toward the bar and approaches from behind. She leans in to whisper in Louise’s ear. Before Dorothy can get a word out Louise gasps and jumps three feet in front of her.
DOROTHY
Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you. Thought you might’ve seen me coming in your periphery. I’m Dorothy, and you are?
LOUISE
Louise. And that there is my friend Thelma.
DOROTHY
Your friend. What kinda friend?
Louise doesn’t answer. She watches Dorothy’s eyes undressing her, her gaze slowly painting its way down to her boots and back up to her face, stalling at the lips. Louise nervously pivots her gaze back toward the bar and watches the bartender pass Thelma two shots of rum.
DOROTHY
(pointing to the bartender)
That’s Dolores. Our Lady of the Sorrows. Patron Saint of Sapphic Yearning.
LOUISE
That’s a lot of titles.
DOROTHY
She had a lot of titles upstairs too. Her name was Stormé DeLarverie and she was guardian of the lesbian bars in New York City.
(beat)
She used to patrol the streets, making sure there weren’t any sisters in trouble. It’s rumoured she threw the first punch at Stonewall. I’ll introduce you.
Dorothy takes hold of Louise’s hand and leads her to the bar.
DOLORES
Well well. It’s been a long time, Dorothy.
DOROTHY
How you doin' Dolores?
DOLORES
Like shit.
(beat)
Well, now that we're all caught up, can I fix you a drink?
DOROTHY
Dolores, this is Louise.
DOLORES
Welcome home, Louise. Any friend of Dorothy is a friend of mine.
8. INT. SULKY’S DYKE BAR - NIGHT
Thelma and Louise are both perched on stools at the bar. With five fingers of rum inside her, Thelma is restless and jumps up from her seat.
THELMA
Aaack! I want some action.
As Thelma strides up to the group of leather-clad women shooting pool in the corner, Louise watches from the bar. She observes a look of wicked delight on Thelma’s face. Louise recognises this look. Louise gave her the same look the night after she robbed the Bedrock General Store. In their shared motel room, Thelma re-enacted the scene.
They laughed as Thelma passed the bottle of Wild Turkey to Louise. Louise’s hand clasped the neck of the bottle. Thelma held her grip, grinning and cocking her head to the left as she pulled the bottle and Louise closer to her.
A glass rolls off the bar and smashes on the floor.
9. EXT. SULKY’S BAR CAR PARK - NIGHT
The blanket of sky above them is that of deep space. Every dead star’s light punches holes in the black vacuum: into other worlds, other times, times long past.
Louise has the driver’s seat reclined, drinking in the firmament as her left index finger traces the lip of the wound-down window beside her. Thelma is splayed across the bonnet, her boots hanging off the right fender as she hums the chorus of “IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE” BY DUSTY SPRINGFIELD over and over. She can’t remember the rest of it.
Louise casts her eyes down to a black and white square poking out of the ashtray beside her. She pulls it out and flips it over. It’s a polaroid photo they took at the start of their trip.
LOUISE
Huh. I was so sure we lost this.
THELMA
What’s that?
LOUISE
This photo of us. Remember, we took it before all this. I barely recognise us.
Thelma swings her legs over and jumps off the bonnet. She leans into the driver’s side, resting her left arm on the car door while reaching for the photo with the other.
THELMA
Hmm, yeah. They kinda look like us.
LOUISE
They look like ghosts.
END.
“The photograph does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been.”
~ Roland Barthes [9]
** Katabasis: Ancient Greek κατάβασις, from κατὰ "down" and βαίνω “go”. Is the journey to the underworld most commonly figured within classical Roman and Greek mythology.
Chrononormativity: “the use of time to organise individual human bodies toward maximum productivity.” [10]
Endnotes
1. Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: female homosexuality and modern culture, 1993
2. See: Lisa Duggan, The twilight of equality? : neoliberalism, cultural politics, and the attack on democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003); Michael Warner, ‘Normal and Normaller: Beyond Gay Marriage’. In GLQ, 5, 1999, 119–171. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-5-2-119
3. Andrea Weiss, Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in the cinema (London, UK: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1992), 2.
4. Peach, directed by Christine Parker (Oceania Parker Ltd, 1996), https://vimeo.com/171270628.
5. Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 1.
6. See: Jack Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995); Rosi Braidotti, ‘Cyberteratologies: Female Monsters Negotiate the Other’s Participation in Humanity’s Far Future’ (2003); Patricia MacCormack, Cinesexuality (2008); and Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds (2010).
7. Kathy Acker, New York City in 1979 (London, UK: Penguin Random House, 2018,) 6.
8. Marguerite Yourcenar, Fires (Trans. Dori Katz, London, UK: Black Swan Books, 1974), 64.
9. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (Trans. Richard Howard, London, UK: Vintage Books, 2000), 85.
10. Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 3.
Jade Muratore is a researcher and artist based in Sydney, Australia.
She works across performance, installation, and video, with a specific interest in queer performance and visual culture, alternative historicising practices and fandom methodologies.
Jade has a Bachelor of Art Theory (Hons Class 1), a Graduate Diploma in Cultural Leadership and is a current PhD candidate, all at UNSW Art & Design, Sydney. Her PhD project titled Going Down, is a practice-based research project on anarchival and temporally disruptive methodologies in contemporary performance and moving image practice. Jade is a core and founding member of the art collective Hissy Fit (with collaborators EO Gill and Nat Randall) and has exhibited works at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Performance Space, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Arts House, and Carriageworks among others.
Professionally, Jade has over 10 years’ experience in the arts, cultural and community sectors. She is a casual academic teaching in art history and theory, fine arts, and screen culture, and works freelance as a producer and production manager on independent productions and arts events.
Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches. We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.
Runway Journal is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Runway Journal receives project support from the NSW Government through Create NSW.
Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches. We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.
Runway Journal is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Runway Journal receives project support from the NSW Government through Create NSW.