"I don't know, there is something about the ideological lesson of those movies (happiness not in this category), and say like Thelma and Louise and hundreds of others, which ALWAYS make the payment for breaking the boundaries of social norms to be the protagonists death. Sacrifice/payment must be made to re balance the disturbing of the symbolic order.
So, on the one hand, they want you to identify and sympathize with the ideals of the heroes, but make sure you understand that to actually act on any subversive or 'revolutionary' activity/mindset, is bound to fail, will lead to your ruin or demise."
I won't comment on Thelma and Louise. But as for AB and RR, I think your comments are too general.
If we look at the subversive/revolutionary content of AB, we don't find much. This is because AB describes a culture who cannot imagine a greater happiness than teenage freedom, and as we all know, teenage freedom is an illusion supported by endless parental patience and work. This is why the Marine guy and Lester conflict; the Marine guy is the cultural form of adulthood/authority, and Lester the bourgeois form of freedom (which historically cannot exceed the adolescent stage because it admits no communal solutions). They are both distortions, in different directions, of an adult human being. Lester's failure as a revolutionary is the failure of the culture to allow him even to be imagine a real revolution rather than adolescent reaction.
The only solutions offered in the movie, by way of Wes, are the intoxication of drugs or the intoxication of art, and it is only art that offers any possible way of comprehending the nature of suburban culture...by way of its negation.... in the beauty of a plastic bag floating in the wind.
So the failure of revolution in AB is the failure of a degraded revolution; and to understand that is to begin to understand what an actual revolution might have to offer that. It would be a lot more than driving a TransAm and getting high.
As for RR, the revolution envisaged by Frank and April, is nothing more than a romantic, foreign version of their suburban mausoleum. Whether at home or in Paris, the main point is to avoid thinking about the horrors of the war, to create a new life without taking that small fact into account. I thought, at any rate, that the story (and the movie) was a marvellous expression of the deep need to forget and the inability, consequently to create new life (April's abortion) out of the barren ground of forgetting and denial.
Joanna