Thelma & Louise and Set it Off
A sense of sisterhood and loyalty is present in both Thelma and Louise and Set it Off, though they come from different circumstances. Thelma and Louise feel this connection to a certain extent as friends, but it is clear that the truly strong bond that leads them to commit suicide together does not begin to develop until after they start running from the law together--after Louise kills Harlan. The four friend in Set it Off, on the other hand, seem to have a much closer relationship and an immediate sense of sisterhood from the very beginning of the film, seemingly derived from their situation--living in the projects--and mutual desire to change that situation. In these two instances, the white, middle-class women and the lower-class black women are driven together by situations that make them want something more than friendship--a closer relationship with the women important to them. For the white women, their sisterhood is strengthened by the active threat of rape, a definitive external force that drives them together; for the black women, it is simply the conditions in which they live that brings them close together (although the straight women are closer to each other than they are to Cleo, whose lesbian relationship makes them uneasy). It seems as though the white women can afford to have an easy friendship because of the greater freedom their race gives them, while the black women must have the strong sisterly bond from the beginning to merely survive the perils of being underprivileged both financially and racially.
Violence in Set it Off is much more graphic and omnipresent than in Thelma and Louise, though much of it is committed by men in the former. The opening bank robbery in which Frankie watches one of the (male) robbers shoot a woman in the head is much more graphic than the women's later violent crime, when Tisean shoots Luther as he threatens Cleo. Tisean's crime is much more like Louise's shooting of Harlan than the shooting Frankie witnesses during the robbery--both Louise and Tisean shoot to protect their friends from a male threat. However, this is one of the few similarities between the women in these two movies when it comes to violence. The bank robbers in Set it Off are much more willing to threaten bystanders with their guns than Thelma and Louise are (the latter apologize profusely to the highway cop as they lock him in his trunk at gunpoint while the former shout at bank patrons as they point guns at them and steal the money). It is as if the people behind these two films believe that violence is more acceptable to the audience when it is committed by black women or by men--the white women are considered victims of circumstance for much of their film, while the black women are immediately suspected of malicious wrongdoing--so that Thelma and Louise's crimes are immediately justified while the Set it Off ladies' crimes are a little more morally ambiguous. The privilege of the white women here is clear--they commit justifiable homicide and get a chance to hit the road and run from the authorities while the black women are suspected from the start and are trapped in Los Angeles.