"Something's crossed over in me. I can't go back. I couldn't live."

For those who experienced the tumultous "girlpower" ride of 1990s popular culture this Pretty Woman vs. Thelma & Louise essay in The New York Times is wonderfully mnemonic... and insightful.

Love that accompanying illustration by Tom Gauld. Spot on, spot!

Here's a morsel from the article on the narrative transformational journeys of Thelma (Geena Davis) and Vivian (Julia Roberts), the "ingenues" as the narratives go.

...only Thelma transitions into a new, more independent self, while Vivian finds a way to be preserved as a wide-eyed child-bride forever.

It was precisely this happy ending that made people love “Pretty Woman,” just as it was the flying-off-the-cliff part that made some people object to “Thelma and Louise.” But while Vivian was happily giving herself to a callous oligarch who would purchase her personhood (as she chirped inanities about “rescuing him right back”), Thelma was saving herself by holding up a gas station and locking a cop in the trunk of his car. As every moment of Vivian’s transformative love story — from buying new outfits to subsuming herself to her Pygmalion husband — is transactional, every step of Thelma’s transformation is about evolving from chattel to free agent. In fact, you can make the argument that it was actually Vivian, not Thelma and Louise, who ceased to exist at the end of her film.

Guess which film predicted the next two decades of pop culture? Sigh.

In the magazine version (alas not online) the sidebar features Susan Sarandon Haikus by Adam Sternbergh. These were the two funniest:

Kind Sister Prejean
Bravely faced down injustice
And Sean Penn's Acting.

Nun, hooker, stepmom,
Your only regret, no doubt:
"Mr Woodcock," yes?

Teehee.

Come back to the five and dime Susan Sarandon, Susan Sarandon. And by five and dime, we mean "good movies."