Set It Off vs. Thelma and Louise
How are sisterhood and loyalty established?
In both Thelma and Louise and Set It Off sisterhood and loyalty are established by the women's status/place in society and solidified through the process of law breaking. At the beginning of the film Thelma and Louise are two stereotypical women: one a waitress, the other a lonely housewife. The two confide and depend on each other as a means of support. In Set It Off the four girls also play into many racial and gender stereotypes (the black unmarried mother, "hood rats" etc.), and it is the unjustices that they suffer that brings the women together. In both films it is the girls friendship and loyalty to each other that brings them into the world of outlaws, the trust that they have established in one another is the biggest factor that keeps them going, weather it be off a cliff or robbing banks.
How is outlaw status justified?
In both films the justification of the women's violent lifestyle comes from the way that they have been treated in life and by society. In Thelma and Louise it is the overbearing/unloving husband, the un-talked about rape that drive the women to their ultimate end. Quite literally, it is the men in their life that drove them to commit any of the crimes in the first place. Louise's rape made her shoot Harlen in the parking lot, J.D. stole their money so that made Thelma rob the convenience store, and the whole troop of squad cars was the final push that they needed to set them off the cliff. In Set It Off it is the racial and economic discriminations that the women suffer from that causes them to enter into the world of the outlaw. As a viewer from the very beginning I found myself identifying with Frankie and was filled with rage when she was fired from the bank. Simply because of the neighborhood she lived in and the kind of people who lived there she was fired from a job she worked her ass off at. T.T. was a single mother living in the hood just trying to feed her baby by janitoring at night and when she couldn't afford a babysitter her son was taken away; Stony's brother was killed unjustly and Cleo was a lesbian who was constantly being hit with slanders. The way the women were treated in their every day life was enough to drive them into this lifestyle as they were only trying to escape the hands of poverty and oppression, not because they wanted to hurt anybody.