Sometimes with a movie, it’s all about the tagline:
“They’re young … they’re in love … and they kill people.”
[record scratch]
Say what?
*****
Until a couple of weeks after I turned seventeen, Bonnie and Clyde was one of those movies I vaguely knew existed but didn’t know the first thing about. Sort of like St. Kitts & Nevis, or APR financing, or the female orgasm.
Now, I couldn’t quite record the kind of movies that would educate me on the latter subject off network television and onto a VHS cassette, but I could record Bonnie and Clyde. I think it aired at 2:00 in the morning, but the VCR had this amazing feature where I could “program” the machine to start recording at 2:00 a.m., and then – if you can believe this – view it the next day. I could even fast-forward through the commercials! Assuming I wanted to watch the whole movie anyway, that is.
Well, about five minutes in, I knew.
Some movies fart around, stretch their legs, take their time to get into the groove. Bonnie and Clyde cuts to the chase. No, literally.
I don’t know precisely how I expected Bonnie and Clyde to begin, but I wasn’t expecting it to begin like this:
1) A young, handsome stranger (Clyde Barrow) approaches a random car, in front of a random house, and attempts to steal it.
Interesting.
2) A young, beautiful stranger (Bonnie Parker), after observing this would-be car thief from her bedroom window, opts to not only befriend him (“My my … the thangs that turn up in the street these days …”), but to stroll down the town’s main drag and playfully chat with this stranger (who, lest we forget, she has just caught attempting to steal a car), while slurping the top of a Coca-Cola bottle in a rather orally-inclined manner, and rubbing her fingers against his revolver, which happens to be curiously placed over his groin area.
Interesting.
3) Spurred on by Bonnie’s skeptical observation, “But you wouldn’t have the gumption to use it,” Clyde promptly robs a store, fires a bullet into the air, and as he hotwires an automobile, they take this opportunity to formally introduce themselves:
“Hey, what’s your name anyhow?”
“Clyde Barrow.”
“Hi, I’m Bonnie Parker. Pleased to meet you.”
Interesting.
Before you know it, they’re swerving down a country road at a less-than-safe speed, Bonnie just about ready to have Clyde’s baby, and … is that a banjo I’m hearing?
This movie was crazy, all right. But the good kind of crazy.
I sat there, munching on my stale Cheez-Its, viewing the product of the previous evening’s VHS taping, and thought to myself, “Now this is how you start a movie.”
*****
Bonnie and Clyde, within the history of 20th century film, is considered a very “important” and “significant” movie, and I’ll get to that. Oh, you will regret the day I get to that. But before I do, I just want to say this:
Talk about a film with style.
Some movies have style, some movies don’t. Bonnie and Clyde’s got style like Norway’s got fjords.
Even the opening credits have got style. Those crisp, quick flashes of sepia-tinted Depression-era photographs all but say, “Hi. How are you? I’m Bonnie and Clyde. I am going to do everything I want to do to you, dear viewer, exactly the way I want to do it, and I will leave you choking on a cloud of dust and admiration, your throat parched and your nostrils bleeding.” The credits give off just the right tone-setting mixture of stillness, rapidity, and preciseness.
So, forget all the other noise; I feel like Bonnie and Clyde is worth watching merely so I can soak in its style alone. Maybe I’m just a sucker for evocative, old-timey Americana as interpreted through that knowing, distanced late ‘60s prism (see: Sweetheart of the Rodeo; Music from Big Pink). But out of all the ink spilled over this film, how much of that ink has been devoted to praising it as a period piece? Today, you have seen me spill that ink.
Some balloon-puncturing history professor is about to explain to me that director Arthur Penn mistakenly utilized a 1937 Ford V8 instead of a 1932 Ford V8 during that one car chase sequence, that Flatt & Scruggs’s “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” wasn’t released until 1949, and that the real Bonnie and Clyde didn’t do half the things this movie depicts them doing.
I am unpersuaded. It’s all about the vibe, the atmosphere, how I can feel the desolation of the landscape surrounding these two snotty, narcissistic felons I don’t care for very much. This movie is like Dust Bowl porn.
I mean, if I actually lived through the Great Depression, I would have probably found it exceedingly unpleasant. But imagining that I’m lumbering about in some amber-hued wheat field, a knapsack on my back and a can of burnt baked beans in my belly? Sounds good to me.
So, aside from the many other things I’m about to claim this movie does well, I adore it simply for its tactile, inviting Walker Evans aesthetic alone. Perhaps a more accurate title for this film might be Bonnie, Clyde, and the Earthy, Weathered World in Which They Inhabit. Check out some of these shots and just try to keep your overalls on:
Mmm. Tom Joad, eat your heart out.
An FDR poster and a fire station that’s missing the letter “D”? Someone spray me with a firehose.
Back when a road was a road.
And I don’t know if any other movie does “the inside of a sweltering country store” as well as Bonnie and Clyde does:
I can just feel the sticky, humid air seeping through my undershirt. Hell, in this movie, even an ordinary shot of a newspaper reeks of atmosphere:
“U.S. Delegates Attend Meet”? A meet on what? Who doesn’t want to read that story?
(Side note: The film’s cinematographer was named Burnett Guffey. Most Dust Bowl name for a cinematographer ever?)
My point is, since Bonnie and Clyde tends to be analyzed as a movie “about the ‘60s,” the period piece side of it gets lost in the shuffle. But because Penn picked his era and committed to it, I think it works on that level even if the viewer doesn’t delve into the other levels. It’s like Animal Farm – better if you understand the subtext, but not explicitly dependent on it.
Besides, making your film a period piece already halfway renders it “timeless,” by virtue of it not being set in the period in which it was made (unless it’s a Baz Luhrmann period piece, in which case, all bets are off). Quick: which 1967 film feels less “dated”: The Graduate, or Bonnie and Clyde? And that’s not a knock on The Graduate.
Speaking of the 1930s. The time has come … to talk about the Production Code.
*****
Oh, you thought this was going to be an essay about Bonnie and Clyde?
Don’t worry, it still is – I think. The thing is, I wrote about Bonnie and Clyde back in grad school, and I did all this research when I wrote about it, and I need to take advantage of the $12,000 debt they saddled me with somehow.
They didn’t even give me the dignity of getting to call it a master’s thesis. I had to call it a master’s “essay.” “Well, a thesis is ultimately published, whereas your essay is only going to be read by me (your advisor), and some other professor you’ll never actually meet, and then swiftly forgotten about.” Come on guys. You can’t even throw me a bone and let me call it a “thesis”? I digress.
If you’re looking for a fairly concise and informative, if drier, explanation of the Production Code (also known as the Hay Code or the Breen Office), I suggest this handy Wikipedia article; if you’re looking for the wry, sardonic version, please read on. But if it’s a history lesson I’m about to give, it’ll be an interesting, surprising, and, dare I say, comical one. Because what’s funnier than censorship? I suspect this info will be new to 95% percent of you, and I don’t know that it should be. We stumble through our days, we live our lives, and we never ask the big questions, like “How come nobody ever said the ‘F’ word in old movies?”
Maybe this should be a separate essay. It doesn’t feel like it, though. I think it’s all related to the question of morality vs. immorality in art. Can a film show “bad stuff” and be good for you? Is the absence of “bad stuff” a problem? Is there a difference between intention and impact? When is a work of art breaking a taboo a “positive” thing?
And is it possible that Bonnie and Clyde’s “cinematic innovations” innovated in the wrong direction?
*****
To paraphrase the Book of Genesis: In the beginning was the Production Code. And the Production Code … maybe wasn’t so good.
Oh, somebody thought it was good, all right. But those somebodies clearly weren’t part-time Buddhists.
Rewind. In the beginning, there wasn’t the Production Code. That was the whole problem. There existed no legal guidelines surrounding the content that motion pictures could depict. Movies could show anything they wanted to show. It was the Wild West, a free-for-all. We’re talking the days of nickelodeons and hand-tinted negatives here. “Editing” was this exciting new thing. Silent cinema. How worked up could one get about free speech … when there was literally no speech?
But just in case anyone did get worked up about it, the U.S. Supreme Court had its say, because in the 1915 case Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, the Court ruled that the First Amendment did not extend to motion pictures. Justice Joseph McKenna: “… the exhibition of moving pictures is a business, pure and simple, originated and conducted for profit … not to be regarded, nor intended to be regarded … as part of the press of the country, or as organs of public opinion.”
[slides spectacles down nose]
Oh reeeeally?
It was one of those 9-0 “unanimous” decisions, so, no arguments. Movies = not art. Says so right there in the Constitution. Still, until the transition to sound, few cared. Then things got hairy. Given the Supreme Court’s appearance in the timeline, you might be thinking that this mysterious “Production Code” I keep referring to must have been some sort of federal law, right?
Well … no.
See, free to censor films in whatever manner they saw fit, individual U.S. states began setting up their own individual state censorship boards in the late ‘20s. But what flew in California wasn’t exactly going to fly in Alabama, right? Soon realizing that it would be a pain in the neck to create, say, fifty differently-edited versions of It Happened One Night or The Thin Man, sometime around 1930, the major Hollywood studios (Columbia, MGM, Paramount, RKO, 20th Century Fox, Universal, Warner Brothers), decided to band together and create a written list of “Don’t and Be Carefuls” that would apply to all movies produced by all studios, and then hire a group of secretive Catholic tightwads to enforce it.
In other words, the Production Code was a mutually agreed-upon form of self-censorship. Because all this controversy was getting in the way of the most important Hollywood goal of all: making piles and piles of money.
“Well wait a second,” you say, “couldn’t some small, independent studio have made a movie that didn’t follow the Production Code and then release it into theaters anyway?” Great question, randomly planted audience member, but no.
Because, back in the ‘30s and ‘40s, the major film studios (listed above) simultaneously owned and ran their own movie theaters. The operative term here would be “monopoly.” The studios held a monopoly on the distribution. So yes, in theory, some renegade director could have directed a Code-mocking heist movie featuring five flamboyantly gay criminals committing a robbery and getting away with it, but no respectable movie theater was ever going to bother showing that.
In summary: for roughly three decades, states had the legal right to censor films, and movie theaters owned exclusivity rights concerning which films could be shown or not shown. For three decades, the Production Code was God.
And the Production Code was the biggest party pooper of all time. Picture your parents giving you a nice, long list of all the things they forbid you to do – which only made you want to go out and do precisely those things.
The Production Code (unlike, say, the samurai code?) was a real, written document. You can read it this very minute. The full text is roughly 10 pages long. Here is a link to the 1930 version; here is a link to a version with thirty years’ worth of revisions included. Potentially a fun Sunday afternoon read, but allow me to present select highlights:
No picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrong-doing, evil or sin.
Illegal drug traffic must never be presented.
Sex perversion or any inference to it is forbidden.
The flaunting of weapons by gangsters, or other criminals, will not be allowed.
There must be no scenes, at any time, showing law-enforcement officers dying at the hands of criminals.
Obscenity in word, gesture, reference, song, joke or by suggestion (even when likely to be understood only by part of the audience) is forbidden.
In other words: none of the good stuff! You couldn’t even make obscene jokes by suggestion? What else was comedy for? Here’s another favorite: “White slavery shall not be treated.” Seriously, who put that in there? So many questions. Indeed, the “Profanity” section might be the closest the Code comes to unintentional self-parody:
No approval by the Production Code Administration shall be given to the use of words and phrases in motion pictures including, but not limited to, the following:
Alley cat (applied to a woman); bat (applied to a woman); broad (applied to a woman); Bronx cheer (the sound); chippie; cocotte; God, Lord, Jesus, Christ (unless used reverently); cripes; fanny; fairy (in a vulgar sense); finger (the); fire, cries of; Gawd; goose (in a vulgar sense); “hold your hat” or “hats”; hot (applied to a woman); “in your hat”; louse; lousy; Madam (relating to prostitution); nance, nerts; nuts (except when meaning crazy); pansy; razzberry (the sound); slut (applied to a woman); SOB.; son-of-a; tart; toilet gags; tom cat (applied to a man); traveling salesman and farmer’s daughter jokes; whore; damn; hell (excepting when the use of said last two words shall be essential and required for portrayal, in proper historical context, of any scene or dialogue based upon historical fact or folklore, or for the presentation in proper literary context of a Biblical, or other religious quotation, or a quotation from a literary work provided that no such use shall he permitted which is intrinsically objectionable or offends good taste).
I just … I don’t even know where to start with this.
Granted, making fun of the Code, from our modern 21st century vantage point, feels like shooting fish in the proverbial barrel. However, while I’m fully onboard with the mockery, one must give respect where respect is due, as I don’t find all the Code’s ideas entirely free of merit. They may have been Catholic prudes, but they weren’t idiots.
Let’s not forget that, once upon a time, motion pictures were a brand new medium, and that no one knew whether they would warp fragile children’s minds beyond recognition or not. I find the section on motion pictures’ “special moral obligations,” in particular, to be somewhat persuasive:
A. Most arts appeal to the mature. This art appeals at once to every class, mature, immature, developed, underdeveloped, law abiding, criminal. Music has its grades for different classes; so has literature and drama. This art of the motion picture, combining as it does the two fundamental appeals of looking at a picture and listening to a story, at once reaches every class of society.
B. By reason of the mobility of a film and the ease of picture distribution, and because of the possibility of duplicating positives in large quantities, this art reaches places unpenetrated by other forms of art.
C. Because of these two facts, it is difficult to produce films intended for only certain classes of people. The exhibitor’s theatres are built for the masses, for the cultivated and the rude, the mature and the immature, the self-respecting and the criminal. Films, unlike books and music, can with difficulty be confined to certain selected groups.
I guess they didn’t anticipate pimply-faced ushers enforcing PG-13 admission guidelines by chasing down gangs of mischievous preteens like they were members of the Stasi. It goes on:
D. The latitude given to film material cannot, in consequence, be as wide as the latitude given to book material. In addition:
(a) A book describes; a film vividly presents. One presents on a cold page; the other by apparently living people.
(b) A book reaches the mind through words merely; a film reaches the eyes and ears through the reproduction of actual events.
(c) The reaction of a reader to a book depends largely on the keenness of the reader’s imagination; the reaction to a film depends on the vividness of presentation.
Hence many things which might be described or presented in a book could not possibly be presented in a film.
Uh … sure.
F. Everything possible in a play is not possible in a film:
(a) Because of the large audience of the film, and its consequential mixed character. Psychologically, the larger the audience, the lower the moral mass resistance to suggestion.
(b) Because through light, enlargement of character, presentation, scenic emphasis, etc., the screen story is brought closer to the audience than the play.
(c) The enthusiasm for and interest in the film actors and actresses, developed beyond anything of the sort in history, makes the audience largely sympathetic toward the characters they portray and the stories in which they figure. Hence the audience is more ready to confuse actor and actress and the characters they portray, and it is more receptive of the emotions and ideals presented by their favorite stars.
So wait, are they telling me Marlon Brando didn’t really shove that butter where he said he did?
G. Small communities, remote from sophistication and from the hardening process which often takes place in the ethical and moral standards of groups in large cities, are easily and readily reached by any sort of film.
H. The grandeur of mass settings, large action, spectacular features, etc., affect and arouses more intensely the emotional side of the audience.
In general, the mobility, popularity, accessibility, emotional appeal, vividness, straightforward presentation of fact in the film make for more intimate contact with a larger audience and for greater emotional appeal. Hence the larger moral responsibilities of the motion pictures.
Well … yes and no. This reads like a vision of film as Red Scare-style Communism. Its powers of persuasion are all-encompassing. Once you see a morally questionable act in a movie, you’ll never be the same again.
But at least I wouldn’t accuse the Code’s authors of refusing to grapple with the thorniness of these issues. I agree, film is different from literature. In another section, the authors even dare to admit that powerful storytelling occasionally necessitates the tackling of dark subject matter:
Note: Sympathy with a person who sins is not the same as sympathy with the sin or crime of which he is guilty. We may feel sorry for the plight of the murderer or even understand the circumstances which led him to his crime. We may not feel sympathy with the wrong which he has done. The presentation of evil is often essential for art or fiction or drama.
You don’t say.
On the other hand, to state a position I suspect few today would argue with, so much of the Code strikes me as baseless speculation, a parade of flimsy assumptions rooted in some sort of pop-Christian psychology, without any grounding in clinical research or thorough scholarship. Examples:
Because of the increase in the number of films in which murder is frequently committed, action showing the taking of human life, even in the mystery stories, is to be cut to the minimum. These frequent presentations of murder tend to lessen regard for the sacredness of life.
And they know this because …?
Scenes of passion must be treated with an honest acknowledgement of human nature and its normal reactions. Many scenes cannot be presented without arousing dangerous emotions on the part of the immature, the young, or the criminal classes.
Evidence, please?
Dancing in general is recognized as an art and as a beautiful form of expressing human emotions. But dances which suggest or represent sexual actions, whether performed solo or with two or more; dances intended to excite the emotional reaction of an audience; dances with movement of the breasts, excessive body movements while the feet are stationary, violate decency and are wrong.
Oh come on. Even keeping your feet stationary wasn’t good enough for these people? The funniest part might be when they resort to saying it’s “wrong” at the end. Don’t argue; it’s “wrong.” They weren’t even trying anymore.
Well-intentioned as it may have been, I would say in hindsight that the Code served as a force for more harm than good. It threatened to turn a nascent artform of limitless potential into something more closely resembling religious propaganda. It was a nice, tidy set of rules for a messy, contradictory world. In other words, the Code contained far too much Catholicism in it, and not nearly enough part-time Buddhism.
Shouldn’t art have the ability to grapple with the world as it is, and not as some overly-sensitive schoolmarms think it should be? Last time I checked, people usually tend to bleed when they get shot. Sometimes the “bad guys” win. Sex acts are performed, whether one approves of them or not. Less-than-heterosexual people exist. But nope! Just plug your ears. La-la-la-la-la-la.
The idealistic minds behind the Production Code seemed to have been hoping that if motion pictures simply never showed all the supposedly “unpleasant” activities (in their view) that humans tended to involve themselves with, then humans, given enough time, would stop engaging in those activities. Out of sight, out of mind. In other words, if movies could create a squeaky-clean fantasy version of society, then maybe that squeaky-clean fantasy version would rub off on society.
And how did that go?
As far as I can tell, all that happened instead was that humans kept engaging in “unpleasant” activities, and novelists were allowed to depict those activities, while filmmakers were not, a situation which turned American cinema into sort of a second-class art form. No wonder Holden Caulfield kept calling movies “phony.”
Oh, don’t get me wrong, there is no shortage of worthwhile Hollywood films that were produced between 1935 and 1966 (some of the most worthwhile films of all, I would say), but the way I see it, few of them were able to reach that literary level of thematic maturity without a little … contortionism. I mean, a painter could create an incredible painting while refraining from using the color yellow, but wouldn’t it be better if they could … just use yellow?
True, five-year-olds who can’t read a controversial book can accidentally view a controversial movie. Oh, I’ve got a solution. Why don’t we bring all movies down to the level of a five-year-old? Let’s consign this exciting new medium to the fate of late 20th century network television.
And I think what the authors of the Code, and the 1915 Supreme Court, might have missed was that the overall benefit to society of having an artform that can address virtually any subject, wholesome or not, far outweighs the potential drawback of exposing impressionable young children to vice and deviance. Don’t want your kid to glimpse nudity or hear cuss words? Fine – keep your kid out of the damn movie theater!
Perhaps a more lenient and flexible rulebook might have lasted a bit longer, but something as strict and pearl-clutching as the Code, like Prohibition before it, was bound to find its days numbered. And the noble activists to strike the first blow?
The Supreme Court.
[record scratch #2]
Yes, the Supreme Court taketh away, and the Supreme Court giveth. Because in the 1948 case United States v. Paramount Pictures (itself the potential title of a drive-in B-movie?), the Court ruled that the questionable set-up of movie studios also owning their own movie theaters was in violation of something called “antitrust law.”
And then, in 1952’s Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson, the Court unanimously overturned its fateful 1915 decision (which had been decided unanimously, remember), now “recognizing that a film was an artistic medium entitled to protection under the First Amendment.” I believe the full text of the decision read: “Whoops!” (Here’s the Wikipedia article if you want the actual language.)
Old habits die hard, but while these two decisions did not lead to the overnight demise of the Code, the writing was on the wall. By 1959, major studio films such as Some Like It Hot and Anatomy of a Murder, despite being denied certificates of approval from the Hayes Office, were not only released, but became box office hits and Oscar contenders. Not to mention all those foreign films trickling in to art house cinemas that didn’t fall under the provisions of the Code because they were somehow produced – I’m not sure how this was even possible – outside the United States?
In 1966, a courageous attempt was made to revise the Code in an effort to “keep in closer harmony with the mores, the culture, the moral sense, and the expectations of our society,” before, in 1968, it was scrapped altogether in favor of the creation of everyone’s favorite rating system (G, PG, R, and X).
And so, it was in 1967, during that uncertain two-year interregnum, when Bonnie and Clyde was produced and released.
And Bonnie and Clyde took one look at the Production Code and said, “Oh we are burning this motherfucker down.”
*****
I get the sense that the team behind Bonnie and Clyde – director Arthur Penn, producer/star Warren Beatty, and screenwriters Robert Benton and David Newman, among others – sat around a table, meticulously read the text of the Production Code, and then gleefully structured their film as a deliberate attempt to break as many Code taboos as possible.
“Brutal killings are not to be presented in detail”?
Check.
“The flaunting of weapons by gangsters, or other criminals, will not be allowed”?
Check.
“There must be no scenes, at any time, showing law-enforcement officers dying at the hands of criminals”?
Check.
“… the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin”?
Oh, double check.
Still, I hear a large section of the class looking up at old man Part-Time Buddhist Pop Culture Guru and saying, “So what? It’s not 1967 anymore, is it?” Indeed, art that might have been “cutting edge” and “boundary-pushing” in its era doesn’t necessarily stand the test of time. I could spend the rest of this essay, eyes bugging out of my head, explaining that “Bonnie and Clyde was so unprecedented when it came out, audiences had no frame of reference for what they were watching, blah blah blah …,” but any work of art that relies on shock value loses its luster once the shock wears off, right?
I remember once chatting with a stranger at a party (yes, me, at a party), expressing my passion for late ‘60s cinema, and he went into a rant about how so many “influential” movies from the ‘60s no longer held up, specifically singling out Bonnie and Clyde:
“I just re-watched it, and then I re-watched In the Heat of the Night, and In the Heat of the Night has aged so much better, it wasn’t even funny.”
I explained to this fellow that I was someone who was not alive in 1967, that I had viewed both Bonnie and Clyde and In the Heat of the Night, and that, in my view, Bonnie and Clyde held up better (although if you’re expecting me to denigrate In the Heat of the Night, well, call me Mr. Tibbs). But this guy wasn’t having it.
“No, it doesn’t hold up better. Nobody thinks that.”
“But most film critics think that. I think that.”
Hey, it was his life. My point is, if you think I’m that kind of guy, you’re wrong. I don’t enjoy Bonnie and Clyde simply because it was “historically significant.” Well, all right, you caught me, that’s partly why I enjoy it, because film buffs like me get off on that stuff. But I wouldn’t claim, for instance, The Jazz Singer, widely regarded as the first sound film, to be the most timeless viewing experience (although when I watched it, I found it more entertaining than I expected it to be), and I’m not sure many films could claim to be more historically significant than that one.
No, long after the Production Code has been consigned to the status of an amusing Wikipedia article, Bonnie and Clyde still inspires me to speed down a metaphorical Ozark dirt road and shoot off endless rounds of my metaphorical enthusiasm for it out the car window, because I see breaking new ground as only part of its original appeal.
What I love about Bonnie and Clyde, beyond all the surrounding historical hoopla, is the off-kilter way in which the film’s tone constantly, giddily screws with me. Like I said, it’s all about the tagline.
*****
Reviewers and film historians like to describe Bonnie and Clyde as some kind of “rallying cry” for the younger generation, an “us against them” film that was clearly in favor of the “us.” Allmovie.com’s Don Kaye writes, “Its portrayal of Bonnie and Clyde as rebels who empathized with the poor working folks of the 1930s struck a chord with the counterculture of the 1960s,” while the same site’s Lucia Bozzola observes, “the film openly sympathized with its glamorous gangsters, who became analogues of hip 1960s counter-culture protestors …”
(Side note: allmovie.com recently deleted all their movie reviews, rendering the site almost completely worthless as far as I can tell, but I’ll still quote the old ones here.)
In this telling, Bonnie and Clyde are like the Beatles and the Stones, only with tommy guns instead of guitars – rebellious, misunderstood misfits, finally sticking it to the “man” by robbing the outstretched tentacles of Capitalist oppression.
Yeah, I don’t buy it.
I had a left-leaning film professor in graduate school who was particularly keen to shoehorn Bonnie and Clyde into that kind of “activist” interpretive framework, admiring its elevation of a female to equally gun-toting, cigar-smoking, innocent people-murdering status, and suggesting that the scene where Clyde hands his firearm to two evicted farmers, one white and one black, so that they can blow off steam by firing bullets into their seized house, is a noble demonstration of the titular outlaws’ solidarity with the struggles of both the working class and African-American communities.
Even then I thought, “Huh? If that’s what Bonnie and Clyde is about, then Bonnie and Clyde is stupid.”
Bonnie and Clyde isn’t stupid.
The level of sympathy that the film extends to its leads does go beyond the level that would have been permissible under the Code, and would have, I imagine, ruffled the feathers of the “Silent Majority.” But I admire Bonnie and Clyde not merely because it paints an affectionate portrait of its two protagonists. I admire Bonnie and Clyde because I also think, on some deeper, less apparent level, it loathes its two main protagonists.
Bonnie and Clyde roots for its leads to succeed, and also kind of wants them to die. Its attitude toward its characters, in other words, mirrors my own attitude toward the human race. It’s a love/hate relationship.
Bonnie and Clyde is like the alcoholic step-father who might start beating your ass with a belt at any minute because you burned his toast. It’s a bit bipolar. This is what makes “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” such a fitting soundtrack choice: it’s manic, hyper, and energetic, but not exactly comforting. It’s hillbillies on cocaine.
Whether this uneasy schizophrenia was the original intention of screenwriters Benton and Newman is hard to say. While shopping around the early draft of the script to French New Wave directors such as Truffaut and Godard (side note: when Godard’s proposal to shoot the movie in New Jersey in the dead of winter was rejected, he replied, “You are talking weather, and I am talking cinema” – eye roll), Newman and Benton, in an introduction, wrote the following:
If Bonnie and Clyde were here today, they would be hip. Their values have become assimilated in much of our culture – not robbing banks and killing people, of course, but their style, their sexuality, their bravado, their delicacy, their cultivated arrogance, their narcissistic insecurity, their curious ambition have relevance to the way we live now . . . they are not Crooks. They are people, and this film is, in many ways, about what’s going on now.
Hold on, hold on. Since when did “cultivated arrogance” and “narcissistic insecurity” become virtues? They’re “hip”? So freaking what? In the world of part-time Buddhism, “hip” is a pretty low value on the totem pole.
I suspect director Penn, being a decade older than Newman and Benton, slyly called “bullshit” on the notion of Bonnie and Clyde as two Vietnam-protesting flower children. (Label me cynical, but they seem just as likely to sign up for the draft as attend a war protest.) Besides, a movie about how “admirable” bank robbers are would, in my part-time Buddhist view, be kind of silly. Not only do I not buy these two dashing young criminals as modern day Robin Hoods; I don’t think their own movie buys it. Their own movie is sharper than they are.
Yes, audiences responded to Bonnie and Clyde upon its release in 1967, but I’m inclined to think that they didn’t respond to it so much because they felt its protagonists’ ethos were worthy of emulation, but because they felt the filmmakers’ ethos were worthy of emulation. “A movie is getting away with this tone?” Nothing like a healthy dose of perversity to really hit the spot. Sometimes, I just want a movie to slap me around. But like, in a fun way.
Let’s consider this film, then, as two stories simultaneously coexisting as one, sort of like the way Moby-Dick and The Grapes of Wrath veer off into all those esoteric, interstitial sections. There’s A) the movie in which Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow are cool, hip rebels, and B) the movie in which Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow are callous, self-centered assholes.
Don’t get me wrong – there’s more of the former than there is of the latter. Percentagewise, I’d put it at about 72% to 28%. But don’t sleep on that 28%. That 28% is what makes the sauce so tasty.
Within the seeds of the film’s 112-minute running time lies a mini-film in which Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker are the film’s Joker rather its Batman. And, just as an intrepid YouTuber could easily create an abbreviated cut of this film to make Bonnie and Clyde come off like the gentlest, most innocent, most magnanimous pair of country bumpkins you’d ever meet, one could, I suppose, create an equally convincing “supercut” that makes them look like unhinged, amoral creeps. Allow me to demonstrate.
If The Wizard of Oz can have its Wicked, if Gone With the Wind can have its The Wind Done Gone, then Bonnie and Clyde can have its own parallel narrative. I present to you: The Random Citizens Having to Suffer Through Bonnie and Clyde’s Bullshit.
1. Otis and Family
First up on the wheel of unease: a disenfranchised farmer who, upon finding a suspicious-looking couple using his foreclosed property as a shooting range, hoists his hands in the air and pleads, “You all go right ahead.” (Why get yourself killed attempting to defend a house that’s no longer yours anyway?)
After a moment of tense, silent negotiation, Clyde demonstrates his “sympathy” for the farmer’s plight … by shooting bullet holes into the foreclosure sign. That’ll show ‘em. So, does Otis and his kin shed a tear of gratitude? Rather, Penn cuts to Otis’s youngest son, flinching in fear.
The kid’s probably not thinking, “I wanna be just like those two!” He’s probably thinking, “Daddy, are we going to die?”
2. Lucky Bank Teller
Fresh from having declared to Otis that, with the apparent aid of divine inspiration, “we rob banks” (presumably because it made him think he stood for something other than stealing stuff for no reason and forever shaming his family name), Clyde decides that he might as well follow through and actually, you know, rob a bank. The only problem is, after having spent hours in the car working up the courage to do it, he saunters in with bravado … to a barren lobby staffed by one meek, bemused bank teller, who explains, “There ain’t no money here.” Hello? It’s the Depression!
The ironic turn of events sends Bonnie into a fit of hysterical laughter, but Clyde, needing to vent his displeasure in some fashion, fires several bullets through the bank window, and again, who does Penn cut to? The terrified, defenseless bank teller covering his face with his hands.
“Well,” you say, “Clyde only shoots the window, not the teller.” Sure, but the teller doesn’t know that Clyde’s only going to shoot the window. He’s just an ordinary yokel at the mercy of some volatile asshole with a gun.
3. Meat Cleaver Guy
Now, if Clyde were half as sympathetic to the “everyday working man” as he has claimed to be, then while robbing a store, one might suspect him to mutter something apologetic along the lines of, “I’m sorry to have to do this to you mister, but I need to feed my family, just give me the money and I’ll be on my way.”
Instead, he taunts the clerk with sassy, casually inappropriate questions such as, “Come on now, you sure you ain’t got no peach pies?” Do these strike anyone as the actions of a man attempting to assist his peers with their financial woes? Abruptly, without warning (although perhaps neither Clyde nor the viewer should be surprised), Meat Cleaver Guy sneaks up from behind and, while sadly missing Clyde with the meat cleaver, engages him in a brutal round of fisticuffs, which only comes to a conclusion when Clyde pistol-whips him in the skull.
Back in the car with Bonnie, Clyde expresses his confusion in the apologetic tones he probably should have been using in the first place:
“Try to get something to eat round here and some son-of-a-bitch comes up on you with a meat cleaver. I ain’t against him!”
You know, Clyde, people generally don’t like being robbed, whether you consider yourself “against” them or not. What happened to acquiring food the “legal” way – by working hard, earning money, providing services or goods for someone else, that sort of thing? Too much effort?
(Side note: from this point on, Clyde and the Barrow Gang pay for their food with something called “money,” saving the robberies for the banks, so … perhaps their ethics do evolve?)
4. Not-So-Lucky Bank Teller
Oh, and then you shoot one single bank teller in the face (screen shot shown earlier), and suddenly everybody’s all up in arms about it. Enter Clyde’s equally value-elastic brother Buck Barrow: “You had to do it, didn’t you?”
“Now, he put me on the spot,” Clyde replies. “I had to. Right, I had to.”
I feel like that’s what Hitler was saying in his bunker. “Why’d you kill all those Jews, Slavs, queers, and gypsies?” “They put me on the spot, I had to.”
5. Blanche Barrow
In the annals of misbegotten gangster movie marriages, Blanche Barrow’s must be up there with Kay Adams’s in The Godfather. Just what do you think it was about Buck that originally set her heart aflutter? His way with the English language (“Don’t sell that cow!”)? His respect for the female sex (“She’s a peach!”)? I’ve heard of husbands who, the moment the honeymoon ends, toss all decorum out the window (my maternal grandfather was like that), but surely Blanche could have seen this one coming?
The rest of the gang may find her prudish, grumpy, and uncooperative, but if you plopped me into this movie, I would probably be Blanche Barrow. The one running across the lawn waving a spatula while screaming his head off in the middle of a firefight with the police? That would be me.
You might expect the other members of the Barrow gang to be understanding or sympathetic to Blanche’s concern for her safety … but nope.
Bonnie shouts, “You almost got us killed!”
“What did I do wrong? I thought you’d be happy if I got shot!”
“Yeah! It would have saved us all a lot of trouble!” Mm-hmm. Blanche is clearly the problem here. Surely her husband, at least, will understand?
“Buck, don’t let that woman talk to me like that!”
“You shouldn’t have done that, Blanche. It was a dumb thing to do.”
Uh-oh.
Sorry, preacher’s daughter. I fear that whole “Till death do us part” business is going to end up being a little too literal for your liking.
6. Frank Hamer, Texas Ranger
How do I know the protagonists of this film aren’t exactly my kind of hillbillies? Because once the movie’s supposed chief “antagonist,” Frank Hamer, Texas Ranger, shows up, I’m kind of rooting for him.
Merely capturing the guy isn’t enough; oh no, the gang needs to taunt and tease him. They could simply tie him up and going along their merry way, but instead, they revel in the opportunity to engage in a little … what’s the word for it? Torture. Yeah, that’s the word. They torture the guy. When the gang shoves Hamer against the rear of their car, Penn cuts to a reverse angle of his terrified face peering through the glass. And I’m supposed to be cheering for the people doing the shoving?
Never one to let an opportunity to practice his deluded doublethink go to waste, Clyde climbs up on his soapbox:
“You know, Texas Ranger, you ain’t hardly doing your job. You ought to be home protecting the rights of poor folk, not out chasing after us.”
Lord knows I cherish the great American right that is giving cops a hard time, but can you say “pot calling the kettle black”?
While playfully stroking Hamer’s mustache with a pistol, Bonnie engages in a little irony of her own: “Now you know we are just about the friendliest folks you’d ever want to meet.”
Buck promptly hollers, in a tone matching that of a man who’d just been given a complimentary bag of coins at the casino, “What do you want to do with him then?”
C.W. Moss plumbs the depths of his creativity: “Shoot him?”
After Blanche instinctively shouts “No!,” Penn again cuts to Hamer, whose eyes all but say, “So she’s the weak one.”
“Hang ‘im,” C.W. proposes as an alternative (more palatable than shooting him?).
But Bonnie’s got an even more post-modern, ideologically potent idea. “Nuh-uh. Take his picture.”
Yeah. Why kill the guy outright when they can give him the slow death of a public shaming? After those photos run in every newspaper in the Midwest, Frank Hamer will forever be known as “That Loser Who Tried to Capture Bonnie and Clyde and Failed.” The media as weapon. Sex Pistols, take note.
Then Bonnie lightly sexually assaults him (he doesn’t appear to consent to her kiss), he spits in her face, and in an uncontrollable rage, Clyde and Buck toss Hamer, tied-up limbs and all, into a canoe and shove it out into the middle of the lake, which … isn’t very nice.
“We got you, hear! We got you!!” Clyde screams from within a vast reservoir of impotence. I feel like the more intensely he shouts, the deeper he seems to be digging his own metaphorical hole. Despite the protestations of triumph, he’s fucked, and he knows it. No amount of punishment that the gang can inflict on Hamer in that river can nullify the specter of death that hangs over them all. If that walrus-faced Ranger doesn’t get them in the end, then surely somebody else will?
(Spoiler: the walrus-faced ranger gets them in the end.)
Would a film that didn’t give a rat’s behind about Bonnie and Clyde’s victims linger on a shot of Hamer floating away in a canoe, presumably left to die? Sign me up for the Frank Hamer fan club.
7. Eugene Grizzard and Velma Davis
Even Willy Wonka gets a taste the Barrow Gang emotional roller coaster.
“Hey, that’s my caaaaar!”
Ah yes. If ever an actor were needed to represent a stark contrast to a gang of suave, confident criminals, Gene Wilder was it. Let’s just say that, as film debuts go, you could do worse. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that the actress playing his fiancée (the intriguingly named Evans Evans) managed to find as suitable a cinematic niche as her co-star did, but she did marry John Frankenheimer, so that’s something.
After attempting (unwisely) to reclaim their stolen vehicle, Eugene and Velma quickly find themselves at the center of a surreal joyride with five unruly strangers. There’s another word for this kind of activity. Oh, that’s right: kidnapping. The Barrow Gang kidnap Eugene and Velma. You know who’s having a blast during this car ride? Probably not Eugene and Velma, is my guess.
After Bonnie speculates, “You two must be in love,” Buck shouts, “Now boy,” while thrusting a shotgun in Eugene’s face, the future Mr. Gilda Radner’s life flashing before his eyes. “When you gonna marry the girl?” Phew, I guess?
Bonnie adds, “Don’t be scared or anything like that. Now it ain’t like you was the law or anything like that. I mean you’re just folks like us.” Yep. Just a pack of normal, everyday sadists who chop off their toes to get out of prison work detail – just like you!
Despite the ice appearing to melt over the course of the ride, as Buck tickles Eugene with his unstoppable “Don’t sell that cow!” joke, a greasy bag of fast food is ordered, and everybody at last seems to be having a grand old time, once Eugene lets slip that he’s an undertaker, it kills Bonnie’s buzz and she instantly demands that Eugene and Velma be kicked out of the car in the middle of what appears to be Buttfuck, Missouri.
I’m telling you, I don’t like these people. I just don’t like them.
*****
And yet … I sort of do? Let’s just say they have their moments. Take the scene where, after Bonnie screams at Blanche for her whole “running across the lawn during a shootout while waving a spatula” gaffe (geez), Clyde pulls the car over, and he and Bonnie engage in something resembling a mundane lovers’ quarrel.
Bonnie rants, “She’s nothing but a dumb, stupid, backcountry hick. She ain’t got a brain in her head!”
“What makes you any better? What makes you so damn special? You was just a West Dallas waitress, spent half your time pickin’ up truck drivers!”
“Oh, big Clyde Barrow! You’re just like your brother! Ignorant, uneducated hillbilly! Listen, the only special thing about you is your peculiar ideas about lovemaking, which is no lovemaking at all!”
Perhaps sensing that Bonnie’s last dig (at Clyde’s impotence) deserves to hang in the air for a moment or two, the couple gradually move closer to each other before tenderly embracing. Aww. It’s not your fault I’m so stressed out honey, it’s just all this bank robbing and murdering.
So yes, I can see why the “youth audience” of 1967 might have identified with these two: they embody all the anger, vanity, insecurity, frustration, and neediness of a teenage couple. Of course, those were precisely the kind of couples I vehemently resented in my own teenage years, so … I sort of want them to just be blown off the face of the earth.
Well, good news for me then, because Bonnie and Clyde isn’t the story of Snow White and Prince Charming living happily ever after. And since the earlier highs of their crime spree have felt so giddily intoxicating, when the lows finally arrive, they hit hard. Like “Oh, you wanted to party with the ‘cool’ kids and read about yourself in the paper and smoke and drink and have a good time? Well here’s your good time, suckers.”
Suddenly Blanche is bleeding out of her eyeballs, Buck’s skull is half blown off, Bonnie’s taken a nasty wound to the shoulder blade, and Clyde has a look on his face that all but says, “You’ll have to gun me down with a thousand bullets before I ever submit to you bastards!”
“I got the blues so bad,” Bonnie confides to Clyde when they briefly find themselves alone. Well yeah. She should have the blues so bad. What useful purpose is she serving in society? How is she fostering connection between other lonely, isolated humans? I’m not getting it.
I love how Penn gives us a good minute or so of the members of the Barrow Gang, in various stages of medical distress, crawling around and shivering in the darkness, with no reprieve in sight, so that the audience can steadily marinate in the bleakness. At the very least, let’s stop and admire what appear to be Buck Barrow’s poignant, dignified last words: “Believe I lost my shoes, Clyde … I think the dog got ‘em.”
Fate was surely bound to catch up with Bonnie and Clyde no matter where they ended up heading, but I have to wonder: was lodging with C.W. Moss’s father the smartest move on the chessboard?
“You two stay here as long as you like.” Who wouldn’t trust a face like this?
To give credit where credit is due, Bonnie does manage to express a regret or two, dimly aware that she might not have made the most fulfilling of life choices, almost inching toward a Wild Bunch-style epiphany. Lying in bed with Clyde at the Moss’s house, she poses a poignant hypothetical:
“What would you do if … some miracle happened … and we could walk out of here tomorrow morning … and start all over again. Clean. With no record and nobody after us?”
“Well, uh … I guess I’d do it all different.” Promising beginning. “First off … I wouldn’t live in the same state where we pull our jobs.” Uh … not quite the response she was looking for, Clyde. “We’d live in another state and stay clean there and then when we wanted to take a bank, we’d go into the other state.” Men. Typical.
But a movie expressing the moral “crime doesn’t pay” wouldn’t be very interesting, would it? With Bonnie and Clyde, the moral is more like, “In the end, crime doesn’t pay, but … at the start, it sure is fun,” which is rarely the kind of nuance a Hollywood crime film had been allowed to express up to that point. In other words, through a part-time Buddhist lens, Bonnie and Clyde still is a moral movie; it’s just not the old-fashioned Catholic church kind of moral.
But just because the movie dares to veer into frequent sympathy for Bonnie and Clyde doesn’t mean I don’t think they “get what’s coming to them.” To paraphrase Captain Willard, “Even their own director wanted them dead. And that’s who they really took their orders from anyway.” And perhaps the most valuable moral of Bonnie and Clyde, exemplified in the final scene, might be this: “If you’re going to risk your neck and break a few taboos, you better go all-in.” Or, to steal another line from Captain Willard, “Don’t get off the boat … unless you’re going all the way.”
As they cruise down the road to their inevitable doom, the two protagonists come off as the postcard picture of Edenic innocence and joie de vivre: Bonnie twirling a figurine in her hand before chewing on an apple (*cough* Garden of Eden), Clyde goofily wearing sunglasses with one lens popped out. They’re so charming, so adorable … and I just want them to die already.
Then, the last, fateful glance between the soon-to-be-exterminated couple. In one sense, it’s a private moment, a silent acknowledgement of the everlasting bond of existential nihilism they’ll always share, and which no one else will truly understand, but in another sense, perhaps one might consider it a glance between Penn and the audience, as if the director were saying, “Are you ready? You sure you can handle this?”
I like to think of Bonnie, Clyde, and their automobile as the Production Code, swiftly being rendered into bits of Swiss cheese. Someone needed to kill the Code, and not just halfway kill it, either. They needed to be 100% sure it was dead. That Code had to be sliced, diced, and carved up beyond recognition. I mean, if you’re going to litter the status quo full of bullet holes, you better do a good, thorough job of it.
I love how Frank Hamer and the deputies hesitatingly creep out of the bushes and gaze at their handiwork with stupefied, “You think we got ‘em?” looks on their faces.
Yeah. I think you got ‘em.
I also love the two sharecroppers who had unwittingly come this close to finding themselves in the crossfire.
*****
Over the years, long after my own revelatory teenage viewing of Bonnie and Clyde, I’ve sat down with friends and acquaintances and eagerly shared the film with them, assuming they would be equally as enthralled upon first viewing as I was. Almost without fail, their response has tended to be, “That was good … but I wouldn’t really consider it a ‘favorite.’” Upon interrogating these friends with a “Why the hell not?,” they’ve often said something like, “I guess I just didn’t relate to the characters that much.”
“Relate to the characters”? Geez. Bonnie and Clyde isn’t about “relating to the characters.” It’s about being completely unsure, up to the very, very end, whether you’re supposed to be relating to the characters or not. Maybe that random stranger at the party was right. Maybe you just “had to be there.”
On the other hand, screw that random stranger, and screw my friends too. I don’t like Bonnie and Clyde, which is why I like Bonnie and Clyde. Make sense? Here’s a film that, as far as I can tell, sticks it to all parties: rednecks, hippies, criminals, cops, those who hate violence, those who love violence … no one comes out looking good here.
Except for the film itself. It hovers above all, forever alienating, perennially perverse. Maybe I’m just a twisted little puppy.
But life is twisted too, and sooner or later, a major Hollywood release had to admit it. No use burying all the messy, unpleasant stuff under a rug. Bring it out in the light, so that we can take a real, hard look at it. Are these characters “good?” Are these characters “bad”? Sometimes the audience needs to decide that for themselves. Leave us with something to ponder, something that stings. In this sense, the graphic denouement is like Penn’s final dominatrix slap: “You’ve been closely identifying with these people for two whole hours? Here, watch them die, from eight different camera angles, at four different camera speeds.”
Is it weird that I find such a violent movie about two clueless jerks to be so part-time Buddhist? I guess I don’t see the violence as being directed against people so much as against our prevailing cultural tendencies toward denial and ignorance. And in that sense, the ending of Bonnie and Clyde – and the whole film, for that matter – is the ultimate “Deal with it.”
To quote the old Buddhist proverb: “If you meet the Production Code in the middle of the road … kill him.”