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From http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/alexie.html:
Cineaste: Would you comment on the two young women driving their car
in reverse?
Alexie: [Laughs] Well, their names are Thelma and Lucy!
Cineaste: To avoid copyright problems?
Alexie: It was an in-joke for me, playing around with the idea of a road movie. I love that movie, as an anti-road movie which deconstructs the whole macho road/buddy movie, so I wanted to put them in there as an homage to Thelma & Louise. It also has to do with the sense of time in the movie, when the past, present, and future are all the same, that circular sense of time which plays itself out in the seamless transitions from past to present. Within that circular sense of time, I also wanted to have this car driving in reverse. The phrase I always use is, "Sometimes to go forward you have to drive in reverse." So it's a visual metaphor for what we were doing.
It's also an Indian metaphor because our cars are always screwed up. There was a man who one summer drove his pickup all over the reservation in reverse because none of the forward gears worked. It's one of those moments that I think everybody can find amusing, but non-Indian audiences are going to say, "OK, this is funny, but what the hell's going on?," because there is no explanation for it. Indian audiences are really going to laugh, however, because they're going to completely understand it. I call those kinds of things Indian trapdoors, because an Indian will walk over them and fall in, but a non-Indian will keep on walking.
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