In a 2002 interview with Bernie Cook, Callie Khouri says of the film she scripted, “It is extremely gratifying to know that [Thelma and Louise] still persists in the consciousness of the culture.” The interview appears in Cook's edited collection Thelma and Louise Live! The Cultural Afterlife of An American Film, which attests to that persistent consciousness of the film with six new critical readings and a look back to the generative moment of that consciousness with the inclusion of three magazine articles from the summer of 1991. The six chapters in the anthology offer new academic readings of the film, which Cook says are linked by “a concern for the film's social meaning.” Considering that much of the film's social meaning has centered on women and feminism, it may be surprising that none of the chapters focusses directly on these issues, although it may be argued that they have been extensively dealt with elsewhere. Of course, none of the authors in the collection can fully ignore them either, so several chapters in this anthology offer readings centered on specifically filmic elements while analyzing how these elements engage with the representation of gender. The strongest of these is Victoria Sturtevant's chapter on comedy in the film, in which she argues that the associations of women, laughter, and madness in the film work to expose patriarchal rules as laughable. Her approach is particularly fruitful as the film has not generally been seen as a comedy. Her argument – that the women's luring of the trucker off the highway in order to punish him situates them in a long tradition of the female trickster – offers a fresh reading of an exemplary moment in the film that was most often cited as offensive. J. David Slocum's “meditation” on Thelma and Louise as an “outlaw-couple-on-the-run” film for the 1990s argues that the film attempts to subvert American mythmaking, in the manner of Bonnie and Clyde, while simultaneously indulging in nostalgia for the now mythical period of the 1960s. His analysis shows how a reading of the film as a product of only its own era's cultural politics misses out on the film's complex engagement with American history and film history. Claudia Gorbman's, Susan Kobloch's, and Cynthia Fuch's chapters on the pop score, acting, and Brad Pitt as star, respectively, all show how the popular simplification of the film's gender politics into “male-bashing feminist screed” are complicated by close textual analysis of these elements. Fuch's reading of Pitt reveals how the male characters in the film collectively represent the “everyday harassments” the women face rather than a condemnation of men and masculinity. Cook's introductory chapter paves the way for the rest by arguing that the audience reception of the film was much more complicated than the gender divide amongst the critics by showing how both men and women identified with the female protagonists' journey toward a more mobile identity. After reading these chapters, the 1991 articles initially seem out of place in the book as they exhibit the heated opinions of the contemporary moment. However, their inclusion underlines how good, detailed film analysis can expose the simplicity of popular, reductive discourses about films, like Thelma and Louise, that “hit a cultural nerve”: a useful lesson for any classroom.