Searching for New Frontiers by Rick Worland

Author:Rick Worland
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119464877
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2018-04-23T00:00:00+00:00

The story’s sexual dynamic turns complicated, however, when Clyde rejects her advances explaining, “I ain’t much of a lover boy,” and indeed avoids or is unable to consummate their relationship through most of the film. While the couple’s erotic drives will be channeled into robbery and violence, a more important drive is the one Clyde articulates for transcendence and celebrity, which they will get even as the path to fame hastens their demise. Lunching in a cafe, he accurately and painfully summarizes the story of her dead‐end life as a waitress while offering an escape. The gum‐snapping, middle‐aged woman who appears with their food just then presents a clear vision of her future. Like Bonnie, the grinning waitress has a prominent spit curl in her hair, which Clyde orders his companion to change as the first step in their mutual transformation.

Bonnie and Clyde differed from established currents of the gangster genre in that regard. Protagonists of the classic urban gangster movies like The Public Enemy (1931) and Scarface (1932) openly sought material success and social assimilation, ambitions signaled by an obligatory scene in which, dressed in tuxedos, the rough‐edged boys from immigrant neighborhoods descend from big cars to make a grand entrance into a nightclub. By comparison, the actual Barrow gang fascinated the public in the depths of the Depression because they could be perceived as populist outlaws, victims of social and economic injustice who waged an ambiguous resistance through crime. The train‐robbing Jesse James was their cultural antecedent, and other agrarian gangsters of the 1930s like Ma Barker, “Pretty Boy” Floyd, and John Dillinger fit this pattern too. Their crimes weren’t condoned but were deeply understood by heartland farmers and a rural populace slammed and displaced by the economic calamity and the Dust Bowl. (Movies that portrayed such figures include You Only Live Once [1937], the first loosely based on Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, and High Sierra [1941], with Humphrey Bogart as a tragic rural outlaw.)36 However, fame and romantic adventure seem the only motives of Penn’s good‐looking duo in a film whose exceptional violence only implicitly referenced the unfolding political events of the 1960s.

As Penn noted in a 1968 interview, his less than worldly characters seem to “discover” a rationale for their actions in a chance meeting with a dispossessed farmer and his family leaving their home, children and belongings piled onto a truck in imagery that inevitably recalls The Grapes of Wrath.37 When the man explains that the place was his until the bank took it, Clyde shoots the company’s repossession sign and then offers the pistol to the farmer and his elderly black hired hand so that they can take some satisfying shots as well. “We rob banks,” Clyde smilingly boasts, less from class solidarity than from having sensed the popular appeal of the slogan. In the charged atmosphere of 1967, though, even this vague intimation of a social purpose could appear to align the characters with a counter‐culture upsurge that was meeting increasing opposition from established institutions and the police.

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