This is not, to be clear, a good thing.

Thelma & Louise’s plot revolves around the consequences of an attempted rape: Harlan, a smarmy guy Thelma meets in a roadside bar—a guy she drinks with, and dances with, and flirts with—takes her out back, to the bar’s parking lot. In the guise of taking care of her—she drank a little too much, and dizzied as they danced—he kisses her. She resists him. Things escalate. He hits her. He unzips his jeans. He ignores her flailing protests. He tries to rape her. Louise finds them in the parking lot, and brandishes the gun Thelma has brought with them on their road trip. He stops, finally. “In the future,” Louise informs him, icily, “if a woman’s crying like that, she ain’t having any fun.”

But Harlan remains unrepentant, and Louise snaps. It happens instantly, as if by electric impulse: She shoots him. Dead.

It’s the action that sets all the other actions in Thelma & Louise in motion. But it’s not, it turns out, an isolated incident. We learn later that Louise’s fateful shot was the result not just of her loyalty to Thelma, and not just of her simmering frustration with disappointing men, and not just of her knowledge that Harlan had likely raped before and would likely go on to do it again; it was also the outcome of a more isolated event. Louise, it turns out, had been a victim of rape herself.

So Thelma & Louise, a road trip movie that operates on circular time, is propelled by the basic truth that violence begets violence. It’s a cartoonish revenge fantasy, to be sure—Thelma and Louise go on to rob a gas station and stuff a cop into a car trunk and explode the oil tanker of a man who has serially harassed them—but one that’s propelled not so much by the adrenaline rush of vigilante justice so much as a more logical truth: Thelma and Louise have no recourse but violence. They try to get money, legally; a man (Brad Pitt, in his break-out role) steals it; they’re forced, then, to become thieves themselves, Thelma brandishing her gun at that gas station. They try to flee—Harlan, the police, their unfulfilling lives; they are pursued. (“Oh my God, it looks like the Army!” Thelma remarks, at the phalanx of law-enforcement officers who finally surround them. “All this, for us?” Louise marvels.)

But the fundamental fact of Thelma & Louise—the one that ultimately drives its plot, and the one that makes it feel so disappointingly fresh today—is the women’s recognition that they can’t trust the law, because the law doesn’t trust them. “No one would believe us” runs like a refrain through the film’s taut dialogues, and it underscores pretty much every decision the two women make during their road-trip-turned-crime-spree. The women thought about going to the cops, at first, toying with the notion of confessing and explaining what had happened; they realized, though, that it would be their word against a dead man’s, and that the dead man’s would prevail. “Just about 100 people saw you dancing cheek to cheek with him,” Louise tells Thelma, explaining why no one would see their side of the story. “We don’t live in that kind of world, Thelma!”