The movie Thelma and Louise has two main characters: Thelma who is an unhappy married lady with her husband, and Louise, who is a waitress and also has a boyfriend by the name Jimmy, who seems to her like he is not ready to get into a long-lasting relationship with her. The movie starts with the two ladies planning on going to visit a friend by themselves. Thelma is afraid to reveal to her husband that she is leaving for the trip since she is in an abusive marriage. Louise, on the other hand, is quite much free to do whatever she wants and thus is independent more than Thelma.
According to Hobbes theory of the state of nature and the government as an artificial creation, every human being has the free will to do whatever they deem fit according to them in order for them to protect their freedom and also to protect themselves in any event that they feel threatened with disregard to the set laws and regulations of the society. In the movie, after Thelma and Louise take on their vacation, they make a stopover where they both have a few drinks. Thelma meets Harlan whom they dance with, and after she has had too much to drink he secludes her to the parking lot and after she refuses his advances, he tries to rape her. Louise had carried her boyfriend’s gun, and she comes with it in hand and orders Harlan to leave her friend alone. This causes Harlan to start hurling insults at them and Louise shoots him in return (Pettit, 1997).
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This shows Louise knew she could not overpower Harlan, and thus had to use the gun to defend her and her friend from any physical confrontation that might have arisen had they tried to fight him back. This event positively impacts on the characters: since Louise has prevented her friend Thelma from being raped by Harlan, and thus avoiding the trauma and regrets, that they might have gone through had anything terrible happened to her because Thelma had taken off without her husband’s authority. It also negatively affects the fun that they intended to have away from their spouses since they now get away from a crime scene and render themselves fugitives of the state (Harrison, 2003).
There is also another scene where at a gas station, they bump into JD and Thelma strikes a conversation with him leading to her being charmed by him. They offer him a lift, and they head off for Oklahoma where Louise is supposed to collect some money she had borrowed from her boyfriend Jimmy to help them escape. At the destination, she instead meets Jimmy, and he pays a separate room for Thelma, who now has money and she decides to invite JD in and they get to share a lot with JD giving her some of the details, of how he survives as a thief. In the morning, she leaves him in the room only to get back with Louise to find their money gone. This causes Thelma to rob a gas station since she does not want to surrender and at the same time she does not have the money to keep going. This helps them continue executing their escape plan, which was the sole intention of Thelma carrying out the robbery, but at the same time Thelma now becomes a wanted criminal in Oklahoma for armed robbery.
Jean Jacques Rousseau’s theory of the government and society as inhibitors of our natural freedoms suggests that, the state of nature did not ensure adherence to the law. It would even cause humans to live in hostility. However, with a social contract, where everyone has his or her particular rights and freedom, it would be easier to enforce the law and freedom in society. Citizens of a country are thus supposed to obey the laws set aside for them so as to ensure that they live peacefully among each other. The government is in turn supposed to protect every citizen from harm by their fellow citizens.
As the movie ends the law enforcement officers catch up with Louise and Thelma, and after they are cornered they decide not to end the freedom, they had created for themselves. After they had run away from the authorities, they decided they did not want any of their past lives again. Thelma was no longer in the abusive relationship she had with her husband, and Louise had turned down her boyfriend’s marriage proposal at the Motel in Oklahoma where he had come to give her money for escape. Here we see how they mistrust the law enforcement officers: since they did not believe Thelma was raped and that Louise’s shooting Harlan was a self-defense. They were aware their freedom would have been cut short, if they tried to contact any authorities; and to protect their freedom, Thelma and Louise decided to end their lives together by driving their car off a cliff.
There is another scene where the two ladies encounter a trucker on the road, and he offends them by trying to talk them into engaging in sexual activity with them. They are up to teaching him a lesson for disrespecting them, but they first ask him to make an apology, but he refuses. They then blow up his truck by shooting his fuel tank. Here they decided to disobey the law and destroy someone else’s property; since he did not abide the laws, whereby he should have apologized to them for the obscene words he had used towards them.