ABSTRACT
Friendship is not a particularly popular topic for movies. One reason for friendship’s relative absence from the screen must be that friendship compared to romance is undervalued in the contemporary Western world. This chapter considers the kinds of values that philosophers have accorded to friendship. Using the plotlines of the movies Death in Brunswick and Heavenly Creatures, it explains how the evaluation of conflicts between friendship’s existential value and its moral value depends on context. The chapter provides a discussion of the movies Thelma & Louise and Bagdad Cafe foregrounds the distinctive value that friendship has for feminist ends. The movie Girlhood offers a realistic picture of the limits of friendship while still celebrating the true, be it limited, empowerment that friendship can yield. Movies like Girlhood, Thelma & Louise, and Bagdad Cafe put pressure on C.S. Lewis’s statement that friendship is the least necessary love.
