The Case of Bonnie and Clyde
To posit sexual display and violent action as the two most universal
"attractions" of Hollywood movies is merely to state the obvious. In a
practical sense, success for American movies may be gauged by the degree
to which they are able to mass-produce audience excitement. There
have, however, been instances in which that mass excitement has itself
been deemed dangerously overstimulating.
Initially characterized as "tasteless" and "grisly" (Time, Aug. 25,
1967); as "stomach-turning" (Newsweek, Aug. 21, 1967); as "reprehensible,"
"gross and demeaning," featuring "some of the most gruesome
carnage since Verdun" (Newsweek, Aug. 28, 1967); as "dementia praecox
of the most pointless sort" (Films in Review, Oct. 1967), Arthur
Penn's 1967 release Bonnie and Clyde served, more than any commercial
movie made in America before or since, to redefine the nature of acceptable
on-screen violence. "A test for the individualviewer for his own
threshhold," per one early reviewer, Bonnie and Clyde encouraged
laughing "at sadism and murder [but] eventually repels you, and makes
you angry or ashamed at having had your emotions manipulated"
(Newsday, Aug. 14, 1967).
American mass culture may be considered a form of spectacular
political theater that also functions as a feedback system. It is within
this public space--which overlaps the arena of electoral politics--that
rival scenarios and contending abstractions struggle for existence, definition,
and acceptance. Thus, at once highly popular and extremely po-
116
6^
"A Test for the Individual Viewer":
Bonnie and Clyde's Violent Reception
J. HOBERMAN
"A Test for the Individual Viewer" 117
larizing (itself an unusual accomplishment for a Hollywood movie),
Bonnie and Clyde is significant as much for what it symbolized as for
what it actually depicted.
Written by Robert Benton and David Newman, Bonnie and Clyde
takes as its subject the quasi-historical, increasingly violent criminal exploits
of a young couple and their accomplices throughout the central
Southwest during the early 1930s. The story was sufficiently compelling
to have inspired a number of previous movies. Nevertheless, Bonnie and
Clyde was unprecedented both in foregrounding mayhem as a choreographed
spectacle--most notoriously in the two-minute danse macabre
that, ending the movie with a metaphor for the cinema itself, offered the
startling image of the protagonists' corpses reanimated by a barrage of
gunfire--and in offering a scenario that, despite its period setting, was
widely cited for its contemporary relevance.
Bonnie and Clyde remains important today as much for the shift in
attitude that it embodies as for its intrinsic value as film--or even for
the particular magnitude of its violence. Within two years of its release,
the movie had already been supplanted as the ultimate in cinematic carnage
by Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, which featured even further
distended slow motion, additional spurting blood, and more kineticediting.
"A pace-setter in the display of violence," The Wild Bunch's climactic
Gotterdammerung served as the "aggressive" film footage in a
1973 National Institute of Mental Health study, "Motivated Aggressiveness
Perpetuated by Exposure to Aggressive Films and Reduced by
Exposure to Nonaggressive Films."1
Nevertheless, over a quarter century after Bonnie and Clyde's controversial
premiere, political pundit David R. Boldt used the editorial
page of the Philadelphia Inquirer (Aug. 1, 1993) to attack the movie as
the source for Hollywood "pornoviolence." If Bonnie and Clyde has
been "largely forgotten," Boldt wrote, it is only "because its wretched
excesses have been exceeded so often." For Boldt, Bonnie and Clyde
represents something akin to a national fall from grace: "I think we went
wrong with the release of Bonnie and Clyde . . . the first in a wave of
movies that came to the screen immediately after Hollywood's selfpolicing
apparatus was dismantled in 1966. . . ."
Boldt remembers his own negative response to Bonnie and Clyde as
having been sharpened by a sense of social foreboding and alienation
from the rest of the audience--which, he imagined, was enjoying the
movie for the very reasons he loathed it: "All I knew the first time I saw
it was that Bonnie and Clyde was a malignantly manipulative movie--
and that all the other people in the theater around me seemed to be
eating it up. I can actually recall thinking to myself at the time, 'This is
it. We've had it.' " As Boldt further notes, Bonnie and Clyde is not
simply a violent display. It is a violent display given a particular perspective:
"The entire film is told from the point of view of the criminals."
118 Why We Watch
The implications are clear. Liberated from the constraints of the
movie industry's traditional "self-policing apparatus," the movie audience
may be manipulated into passive complicity with the portrayal of
criminal violence. Indeed, this complicity is perhaps an integral aspect
of the mass audience's enjoyment. A movie like Bonnie and Clyde is
thus itself a sort of symbolic crime--it makes us something like accomplices
to murder. Of course, it is also possible that a discussion of the
violence in Bonnie and Clyde is a way to talk about something else.
Historical Precedents
The question of violence in American movies has typically been linked
to the representation of some criminal activity--most frequently episodes
of gangsterism or juvenile delinquency.In fact, it is sometimes only
in the context of criminal behavior that screen violence may even be
perceived as problematic. Senator Bob Dole's widely publicized June
1995 attack on the American entertainment industry singled out Natural
Born Killers, a movie concerning a murderous outlaw couple clearly
modeled on Bonnie and Clyde, as a "nightmare of depravity" while
citing True Lies, a scarcely less bloody film in which Arnold Schwarzenegger
plays an American espionage agent, as being "friendly to fami-
lies."
In any case, the question of violence in American movies has largely
been secondary to issues of sexual behavior. The earliest reported case
of American movie censorship--in which Chicago police denied an exhibition
permit to Essanay's 1908 The James Boys in Missouri for "criminalizing"
American history--involved the representation of violent
lawbreaking (de Grazia & Newman, 1982, pp. 177-78). Nevertheless,
the 1927 Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) Production
Code, administered by Will B. Hays, was almost exclusively concerned
with issues of sex and nudity. The treatment of illegal behavior was not
even raised as a question until the revised 1930 MPAA Code, which had
been formulated in response to silent gangster films, like Josef von Sternberg's
1927 Underworld and 1928 The Docks of New York (Bergman,
1971, p. 5).
Little Caesar, released by Warner Brothers in early 1931, helped
stimulate a subsequent cycle of gangster talkies. Popular and controversial,
these movies made so great an impact that, as film historian Carlos
Clarens would later note, "a mere 10 percent of [Hollywood's] yearly
output suddenly came to represent the dominant trend" (1980, p. 81).
Gangster movies were blamed for inciting violence--perhaps even that
of the historical Bonnie and Clyde--as well as for providing practical
information as to its application. In the summer of 1931, for example,
it was reported that a New Jersey twelve-year-old returned from seeing
"A Test for the Individual Viewer" 119
The Secret Six and consequently shot another child through the head
(Bergman, 1971, p. 4).
The presumed threat was thus the possibility that impressionable
members of the audience might wish to participate in that which the
movie seemed to celebrate. "Does not the exhibition of gangster pictures
in the so-called high delinquency neighborhoods amount to the diffusion
of poison?" the 1933 best-seller Our Movie Made Children asked in
devoting a major portion of its penultimate chapter to the sometimes
fatal impact that Little Caesar had had upon impressionable young slum
dwellers (Forman, 1935, pp. 195, 265ff.).
Attempting to maintain respectable perimeters for screen violence,
the Hays Office proscribed on-screen bleeding and stipulated that a firearm
and its victim not be framed together in the same shot. Hays was,
however, challenged by the most violent gangster film of the cycle, Howard
Hughes's Scarface. The MPAA office returned Scarface's script with
the following directive from Hays: "Under no circumstances is this film
to be made. The American public and all conscientious State Boards of
Censorship find mobsters and hoodlums repugnant. Gangsterism must
not be mentioned in the cinema. If you should be foolhardy enough to
make Scarface, this office will make certain it is never released" (Clarens,
1980, p. 82). Hughes, unimpressed, is supposed to have told his director,
Howard Hawks, to "screw the Hays Office [and] start the picture."
Despite some cuts and a few local bans, Hughes--who would, a decade
later, tangle with the Hays Office over the issue of Jane Russell's cleavage
in The Outlaw--prevailed (Clarens, 1980, De Grazia & Newman, 1982,
p. 36).
The first "General Principle" of the 1930 MPAA Production Code
was that "no picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards
of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should
never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin." (It was
further mandated, under the section "Crimes against the Law: Murder,"
that "brutal killings [were] not to be presented in detail" and any "use
of firearms [would be] restricted to essentials.") Nevertheless, the MPAA
Code was not truly enforced until 1934, when the Hays Office was given
additional muscle by the Catholic Legion of Decency. Again, the association
of violence with criminal behavior was crucial. In the mid-1930s,
Warner Brothers revamped and elevated the gangster genre with movies
like G-Men (1935), Bullets or Ballots (1936), and Public Enemy's Wife
(1936), which glorified the role of the FBI and were, in some cases,
endorsed by its director, J. Edgar Hoover (Bergman, 1971, pp. 84-88).
Thereafter, despite an occasional incident--the 1941 Blood and
Sand remake was, for example, required to tone down a "gruesome"
bullfight sequence (Leff & Simmons, 1990, p. 119)--the issue of onscreen
violence lay largely dormant until several years after World War
120 Why We Watch
II, when cuts were demanded in the 1949 juvenile-delinquency drama
City across the River (Doherty, 1988, p. 119). The juvenile-delinquency
cycle also included Knock on Any Door and Bad Boy, both 1949, as
well as two other 1949 movies that can be seen as thematic precursors
of Bonnie and Clyde: Gun Crazy and They Live by Night. A subsequent
juvenile-delinquency movie, The Blackboard Jungle, and the Mike Hammer
thriller Kiss Me Deadly (both 1955), initially rejected by censors,
were prominently cited in the 1955 hearings held by presidentialhopeful
Estes Kefauver's Senate subcommittee on juvenile delinquency--as was
the as yet unreleased Rebel without a Cause (Schumach, 1964, pp. 174-
78).2
In 1957, Don Siegel's Baby Pace Nelson, made for the low-budget
studio Allied Artists, broke the MPAA interdiction against the represention
of historical criminals. The following year, another small studio,
American-International Pictures (which specialized in topical, drive-in
fare) resurrected two early-1930s bandits for a teen-oriented double bill,
Machine Gun Kelly and The Bonnie Parker Story. Roused to action, J.
Edgar Hoover nostalgically warned that "In the face of the nation's
terrifying juvenile crime wave we are threatened with a flood of movies
and television productions which flaunt indecency and applaud lawlessness.
Not since the days when thousands passed the bier of the infamous
John Dillinger and made his home a virtual shrine have we witnessed
such a brazen affront to our national conscience" (Motion Picture Herald,
May 10, 1958). Despite this concern, however, violence in the movies
would not reemerge as a significant issue for another decade--and
only then in the context of a presidential assassination, an escalating, if
undeclared, war, and a succession of civil disorders that would shock
and convulse American society.
The Problem of Pornoviolence
David Boldt doesn't define (or credit) his apparent neologism "pornoviolence,"
but the term, like the movie to which he applied it, first appeared
during the summer of 1967. Attempting to answer the question,
"Why Are We Suddenly Obsessed with Violence?" posed by the July
1967 issue of Esquire, Tom Wolfe's essay, "Pornoviolence," analyzed
such variegated phenomena as the sensational weekly tabloid the National
Enquirer, an episode of the TV western Gunsmoke, Truman Capote's
best-selling nonfiction novel In Cold Blood, and the sustained
popularity of James Bond as exemplars of a "new pornography, the
pornography of violence."
What was it that made this "pornography" new? Albeit restricting
his discussion to the realm of cultural production, Wolfe was struck by
the widespread, obsessive interest in the minutiae of John F. Kennedy's
death: "There has been an incessant replay, with every recoverable clin-
"A Test for the Individual Viewer" 121
ical detail, of those less than five seconds in which a man got his head
blown off."Imagining that the preferred "vantage point" was "almost
never that of the victim [butrather] the view from Oswald's rifle," Wolfe
described a pornoviolence that was essentially spectacular and purely
sensational: "The camera angle, therefore the viewer, is with the gun,
the fist, the rock. . . . You do not live the action through the hero's eyes.
You live with the aggressor, whoever he may be" (Wolfe, 1977,pp. 161-
62).
Wolfe linked this desire to align oneself with the instrument of aggression
to the experience (and, in its compulsive repetition, Freud would
suggest, to the attempted mastery) of a national trauma. As profoundly
abrupt and disorderly as it was, the Kennedy assassination undermined
the logic of the American democratic process. A history-altering crime
by its very nature, the murder of the American president could not help
but support the notion argued by the French revolutionary theorist
Georges Sorel (1847-1922) that all great social change is inevitably
marked by violence (Roth, 1980, pp. 50-51). For a sizable part of the
American public, then, violence was not simply a source of excitement
but an integral part of the historical process.
Among other articles, the July Esquire included one far less judgmental
than Wolfe's. In "Now Let the Festivities Begin," regular contributors
Robert Benton and David Newman surveyed those cultural
artifacts that embodied " 'the fun' of violence." Casting a wider net than
Wolfe's to better snare the Zeitgeist, the writers cited evidence ranging
from true-crime best-sellers (The Boston Strangler and In Cold Blood]
and current theatrical offerings (Marat/Sade, Dutchman, MacBird)
through musicians as varied as the Rolling Stones and Archie Shepp to
images as disparate as Andy Warhol's electric chairs, Francis Bacon's
flayed bodies, and Marvel comic books. What these all had in common,
per Benton and Newman, was their attitude: "The rules of reaction have
changed: it's not that old catharsis any longer, but that new kick."
Catharsis connotes tragedy. But unlike Aristotle (or Tom Wolfe),
Benton and Newman did not take any particular moral attitude toward
the artistic representation of mayhem. Rather than a new pornography
of violence, they would seem to propose a wide-ranging and fashionable
aesthetic of violence for violence's sake--a violence of style as well as
content. Benton and Newman were not only the screenwriters for Bonnie
and Clyde; they had originated the entire project. Although the writers
scrupulously avoided plugging their long-germinating but soon-to-bereleased
film, the entire issue of Esquire may be seen as a rehearsal for
its reception.
Bonnie and Clyde had its world premiere on August 4, 1967, as the
gala opening attraction of the Montreal International Film Festival (itself
part of the world's fair, Expo 67). Bosley Crowther, the New York
Times critic and then dean of American daily movie reviewers, was in
122 Why We Watch
attendance and subsequently declared himself amazed that "so callous
and callow a film should represent [the] country in these critical times."
Bonnie and Clyde was the "indulgence of a restless and reckless taste,
and an embarrassing addition to an excess of violence on the screen"
(New York Times, Aug. 7, 1967).3
Crowther was already in the midst of a campaign against movie
violence, up until then exemplified by The Dirty Dozen, a new and
highly popular war film. The Dirty Dozen had its world premiere in
New York on June 16. The movie set house records at the Loew's Capitol,
a large Broadway theater, and, after opening nationally over the
July 4 weekend, enjoyed the highest grossing week of any single picture
in distributor MGM's history. Indeed, The Dirty Dozen sold an unprecedented
$15 million worth of tickets during its first two months in
release--a period that also brought a marked increase in American civil
violence, much of it racial in nature and virtually all of it directed against
the police.
On a symbolic level, the hot summer of 1967 opened on the afternoon
of May 2, when eighteen representatives of the Oakland-based
Black Panther Party for Defense provoked a media sensation by appearing,
armed with Ml rifles and twelve-gauge shotguns, at the California
state capitol building in Sacramento. Two weeks later, a Houston
policeman was killed by sniper fire during disturbances at the predominantly
black Texas Southern University. That same night in Washington,
D.C., the controversial Student Non-Violent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC) chairman Stokely Carmichael declared that "we're
going to shoot the cops who are shooting our black brothers in the back
in this country" (U.S. News and World Report May 29, 1967). A number
of American cities, including Boston, Tampa, Dayton, Atlanta, Buffalo,
and Cincinnati, experienced a series of race riots over the next
month. (Meanwhile, on June 23 in Los Angeles, police--for the first
time--used force to break up a demonstration against President Lyndon
Johnson and the American war in Vietnam.)
The Dirty Dozen'?, extraordinary popularity thus coincided with a
season of nationally televised violence. June's relatively minor disturbances
set the stage for the far more extensive Newark disorders that
raged from July 12 through July 17, leaving twenty-three dead and causing
$10 million in damages. The following weekend's Detroit riots
(which ultimately required a force of eight thousand National Guardsmen
and forty-seven hundred paratroopers to put down) produced
nearly twice as many casualties and doubled the estimated cost of destruction.
On July 30, the same day that order was finally restored in
Detroit, the New York Times had published the latest missive in
Crowther's crusade under the perhaps dismissive headline "Another
Smash at Violence."
Here, the critic took issue with those who had written to the Times
"A Test for the Individual Viewer" 123
to attack his attack on The Dirty Dozen (or, in one case, question his
objections to the Italian western For a Few Dollars More, released in
late June). To those who argued that violent movies manifested an accurate
reflection of current American social reality and, in particular, the
war in Vietnam, Crowther replied that, "By habituating the public to
violence and brutality--by making these hideous exercises into morbid
and sadistic jokes, as is done in The Dirty Dozen--these films of excessive
violence only deaden their sensitivities and make slaughter seem a
meaningless cliche."
Hardly cliched, however, The Dirty Dozen evoked World War II in
a drastically revisionist way. The film's eponymous antiheroes are a unit
composed of murderers, rapists, and other violent misfits, released from
the brig and commanded by a tough colonel (Lee Marvin) who has been
ordered by the cynical American brass to lead them on a suicide mission
behind enemy lines. On one hand, The Dirty Dozen is a glorificationof
dirty fighting that openly mocks society's ambivalent dependence on the
killer instinct. An army psychologist calls the Dozen "the most twisted
bunch of antisocial psychopaths," adding that he "can't think of a better
way to fight a war" and thus endorsing what could be termed the
movie's tough-minded realpolitik, its "dirty" secret. On the other hand,
the movie is an attack on authority--of any kind. American commanding
officers, no less than their German adversaries, are shown as essentially
corrupt and unfeeling.4
Although The Dirty Dozen opens with a graphic representation of
a hanging (the first of the "repellent subjects" that the 1930 MPAA Code
stipulated be "treated within the careful limits of good taste"), extraordinary
mayhem is withheld until the final mission. Then, with an undeniable
slapstick quality, the Dozen trap the German generals--
together with a number of innocent civilians, most of them women--in
an underground bunker. They then pour gasoline through ventilator
shafts and drop in live grenades. Unfolding in an atmosphere of frenzied
cruelty, this astonishing sequence manages to invoke mass death by a
combination of gas-chamber asphyxiation, saturation bombing, and na-
palm.
When The Dirty Dozen opened in New York, many reviewers appeared
to be shocked and revolted. Despite the movie's ambiguous relation
to violence, few experienced the excessively graphic Dirty Dozen
as antiwar so much as a crude and overly enthusiastic celebration of
war--and this at a time when their own country was engaged in a major
military operation. Crowther was the most outspoken in labeling the
film "a raw and preposterous glorification of a group of criminal soldiers
who are trained to kill and who then go about this brutal business with
hot sadistic zeal . . . an astonishinglywanton war movie. . . . morbid and
disgusting beyond words" (New York Times, June 16, 1967).
By Crowther's lights, The Dirty Dozen was not only violent but
124 Why We Watch
irresponsible. The movie's mayhem constituted a form of dangerous hyperbole
akin to demagoguery. In objecting to the portrayal of the Dozen
themselves, Crowther might almost have been attacking those leaders,
SNCC chairman Carmichael and his successor H. Rap Brown, whose
inflammatory rhetoric was widely reported and condemned before and,
particularly, throughout the summer's riots. "To bathe these rascals in
a specious heroic light--to make their hoodlum bravado and defiance
of discipline, and their nasty kind of gutter solidarity, seemexhilirating
and admirable--is encouraging a spirit of hooliganism that is brazenly
antisocial, to say the least."
A number of The Dirty Dozen's reviews are similarly characterized
by an unusual concern for the movie's effect upon its spectators. Newsweek
(July 2, 1967) complained that the "orgy of unrestrained violence"
with which The Dirty Dozen climaxed was designed "to stir only the
atavistic passions of this audience." The New York Post (June 16, 1967)
termed it "roughage for an audience needing entertainment increasingly
hyped for the hardened" in which "kill-crazy brutality is exploitated to
the utmost" and concluded that it "could be a crowd pleaser." The Daily
News (June 16, 1967) remarked that The Dirty Dozen opened to "the
loudest blast of applause ever heard on old Broadway," while the New
Yorker (July 22, 1967) observed that "the moronic muggings of the title
characters were hailed by colleague thugs in the audience with gales of
comradely laughter."
Mass excitement may be deemed overstimulating when violence is
linked to the representation of criminal activity. The Dirty Dozen was
understood less as a comment on warfare than, at once violent and
antiauthoritarian, something that might be incitement to riot--although
there is no evidence of any disturbances in any theater during the course
of its release.
Andrew Sarris in the Village Voice (June 29, 1967) was somewhat
more specific and politically attuned in terming The Dirty Dozen "a
glorification of the dropout [that was] well suited to slum fantasizing."
Without specificallymentioning America's season of violence, Sarris theorized
the source of the movie's appeal:
Jean Renoir has observed that people are moved more by magic than
by logic. To sit in the balcony of the Capitol while Clint Walker and
Jim Brown [both relatively sympathetic members of the Dirty Dozen]
are demolishingtwo finky noncoms is to confirm this observation. All
the well-intentionedOperation Bootstrap cinema in the world cannot
provide underdog audienceswith the emotionalrelease achieved almost
effortlessly with one shot to the solar plexus. It's sad, but true. Blood
is thicker than progressive porridge.
So it would be with the even more "political" and antiauthoritarian
Bonnie and Clyde.
"A Test for the Individual Viewer" 125
Bonnie and Clyde's Critical Reception
Considering Bonnie and Clyde's violence quotient, Variety (Aug. 9,
1967) had recommended a "hard-sell exploitation campaign." Warner
Brothers complied, using one of the most outrageous slogans of the period
for the first advertisement to run in the New York Times (Aug. 13,
1967): "They're young . . . they're in love . . . and they kill people."5
Such flippancy was provocative, and the critical response when Bonnie
and Clyde opened in New York, on August 13, 1967, was no less
strong. The "blending of farce with brutal killings is as pointless as it is
lacking in taste," Crowther wrote in the New York Times. Then, something
unusual happened. "We got advertising we never could have afforded,"
director Arthur Penn would recall twenty-seven years later in
the course of a public interview at the American Museum of the Moving
Image (Nov. 12, 1994). The Times was flooded with letters attacking
Crowther, who felt compelled to publish yet a third denunciation of
Bonnie and Clyde, this time accusing the movie of distorting history and,
like The Dirty Dozen, pandering to a fashionable anti-Establishment
anger.6
Such anger may have been even more fashionable than Crowther
feared. That same week, in an unprecedented second review (Aug. 28,
1967), Newsweek critic Joseph Morgenstern recanted his original, Dirty
Dozen-like characterization of Bonnie and Clyde as "a squalid shoot'em
up for the moron trade."
Now, Warner Brothers was running print ads in which the Barrow
Gang thanked New York for its support while Variety (Aug. 30, 1967)
gleefully reported the fracas as "Crowther's 'Bonnie'-Brook." The Times
published another half-dozen letters praising Bonnie and Clyde as well
as an interview with Arthur Penn in which he responded to Crowther's
charges, arguing that his film was, if anything, a cautionary treatment:
"The trouble with the violence in most films is that it is not violent
enough" (Sept. 17, 1967). Let Films in Review (Oct. 1967) call Bonnie
and Clyde "evil"; the New Yorker ran two positive reviews. Critic Penelope
Gilliat's original notice was followed two months later, in the
October 21 issue, by freelancer Pauline Kael's nine-thousand-word manifesto:
"The innocuousness of most of our movies is accepted with such
complacence that when an American movie reaches people, when it
makes them react, some of them think there must be something the
matter with it--perhaps a law should be passed against it."
Kael raised the rhetorical stakes considerably by linking her defense
of Bonnie and Clyde to issues of free speech, illegality, and even insurrection,
while implicitly defending the overthrow of the MPAA Code.
At the same time, she suggested that Bonnie and Clyde was perceived
as dangerous precisely because it succeeded in popularizing a hitherto
rarefied attitude toward criminal violence: "Bonnie and Clyde brings
FIGURE 6.1 Variety had recommended a "hard-sell exploitation campaign"
and Warner Brothers complied, using one of the most outrageous
slogans of the period for Ronnie and Clyde: "They're young . . . they're
in love . . . and they kill people." Courtesy of Warner Bros.  1967
Warner Bros.--Seven Arts and Tatira-Hiller Productions.
"A Test for the Individual Viewer" 127
into the almost frighteningly public world of movies things that people
have been feeling and saying and writing about." Presumably, these
might include the cultural artifacts that Benton and Newman surveyed
in "Now Let the Festivities Begin" as well as the philosophical justification
for political violence found, for example, in Frantz Fanon's The
Wretched of the Earth.
Movies, as the anxious response to The Dirty Dozen suggests, considerably
democratized the audience. "Once something is said or done
on the screens of the world, once it has entered mass art, it can never
again belong to a minority, never again be the private possession of an
educated, or 'knowing' group." The movie Bonnie and Clyde, like the
historical Bonnie and Clyde, appeared to Kael to be acting out "forbidden
roles" and popularizing illicit thrills. Indeed, establishing itself as a
post-MPAA (and post-liberal) release, Bonnie and Clyde wastes little
time establishing a social or psychological basis for its protagonists'
criminal behavior--the better to dwell on that behavior itself. Moreover,
from the onset, the capacity for criminal violence is shown alternately
as a substitute for or a stimulant to sexual relations.
Bored waitress Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) and brash ex-con
Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) meet on a dusty, depressed West Dallas
afternoon when she foils his attempt to steal her mother's Model T. The
scene is frought with erotic suggestion. Bonnie, who observes Clyde from
her bedroom window, is herself nude when first seen by him (and us).
After thwarted Clyde proudly shows her his revolver, she fondles the
barrel suggestively and taunts him into robbing a grocery store. Clyde
does so and Bonnie is so aroused she literally throws herself at the gunman
as they careen off in their newly stolen getaway car. To her disappointment,
he is sexually impotent. In a scene thus frought with
embarrassment and anxiety, Clyde reasserts control by appealing to Bonnie's
desire for glamour and successfully enlisting her as his accomplice
in crime. Clyde, as he says, may not be a "lover boy," but he is evidentally
a crack shot and much is made of his teaching eager Bonnie how
to handle a gun.
The movie's initial tone is saucy and lighthearted, with frequent use
of the rollicking banjo piece "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" as a theme
for the outlaw pair's comic mishaps. Holding up another grocery, Clyde
narrowly avoids having his head split by a clerk who attacks him from
behind with a meat cleaver. ("He tried to kill me," he tells Bonnie in
amazement.) After attempting to rob a bank that has already failed,
Bonnie and Clyde pick up a loveably stupid accomplice, C. W. Moss
(Michael J. Pollard), as a driver, only to be confounded in their next job
when he parks the getaway car. Here, for the first time, the comedy
becomes too real. Clyde is compelled to shoot the bank teller who pursues
them point-blank in the face--a shock image that deliberately re-
128 Why We Watch
FIGURE 6.2 From the outset of Bonnie and Clyde, capacity for criminal violence
is shown alternately as a substitute for or a stimulant to sexual relations.
Courtesy of Warner Bros.  1969 Warner Bros.--Seven Arts Inc.
calls the violent death of an elderly, bespectacled woman in the Odessa
Steps sequence of Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin.
This first killing is followed by an even more obvious film citation
with a cut to Bonnie, Clyde, and C. W. at the movies watching the nowcampy
opening number, "We're in the Money," from a thirty-four-yearold
Warner Brothers musical, Gold Diggers of 1933. Bonnie, who is
least affected by the death of the bank officer, will later reprise the song
before her mirror. In general, she and Clyde act as though they are living
a movie. Their initial relationship--defined by Clyde's discovery, training,
and casting of Bonnie--is suggestive of a producer grooming a prospective
star. For virtually the entire period that they are fugitives from
the law, the couple can be seen explicitly constructing their public images--posing
for photographs, introducing themselves as celebrities, enjoying
their press clips, and, in the case of Bonnie, writing doggerel verse
to celebrate their exploits.
It is the newspaper publication of "The Ballad of Bonnie and
Clyde," and thus public recognition of his existence, that inspires Clyde
to a successful sexual performance. "Once incarnated as myths," as
Richard Maltby notes in Harmless Entertainment: Hollywood and the
"A Test for the Individual Viewer" 129
Ideology of Consensus, Bonnie and Clyde are shown to behave "just like
'normal' people: their subsequent assassination may then be presented
as a tragic irony, in which they are victimized for their non-conformity
by a vindictive society" (1983, p. 309). Significantly, once Bonnie and
Clyde achieve what might be termed ordinary sexual satisfaction, the
capacity for outrageous--and outrageously punitive--violence resides
entirely with the state.
Even before the movie's climax, the audience has been conditioned
to fear mayhem. Pursued by the Texas Rangers, the increasingly celebrated
Barrow Gang joins forces with Clyde's older brother, Buck (Gene
Hackman), and Buck's wife, Blanche (Estelle Parsons). After an initial
flurry of enthusiasm, the mood darkens. The Barrows are twice trapped
in rustic motor courts by small armies of lawmen and twice compelled
to shoot their way out to freedom, killing several police officers in the
process. Bonnie and Clyde's obvious aestheticism, its pleasure in broken
glass and overturned automobiles, appeared to trivialize violence. When
the members of the Barrow Gang were themselves the victims of gunshots,
however, the movie raised the firepower to wartime dimensions.
(Esquire's November 1967 issue described the penultimate gun battle as
"the Siege of Dienbenphu.") This allowed for some painful verisimilitude,
as when Buck is naturalistically shot in the head and Blanche,
herself wounded, launches into what would be an Oscar-winning rant
of denial.
Similarly, the protagonists' climactic, bloody perforation has a tremendous
finality. The shooting stops, the lawmen emerge from their
ambush and advance toward the car. At this point, the movie literally
stops dead; Bonnie and Clyde no longer exist, the screen goes black.
Bonnie and Clyde as Arbiters of Fashion
Bonnie and Clyde divided American critics but the civil war was a brief
one. Bosley Crowther retired at the end of 1967 (ultimately replaced by
Vincent Canby, whose sympathetic Penn interview had signaled the senior
critic's waning power); Kael went on staff at the New Yorker to
become the most influential American movie critic of the next two decades.
By that time, Bonnie and Clyde was certified pop art, featured on
the cover of the December 8, 1967, issue of Time as interpreted by
Robert Rauschenberg for an essay entitled "The New Cinema: Violence
. . . Sex. . . Art."
Time, which had earlier panned Bonnie and Clyde under the headline
"Low-Down Hoedown" as "a strange and purposeless mingling of
fact and claptrap," blandly reversed itself to proclaim the movie "the
sleeper of the decade." Whereas Time's original review parroted
Crowther's outrage that Bonnie and Clyde had represented the nation
in Montreal, the newsweekly now echoed Kael's assertion that audiences
130 Why We Watch
left the movie in a state of stunned reverie: "There is usually a hushed,
shaken silence to the crowds that trail out of the theaters."
By some accounts, the anonymous Time staffer who initially reviewed
Bonnie and Clyde was subsequently relieved of such responsibilities
(Clarens, 1980, p. 259). Newsweek (Dec. 18, 1967), meanwhile,
would amusedly cite Pravda's fuddy-duddy blast against the "decadent"
Bonnie and Clyde. If the Russians missed the fun of violence, Time's
cover essay was ostentatiously au courant in invoking Cahiers du Cinema
and paraphrasing Jean-Luc Godard to explain how narrative, in the
movies, may only serve as a pretext, that filmmakers need not adhere to
conventions, and that comedy and tragedy might be blurred: A "segment
of the public wants the intellectually demanding, emotionally fulfilling
kind of film exemplified by Bonnie and Clyde." Tastes had grown more
sophisticated. Violence was no longer restricted to the moron trade. Television
had taken over Hollywood's function and the "cinema" was now
"the favorite art form of the young."
The generational relationship was clinched when the December 26,
1967, issue of Time ran a letter written by an eighteen-year-old college
freshman from Peoria, maintaining that Bonnie and Clyde was "not a
film for adults," which was precisely why it had incurred such Establishment
wrath. Nor was it the violence, she wrote, that had shocked
her peers: "The reason it was so silent, so horribly silent in the theater
at the end of the film was because we liked Bonnie Parker and Clyde
Barrow, we identified with them and wanted to be like them." But what
exactly did that mean?
One can hardly imagine such a letter being written to Time in defense
of The Dirty Dozen. As the authors of the discarded MPAA Code
feared, the attractive protagonists of Bonnie and Clyde had seduced impressionable
viewers into complicity with criminal violence.Appropriating
the romantic saga of the Outlaw Couple, Bonnie and Clyde drew
legitimacy from one of Hollywood's oldest stories even as it invited a
new and sophisticated complicity with the perhaps illicit pleasures purveyed
by the movies. Bonnie and Clyde signaled a willingness to suspend
moral judgment and go with the flow. Its success, as Richard Maltby
notes, demonstrated "the extent to which the obligatory moral certainties
of the Production Code's linear narratives had been discarded in
favor of a self-regarding opportunism which allowed performers to act
as they pleased, as free from social conventions as they were from narrative
responsibilities" (1983, p. 312).
Bonnie and Clyde promoted an appreciation of crime as a game
ruined by a grown-up society's tedious insistence that acts have consequences.
Some took this literally. The New York Times (Mar. 23, 1968)
reported that five teenage boys in dress "apparently inspired by the
movie Bonnie and Clyde" were arrested in the affluent suburb of Westport,
Connecticut, and charged with breach of the peace after "creating
"A Test for the Individual Viewer" 131
a disturbance at a local bank" by brandishing a toy gun as an armored
car pulled up across the street.
Not simply as photogenic as pop stars (in one sequence, the Barrow
Gang playfully cluster around the car of a hapless undertaker and his
date, mashing their faces against the windows as if imitating the Beatles
in A Hard Day's Night), Bonnie and Clyde are simultaneously victims
and aggressors. Meanwhile, as Maltby points out,
the interplay of comedy (in which the gang is always seen to laugh)
and violence (in which the gang is always seen to suffer) enforces the
audience's emotional attachment to them. . . . The ingratiating nature
of the central performances allows the spectator no viewpoint other
than that of the characters themselves, and the narcissistic display of
style as its own justification obliges the audience to make its judgments
on the appearances with which Beatty and Dunaway are so obsessed.
(1983, p. 313)
It should not be surprising then that, for some, Bonnie and Clyde was
not so much overly violent as excessively glamorous: "Pretty people who
kill, and the killing they do is pretty too," wrote Jimmy Breslin in New
York (July 8, 1968), adding that if "you want to see a real killer, then
you should have been around to see Lee Harvey Oswald."
Good looks, swell clothes, and impossible cool set Bonnie and Clyde
apart from their dowdy environment. That Beatty and Dunaway themselves
appear too old to be a couple of crazy mixed-up kids is part of
the movie's pronounced figure-ground problem. These were no ordinary
delinquents. Crowther had complained that Bonnie and Clyde's, "sleazy,
moronic" protagonists were shown "as full of fun and frolic as the jazzage
cut-ups in Thoroughly Modern Millie" (New York Times, Aug. 14,
1967), and couturiers, certainly, understood that they were scarcely a
pair of dust-bowl losers. If anything, Bonnie and Clyde's style suggested
that of the wealthy young couple in The Great Gatsby, motoring heedlessly
through the hinterlands, smashing up the lives of lesser "little people,"
and then retreating into their money.
Bonnie and Clyde were too beautiful to grow up, become domestic,
join the middle class. Their vehicle was about going over the edge, hence
the joke of the January 13, 1968, New Yorker cartoon in which a laughing
pair of pear-shaped middle-aged bourgies announce themselves on
an apartment intercom, "Open up. It's Bonnie and Clyde!" According
to screenwriters Benton and Newman, the couple's real offenses were
not robbing banks and killing policemen but, rather, crimes of lifestyle:
Bonnie's insolent poetry and cigar smoking, Clyde's sexual hang-ups,
the couple's "existential" relationship and self-absorbeddesire for celeb-
rity.
In their original film treatment, Benton and Newman wrote that "if
Bonnie and Clyde were here today, they would be hip. . . . Their style,
132 Why We Watch
their sexuality, their bravado, their delicacy, their cultivated arrogance,
their narcissistic insecurity, their curious ambition have relevance to the
way we live now." Bonnie, in particular, was for them "a kind of strange
and touching vision: a pretty girl who was both tough and vulnerable,
who was both Texas and universal, who wrote poetry and shot policemen,
who loved life and courted death" (Mademoiselle, Mar. 1968).
One wonders if the writers weren't responsible for the photo gallery of
"Jail Birds," comely young women currently in jail for crimes of violence,
that postscripted Esquire's dossier on violence.
From the perspective of thirty years, what is most striking about
Bonnie and Clyde is the public's widespread and largely spontaneous
desire to participate more fully in that which the movie seemed to be.
Unlike The Dirty Dozen, Ronnie and Clyde inspired songs recorded by
artists as disparate as Merle Haggard, Brigitte Bardot, and Mel Torme.
Bonnie Parker's sister cut an album-length interview. British singer Georgie
Fame's mock ragtime "Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde" was banned in
Norway (as was the movie itself) and France because it used the sound
of machine-gun fire as percussion. Unprepared for the movie's extraordinary
success, Warner Brothers scrambled to issue a soundtrack album
six months after Bonnie and Clyde's original release had placed its bluegrass
theme, "Foggy Mountain Breakdown," in the top ten (number one
in England).
By early 1968, when Warren Beatty prevailed upon Warner Brothers
to rerelease Bonnie and Clyde with a new, more dignified advertising
campaign that stressed its artistic merits, the film had ignited several
clothing fads on both sides of the Atlantic. These included a return to
calf-length "midi" or "maxi" skirts, a revival of fedoras, wide ties, and
(for the first time in years) berets. Nor did viewers fail to notice that
Faye Dunaway wore no brassiere. Even before the March issue of Harper's
Bazaar showcased "The Gangster Game," Life put Dunaway on
the cover of its January 12, 1968, issue as "Bonnie: Fashion's New Dar-
ling."
Newsweek's March 4, 1968, Dunaway cover proclaimed her "a
with-it girl of the '60s," the first American actress to "electrify the
world's moviegoers" since Marilyn Monroe. But was it the actress or
the role that so captivated the public? Or was it the sense, articulated
by the Weimar social critic Siegfried Kracauer, that "an idea bursts out
of the darkness and can be formulated"?
The social world is at all times filled with countless spiritual forces or
entities that one can simply call ideas [and] what these ideas have in
common is that . . . they all want to become reality themselves.They
appear within human society as a concrete, material should-being [Sollen]
and have an inborn drive to realize themselves. (Kracauer, 1995,
p. 143)
"A Test for the Individual Viewer" 133
Women's Wear Daily announced that the hot shade for spring 1968
was "the gun-barrel gray of Bonnie's pistol" (Newsweek, Dec. 18,
1967). The March 1968 Mademoiselle gave Dunaway a "special
award," explaining, in suitably Kracauersian terms, that "Every so often
a new look comes into being. It may float the air unlabeled, unclaimed
in origin, before it crystalizes and people say, "That's it. That's what
we're talking about." Which is what happened with Bonnie and Clyde's
Faye Dunaway. Suddenly she brought a look to life, focused it by the
way she walked and talked and wore her clothes. . . ." In short, the
movie was an event. It meant something. It was Now.
Bonnie and Clyde as a Political Text
As Arthur Penn defended Bonnie and Clyde by pointing out that "violence
was part of the American character" (1967), so the mayhem in his
movie was not only unusually bloody and vivid but appreciated in a
contemporary, as well as a period, context.7
Like an updated version of
the anarchist Bonnot Gang, who robbed banks (and invented the motorized
getaway) in pre-World War I France, Bonnie and Clyde even
seemed to articulate a political justification for their criminal activities.
They several times express their solidarity with dispossessed farmers and
other victims of the Depression and link this to their hostility toward
banks. Humiliating authority is another one of their specialties.
Moreover, the movie suggests that, for the sexually dysfunctional
Clyde, guns are in some way compensatory. In the libidinal economy of
Bonnie and Clyde, violence is thus a consequence of repression--sexual
or otherwise. (As Andrew Kopkind wrote in the September 28, 1967,
issue of the New York Review of Books that "to be white and a radical
in America this summer is to see horror and feel impotent," so Dunaway
cited the source of her identification with Bonnie: "The biggest thing
about Bonnie was her frustration. She was up against a stone wall--a
girl with potential who is blocked" [Newsweek, Mar. 4, 19681.) Just as
Bonnie and Clyde's lack of sexual fulfillment is presented as a contributory
cause of the Barrow Gang's violence, so their hard-won sexual
happiness must be punished by the police.
To some degree, Bonnie and Clyde initially appeared as a semiotic
jumble. The Nation--which, back in January 1931, had accused Hollywood
of crowning the lawless "with the Romantic halo of bravery and
adventure that helps to disguise their fundamental moronism"--had the
sense that Bonnie and Clyde's actions would "strike the viewer with icy
familiarity in our day of motorcycle gangs and flower children, Nazi
insignia, cheap beads, incense, drugs, apathy and motiveless violence"
(Cawelti, 1973, p. 90).
The same week that Time highlighted Bonnie and Clyde on its cover,
134 Why We Watch
that of the New York Review of Books (Dec. 8, 1967) featured a David
Levine caricature depicting President Johnson as a suitably degenerate
Clyde, with Secretary of State Dean Rusk as his demure and diminutive
Bonnie. Critic Stanley Kauffmann made a similar connection at a lower
level, noting in the New Republic that Gene Hackman, who played
Clyde's brother, looked and sounded like "a young LBJ." Indeed, the
month Bonnie and Clyde opened, Rap Brown had called the president
"a wild, mad dog--an outlaw from Texas" (Time, Aug. 4, 1967).
But the equation between Bonnie and Clyde and America's leaders
got things backward. Although fundamentally anarchic in itscelebration
of self-absorbed hatred of authority, Bonnie and Clyde was generally
felt to be a film of the left. Penn made a specific link to Black Power,
proudly telling Cahiers du Cinema that, during one of the preview
screenings, the "five Negroes present. . . completely identified with Bonnie
and Clyde. They were delighted. They said: 'This is the way; that's
the way to go, baby. Those cats were all right' " (Cawelti, 1973, p. 19).
Penn's anecdote, his evident pride at this particular endorsement,
and his subsequent observation that African Americans were at "the
point of revolution" suggest that Bonnie and Clyde's appeal (as well as
its danger) was less mayhem per se than a new attitude toward mayhem.
The movie spoke to and popularized the neo-Sorelian cult of violence
that Tom Wolfe would eventually label "radical chic." Reporting in the
December 21, 1967, Village Voice, where Bonnie and Clyde was "the
apotheosis of the New Style," in London theater critic and playwright
Charles Marowitz summed up this stance in somewhat gentler terms:
"If you are a bonnie-and-clyder, you are pro-camp and anti-Ugly; propermissiveness
and anti-authoritarian; an advocate of the easy, improvised
approach to life rather than a Five Year Planner. You pledge
allegiance to the Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones and all they stand
for, and walk imperturbably toward the exit-doors while the National
Anthem is playing."
Marowitz maintained that "the heady ecstasy with which Bonnie
and Clyde break the law is echoed in the arcane pleasure that attends
pot parties in north and southwest London." In the United States, of
course, the youthful outlaw culture not only encompassed taking drugs
but equally included demonstrating against the government, evading the
draft, and, in the most extreme case of the Black Panthers, shooting it
out with the police.
No less than Arthur Penn, white protesters and student radicals were
drawn to violence by the example of Black Power. The issue of New
Left Notes (June 26, 1967) published to coincide with the Students for
a Democratic Society (SDS) annual convention anticipated Bonnie as
fashion's darling by emblazoning its cover with a smiling, rifle-toting
"New American Woman." Appropriating a term from the Black Panthers,
New Left Notes'?, September 25 issue would be the first to char-
"A Test for the Individual Viewer" 135
acterize the authorities as "pigs." Indeed, the period of Bonnie and
Clyde's production is identical to the development of the Black Panther
Party, whose ten-point program was written in Oakland by Huey P.
Newton and Bobby Seale as the movie began filming outside Dallas in
October 1966.
The Dirty Dozen reigned as a box-office hit during the season of
urban riots; the righteous outlaws of Bonnie and Clyde seemed to anticipate
the fall 1967 escalation in antiwar political rhetoric and symbolic
activity. "Here I was," wrote Berkeley activist Michael Rossman
of Stop the Draft Week, "trying to sing what it's like to see the vectors
of the war, the breaking black thing, the incipient hippy pogrom focus
on our heads, and us on the streets of Oakland and at Bonnie and Clyde
for the third time, trying to learn what to do next while the culture
decides to eat its young" (1971, p. 238). The notion of Bonnie and Clyde
as text (the great fear of the old Production Code) is striking. For Rossman,
Bonnie and Clyde had an oracular quality. Nor was he alone. The
first line of Abbie Hoffman's proposed advertisement for the scheduled
October 14 "exorcism" of the Pentagon was "Don't miss Bonnie and
Clyde" (Hoffman, 1968, p. 41).
An international revolutionary martyr had been born on October 7,
when Bolivian soldiers captured and executed Che Guevara. Two weeks
later, Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton was wounded and imprisoned
after a gunfight with the Oakland police. From the point of view
of the counterculture, then, Bonnie and Clyde was right on time. (At the
same time, fall 1967 saw the use of incendiary buzzwords in various
advertising campaigns for automobiles, liquor, cigarettes, detergents,
and deodorants--the best-known of these being the "Dodge rebellion,"
which cosponsored the 1967 World Series.)
SDS militant Gerald Long wrote a piece in the September 9, 1967,
issue of the Guardian explaining that Bonnie and Clyde's true subject
was "the violation of bourgeois property relations." Bonnie and Clyde
is not a liberal or sociological film--times are hard, this is the result:
"Anybody with a grain of sense would be out robbing these banks."
Bonnie and Clyde, C. W., et al. "are just out there doing their thing, the
thing they should be doing, and the camera and the audience are digging
it and zooming along with them on the flight of the banjos plunking in
the background. The banjos are freedom, integrity, spirit, all the things
that bourgeois bankers, sheriffs and undertakers are not."
When the two "consciousness-expanding outlaws" drive into the
service station where C. W. Moss is pumping gas, Long wrote, it's as
though "a Mustang convertible pulls up with Luis Turcos, Frantz Fanon,
and Nguyen Van Troi inside and they hold the door open and say, 'Hop
in man, we're driving on down to the Pentagon.' " Long, who wouid
sign the Weatherman manifesto in June 1969, expressed his hope that
Bonnie and Clyde would break attendance records: "The audience really
136 Why We Watch
gets angry when the anonymous Minions of Bourgeois Order blast down
the Blyth Spirit of the Revolution."
Long's celebration of Bonnie and Clyde was topped four months
later when New Left Notes, which had never before reviewed a commercial
movie, devoted fully a quarter of its January 8, 1968, issue to a
discussion of the movie. Arguing that Long gave Hollywood "more ideological
credit than it deserves," Neil Buckley asserted that Bonnie and
Clyde was revolutionary beyond the filmmakers' intentions in part because
historical context had overdetermined its reception. The current
incidence of violence in America precluded viewing the movie as a "tragedy
of youth gone bad." Rather, Bonnie and Clyde was "the political
equivalent of a horror movie" in its demonstration that the punishment
for challenging the capitalist order is death: "The viewer leaves the film
with a tingling sensation where the bullet holes might have been in his
body had he too gone wrong--had he too violated property rights."
Buckley's reading of the movie deliberately blurs the distinction between
the fictional scenario on the screen and the political scenario he
imagines for himself and his comrades:
We are not potential Bonnies and Clydes, we are Bonnies and Clydes,
the real things, challenging America in a real and fundamental way
(which Bonnie and Clyde did not do--which makes us exceedingly
dangerous).
In its essential element, Bonnie and Clyde is revolutionary because
it defines possible futures for us based on the reality of conditions under
which we struggle. The film does not depict a revolutionary ideology.
It does much more than that; it defines a revolutionary's lot.
What defines a revolutionary's lot? For Sorel, violence had the additional
value of acting as a scission to split a political movement from
the larger society. Although both describe the mayhem committed
against Bonnie and Clyde, neither Long nor Buckley directly addresses
the Barrow Gang's own capacity for violence--even though it is precisely
this violence that not only defines the outlaw band but also creates
that scission dividing the movie's most appreciative viewers from those
most offended.8
Post-Bonnie and Clyde Hollywood Cinema
Bonnie and Clyde grossed $22.7 million--ten times its budget and the
thirteenth highest grossing American movie up to that date--and was
nominated for ten Oscars at a ceremony that had to be delayed for two
days to acknowledge the assassination of Martin Luther King. By then,
the movie had become the symbol of media violence. Three weeks after
the King assassination, the New York Times Magazine (Apr. 28, 1968)
published a symposium entitled "Is America by Nature a Violent Soci-
"A Test for the Individual Viewer" 137
ety?" Two of the nine participating intellectuals cited Bonnie and Clyde.
Life's June 21, 1968, cover story, "The Psycho-biology of Violence," by
Albert Rosenfeld, links the assassination of Robert Kennedy to "the climate
of violence . . . where real life and fictional--as in the popular
movie Bonnie and Clyde--are filled with images of brutality."
The same, of course, was true for Life. The first page of Dr. Rosenfeld's
essay is illustrated with a frame enlargement of Faye Dunaway in
the throws of Bonnie's death spasm: "The casual acceptance of violence,
epitomized in the movie Bonnie and Clyde, creates a climate which some
scientists believe can arouse susceptible people to violent acts." Similarly,
Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s 1968 broadside Violence: America in the Sixties
deplored Bonnie and Clyde for "its blithe acceptance of the world of
violence--an acceptance which almost became a celebration" (p. 53).
Within a week of Robert Kennedy's death on June 5, President Johnson's
executive order established the National Commission on the
Causes and Prevention of Violence. Bonnie and Clyde was cited repeatedly
(albeit frequently sight unseen, according to testimony) during the
commission hearings held in December 1968. Asked about the movie,
Jack Valenti obscured his own evident ambivalence by pointing out that
it had been singled out for praise by the National Catholic Office of
Motion Pictures (Violence and the Media, 1969, p. 206).
Valenti's remarks prompted a reply from Representative Hale Boggs,
Democrat from Louisiana, that echoed the complaints of the 1930s:
We had a murder in my town committed by an 18-year-old boy who
had come out of Bonnie and Clyde one hour before. He killed a young
man who was running a drive-in grocery store. And it was just a senseless
murder. Now, whether or not what he saw in Bonnie and Clyde
had any impact on the murder, I don't know. But I know that what I
say to you is a fact--that he saw this movie which glorifies violence.
Boggs, who pointed out that "those Bonnie and Clyde characters lived
in my State," was particularly annoyed by Valenti's use of the award
(for the best "mature" picture of 1967) by the National Catholic Office
of Motion Pictures to defend Bonnie and Clyde, citing in reply the new
MPAA Code: " 'Detailed and protracted acts of brutality, cruelty, physical
violence, torture and abuse shall not be presented.' That's the essence
of that movie" (Violence and the Media 1969, p. 206).
By the time Lyndon Johnson left the White House a few weeks later,
in January 1969, with U.S. military personnel in Vietnam at a wartime
peak of 542,400, violence was popularly understood as central to American
culture and history. The introductions to the anthologies Violence
in America: A Historical and Contemporary Reader (1969) and American
Violence: A Documentary History (1970) are typical; the foreword
to Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, a report
to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Vi-
138 Why We Watch
olence, published in June 1969, took the even more radical position that
"the growth of this country has occurred around a series of violent upheavals
and that each has thrust the nation forward."
That same month, New Left Notes ran a cover illustration of two
young men, one white and one black, crouching on a rooftop above a
burning city, both armed with automatic rifles and wearing crisscrossed
ammunition belts ("in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take
up the gun"), while the Museum of Modern Art concluded a lengthy
retrospective series, The American Action Movie: 1946-64, having
dropped the rubric Violent America for the retrospective after one film
distributor refused to furnish prints for presentation in a program that
was so called (Twitchell, 1989, p. 187).
Needless to say, none of the films MoMA screened had anything
approaching the degree of mayhem by then available in contemporary
Hollywood movies. Indeed, Variety opined that The Wild Bunch--
which also appeared in June 1969--might be "the most violent USfilm
ever made." Among other things, The Wild Bunch was designed to obliterate
Bonnie and Clyde. Dub Taylor, who appeared in both Bonnie and
Clyde, as the father of C. W. Moss, and the first scene of The Wild
Bunch, as a temperance movement leader, remembers director Sam Peckinpah
boasting that The Wild Bunch would be "better than Bonnie and
Clyde" (Fine, 1991, p. 124). Similarly, another co-worker, Gordon
Dawson, recalls Peckinpah announcing that "We're going to bury Ronnie
and Clyde" (Weddle, 1994, p. 331).
The fourth-and fifth-largest hits of 1967 (behind one romantic comedy
dealing with the generation gap, The Graduate, another on the subject
of integration, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?, and Walt Disney's
animated feature The Jungle Book), Bonnie and Clyde and The Dirty
Dozen offered a volatile mix of ultraviolence with blatant antiauthoritarianism.
As period films, both advanced a revisionist view of the national
past that, in effect, argued the centrality of excessive violence to
American history. Bonnie and Clyde provided a contemporary form of
the righteous outlaw while The Dirty Dozen effectively besmirched the
reputation and questioned the conduct of the most justifiable of all
American wars. At the same time, both movies were understood by initial
audiences as articulating some hitherto unacknowledged aspect of
their lives. If The Dirty Dozen provided an inchoate parallel to the riotous
summer of 1967, Bonnie and Clyde was incorporated into the
fall's escalation in antiwar rhetoric and activity among white protesters
and student radicals.
Bonnie and Clyde was further experienced as a harbinger of fashion
and, not surprisingly, engendered all manner of cinematic progeny, including
the top box-office attraction of 1969 (and, for a time, the highest
grossing western ever made), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. At
the same time, The Dirty Dozen spawned a 1968-1970 cycle of "dirty"
"A Test for the Individual Viewer" 139
war movies concerning similar pariah groups sent on morally ambiguous
commando missions.
The synthesis of Bonnie and Clyde and The Dirty Dozen was The
Wild Bunch, which concerns a collection of aging western outlaws who
jump from the frying pan of the closed American frontier into the fire
of the Mexican Revolution. (Indeed, Kenneth Hyman, who had produced
The Dirty Dozen, was now head of production at Warner Broth-
ers.)
The Wild Bunch code of honor is founded on male camaraderie.
Pike, the group's leader, proclaims that "when you side with a man, you
stay with him." No less than Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch and
even the insipid Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid embodied a striking
inversion of values. At once cynical and romantic, both of these
westerns presented the unregenerate criminal as a sympathetic figure,
expressing regret at his elimination by the agents of law and order.9
Shadowed by a sense of inevitable catastrophe, The Wild Bunch is
bracketed by the spectacle of civilians caught in a murderous crossfire.
Repeatedly, the viewer watches disaster unfold--the botched stakeout
that provides the movie's opening bloodbath, the collision on the railroad
tracks, the explosion on the bridge, the final massacre. Like Arthur
Penn, Peckinpah presented his project as essentially cautionary and demystifying,
echoing Penn's assertion that "the trouble with the violence
in most films is that it is not violent enough." Unlike Penn, however,
Peckinpah acknowledged something of his own fascination with may-
hem:
The point of [The Wild Bunch] is to take this facade of movie violence
and open it up, get people involved in it so that they are starting to go
in the Hollywood television predictable reaction syndrome, and then
twist it so that it's not fun anymore, just a wave of sickness in the gut.
. . . It's a terrible, ugly thing. And yet there's a certain response that
you get from it, an excitement because we're all violent people. (Weddle,
1994, p. 334)
Pauline Kael, who did so much to promote Bonnie and Clyde, had
ambivalent feelings about The Wild Bunch, arguing that, although Peckinpah
"thought that by making violence realistically bloody and gruesome
he would deglamourize warfare and enable the audience to see
how horrible it is," he became "so intricately involved in the problems
of violence that [the movie] tore itself apart. A brilliantly directed and
photographed study in confusion, it played to audiences who apparently
didn't take it as an attack on violence but simply enjoyed it as a violent
Western (New Yorker Mar. 21, 1970)."
William Wolf observed in the August 30, 1969, issue of Cue that
"the killings in Bonnie and Clyde were necessary to illuminate a subject.
The cop shot in the face was a horrible sight, as was the demise of the
140 Why We Watch
FIGURE 6.3 William Holden in The Wild Bunch. Imbuing a western with a
carnage of a war movie was understood, in 1969, as a form of naturalism.
Courtesy of Warner Bros.
gang. But the violence was meaningful in a context of larger drama. We
could hardly enjoy it." Even if one accepted Peckinpah's antiviolence
intent in The Wild Bunch, "he sure as hell wasn't getting any such message
across to the more vocal members of this audience--or to me."
At one point, after someone is shot in the head, the audience laughed
at the high-pitched voice of a little boy in the theater exclaiming: "I
like this picture." It is the kind of film that makes many grown-ups
behave the same way. Perhaps we have become so conditioned to violence
that we delight in the audacity of a film that piles it on with
such gusto.
Perhaps because, as a western, The Wild Bunch seemed targeted at a
less sophisticated segment of the movie audience, the movie inspired
some of the same anxieties as did The Dirty Dozen. On the other hand,
possibly as a result of the controversy that had dogged Bonnie and
Clyde's, The Wild Bunch's reception was characterized by an unusually
high degree of historical consciousness. The Daily News was reminded
of the "hue and cry" over the gangster cycle of the 1930s. Richard
Schickel employed multiple oxymorons in praising The Wild Bunch in
"A Test for the Individual Viewer" 141
Life as "the first masterpiece in the new tradition of the 'dirty western,'
" pointing out that the old "clean" western was "no more firmly
located in time than a dream . . . referring us endlessly to a lost Eden
that we probably never inhabited, a land whose inhabitants, when they
killed one another, usually did so for an understandable reason" (1970).
For Schickel, excessive violence enhanced naturalism in The Wild
Bunch. The same point was made even more forcefully by the Catholic
Film Newsletter (June 30, 1969). "It would be an easy matter to dismiss
\The Wild Bunch] as simply another celluloid blood-bath," noted the
anonymous representative of the National Catholic Office of Motion
Pictures. Yet, earlier westerns, in which "death was shown as a bloodless,
almost painless action," were in their obfuscations at least partially
responsible for "the violence in our society today." Peckinpah, by contrast,
deserved credit for aiming "to demythologize the conventional past
and present it as it really was." The Wild Bunch made violence central
and inescapable. Peckinpah's movie, the reviewer concluded, "could help
thoughtful viewers to understand who we are and where we have come
from in a way that, considering the history of the Western genre, is
singularly healthy." This, of course, presupposes a reasoned response to
the movie.10
Conclusions
That Warner Brothers's recent silver-anniversary rerelease of The Wild
Bunch was held up for a year when the MPAA deemed the movie's
restored version too violent for its original R rating suggests that public
attitudes toward violent imagery are historically determined. Indeed,
spectator antipathy or attraction to screen violence may, in fact, concern
something other than the violence itself. The controversy around
the 1991 movie Thelma and Louise demonstrates that an otherwise unremarkable
movie scenario--two fugitives on the run from the law
after committing an unpremeditated (and almost justifiable) act of murder--can
be considerably transformed by shifting the identity of the protagonists,
in this case from male to female. Albeit minimal (as well as
imaginary), Thelma and Louise's mayhem was perceived by many commentators
as a form of dangerous hyperbole, its rhetoric akin to irresponsible
demagoguery.
Thus, The Dirty Dozen disturbed reviewers by presenting criminals
trained as commandos to perform a job more virtuous soldiers could
not accomplish and Bonnie and Clyde's popularization of a previously
unusual attitude toward criminal violence--a willingness to suspend
moral judgment--was regarded as all the more dangerous for being
placed in the context of "a squalid shoot-'em up for the moron trade."
Criticized for expanding the parameters of "outlaw" violence, The
Dirty Dozen and Bonnie and Clyde were understood and appreciated
142 Why We Watch
by their initial audience as articulating some aspect of contemporary life
hitherto unacknowledged by the movies. Similarly, at the time of its first
release, The Wild Bunch reflected a new permissiveness regarding the
representation of sex and violence on the screen, as well as the free use
of taboo language. Moreover, in elaborating on Bonnie and Clyde's redefinition
of group morality and by raising comradeship to the ultimate
value, The Wild Bunch presaged all the postwar Vietnam films where
the idea is to stay alive, help your buddy, and get the hell out.
In the context of 1969, Peckinpah's outrageously stylized violence,
which imbued a western with the carnage and body count of a war
movie, was perceived as a form of naturalism--by idealists and cynics
alike. Hence the truth of producer Phil Feldman's grandiloquent pronouncement
when The Wild Bunch had its stormy preview at a Warner
Brothers junket: "The era of escapism is over; the era of reality is here.
. . . The entertainment industry has a right and duty to depict reality as
it is."
Notes
1. While the study's findings did not support the argument that exposure
to such material contributed to "the elicitation of aggressive acts in the severely
provoked individual," the authors, Dolf Zillmann and Holland C. Johnson, concluded
that filmed violence served to "sustain aggressiveness."
2. During this period as well, an old-fashioned gangster film, Black Tuesday
(1954) and the cavalry western Fort Yuma (1955) were reeditcd for violence.
3. Other current and recent movies deemed excessively violent, at least by
Esquire, were the psychological thrillers Straight Jacket and Lady in a Cage
(both 1964), the westerns A Fistful of Dollars (1964; U.S. release 1967) and
Nevada Smith (1966), The Chase (1966), and Andy Warhol's avant-garde talkathon
The Chelsea Girls (1966), as well as such imports as Roman Polanski's
Repulsion (1965) and Elio Petri's futuristic Tenth Victim (1965), in which the
violence "problem" is solved by the sport of legal murder. Two upcoming releases,
The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre and In Cold Blood, were expected
to contribute to the trend.
4. The Dirty Dozen was shot in the spring and summer of 1966 and
completed postproduction in October. Robert Aldrich, a director who had previously
experienced censorship problems with his Kiss Me Deadly, expressed
some concern that The Dirty Dozen be "a 1967 picture and not a 1947 picture"--telling
the Saturday Review (June 17, 1967) that "in the midst of a highly
unpopular war, I certainly didn't want to do a film either about the hawks or
the doves." While Aldrich himself seems to have been a political liberal, the
presence of star Lee Marvin (in a role first offered to John Wayne) gives the
movie a right-wing militarist inflection. In March 1966, Marvin, a decorated exMarine,
had hosted Our Time in Hell, an ABC documentary on the Marine
Corps so enthusiastically gung ho that even Variety (Mar 29, 1967) deemed it
"an hour-long public relations plug."
5. This unusually callous sell line appeared almost simultaneously in the
"A Test for the Individual Viewer" 143
national consciousness with H. Rap Brown's memorable formulation that "violence
is necessary and it's as American as cherry pie."
6. A parallel, unmentioned by Crowther, could be found in a contemporaneous
issue of the New York Review of Books, which was notorious for featuring
a diagram of a Molotov cocktail on its cover.
7. As Esquire's violence issue repeatedly noted the murder of John F. Kennedy
as the prologue to America's season of violence, so Bonnie and Clyde
referenced the Kennedy assassination in several ways. For one thing, the production
was based at the North Park Motor Inn in Dallas on the third anniversary
of the Kennedy assassination and, as David Thomson reports in his Beatty
biography, "people on the crew [were] impressed by the local aftershock." Then
too, director Penn, who had helped coach Kennedy for his televised debates with
Richard Nixon and had contrived an iconic reenactment of Lee Harvey Oswald's
shooting in his previous movie The Chase, connected Bonnie and Clyde's savage
denouement to the same Zapruder footage cited by Tom Wolfe: "There's even
a piece of Warren's head that comes off, like that famous photograph of Kennedy"
(Comolli and Labarthe, 1973, p. 16).
8. New Left Notes (Feb. 19, 1968) includes a sympathetic review of Sorel's
Reflections on Violence that, among other things, notes that "proletarian
violence makes the future revolution certain." The author, Tom Rose, is identified
as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee writing
his dissertation on the theory and practice of violence in America. Rose subsequently
edited the Random House anthology Violence in America: A Historical
and Contemporary Reader (1969), one of the numerous books on the subject
published between 1968 and 1970.
9. The Wild Bunch had its origins in a screenplay drawing on the same
historical material that inspired Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Butch
Cassidy was the leader, and the Sundance Kid a member, of the Wild Bunch.
"The biggest gang of outlaws that ever harried the West," according to Dorothy
M. Johnson's survey Western Badmen (1972), the Wild Bunch was active, robbing
banks, trains, and payrolls from 1897 through 1901. Cassidy and Sundance
subsequently relocated to South America, where they resumed their criminal
careers until they were killed in a gunfight with Bolivian police.
10. Writing in the Nation (July 14, 1969), Robert Hatch described a less
cerebral reaction to The Wild Bunch:
Peckinpah has rediscovered something that I suspect was known to the
Elizabethans: if you carry violence far enough, the audience will laugh.
. . . The director has also picked up, possibly from Bonnie and Clyde,
the device of showing the actual instant of annihilation in slow motion,
so that scenes of hysterical activity are constantly punctuated by floating,
dreamlike vignettes of death. And finally, he has decided, on what
medical authority I do not know, that when hit by a bullet the human
body bursts like a ripe melon. At this the audience laughed (and so did
I), not with merriment, exactly, but in tribute to such virtuosity of gore.
This is far closer to the audience response noted at showings of The Dirty Dozen
and unlike that observed at Bonnie and Clyde, the original movie that sought
to make viewers pay for their enjoyment of violence.