Question
and Challenge Authority
Given the emergence of the federal government
during the 1960s as a countervailing force to what appeared to be
manufacturers’ lax efforts to improve anti-theft deterrents in their vehicles,
it seems paradoxical that films of that era push back on the subject with
themes that question authority and the law. Unlike the 1950s, in early 1960s
films the subject of lawless youth and automobile theft was neglected. However,
in 1967, the notion of challenging traditional values burst on the scene with
the release of Bonnie and Clyde.38
Along with a number of other late 1960s films, Bonnie and Clyde revitalized Hollywood’s use of the automobile as a
symbol of autonomous individuality. The film elaborates on earlier themes while
also taking the symbolic potential of auto theft in new directions. Centering
on the lives and violent deaths of the infamous 1930s bank robbing duo, Bonnie and Clyde inaugurated the
transformation of auto theft in film from the subtextual expression of
delinquents grasping for autonomy, into a gradually more overt use of the
subject as a reaffirming act of reclaimed selfhood. Along with other films of
the era that featured personal transportation, such as Bullitt, The Graduate,
and Easy Rider, this story of mobile
criminality captured the complex generational response to the bankruptcy of
post-war American culture. It did so by recapturing a populist view of the
Depression-Era past.
Bonnie
and Clyde opens with a scene of voyeuristic anticipation. Clyde (Warren
Beatty) is hesitantly preparing to steal a car. Bonnie (Faye Dunaway), in the
nude, observes from her bedroom window a handsome young man suspiciously
lingering around her mother’s automobile. Rather than alert her family, she
watches curiously, drinking in the scene, anticipating what is to come. It is
evident that her curiosity stems from the banality of her own life. Confined in
domestic imprisonment, she gazes outside to freedom. To passively consume the
thrill of theft, she steps outside to confront the would-be thief. Her purpose,
however, is not really to stop Clyde, but rather to join him. Clyde and the
stolen Tudor Ford car are her vehicles to escape the self-destroying oppression
of the common, undifferentiated tedium of the everyday world. The act of auto
theft is the catalyst of the film, and it is repeated time after time, although
it was always a secondary crime to that of bank robbery. Accompanied by the
rousing banjo classic “Foggy Bottom Breakdown,” the opening acts of car theft,
criminality, and disorderly mobility convey the recapture of control over one’s
life. What follows is an elaboration of the search to find self through
repeated acts of stolen mobility and the defiance of society and its
institutions that strangle the chance for personal realization in rural America
during the Great Depression.
Set at a time in the United States
history when the failure of society to create an environment in which
autonomous individuality might be realized, the film radiates an
anti-establishment sensibility. The protagonists become the heroes of the
struggling working class people who live in stark visual settings. As bank
robbers, Bonnie and Clyde victimize the institutions that have victimized the
common person. In one scene, they are awakened in an abandoned home by the
family who had been evicted from it. Hearing their story, Clyde announces to
nodding approval that they are bank robbers, and gives the family a chance to
shoot the windows of the home now owned by the bank. More deeply, over the
course of the film we are led to see that the simple dreams for dignity and
independence of these people parallels Bonnie’s own basic desires, her wish for
a meaningful, loving life. However, the atmosphere of stark emptiness of Depression
era America created by the film makes clear that Bonnie’s wish will not be
fulfilled. On the sexual level, Clyde’s ability to perform is as disappointing
as the landscape. He can shoot a handgun with great accuracy and steal cars
effortlessly, but he avoids intimacy with Bonnie at every turn.
Clyde’s reasons for stealing cars are
rooted in masculine frustrations that mirror Bonnie’s simple longings for
dignity and fulfillment. Throughout, Clyde betrays a volatile combination of
diffidence and rashness expressive of suppressed manhood: a condition embodied
in Clyde’s sexual impotence. Bonnie’s assertive, longing sexuality repeatedly
spurs him into substitute actions of auto theft, bank robbery, gunplay and compulsive
mobility. His manliness has, in effect, been diverted into bold usurpation and
defiance of institutional authority in the form of banks, the police, and the
laws of the road. It’s their ticket to dignity. Repeatedly, the theft of a car
saves them from capture or death by the malignant forces which, far more than
the money they steal, signals their independence. Emphasizing the point is the
up-tempo banjo music, signaling the positive restoring vitality of the act. At
the same time, the music’s folksiness suggests a populist political message
that each act of stealing mobility restores the traditional distinctive
individuality that has been lost in mass society.
Yet these themes of restoration of
selfhood through stolen mobility are undercut as the film progresses. Like many
of the films of the New American Cinema movement, Bonnie and Clyde demonstrated a reflexivity that brought into
question the conventional use of mobility as a simple signifier of restored
liberty. Midway through the film, a darker mood of futility and inevitable doom
begin to creep across events, foreshadowing the bloody climax at the end. The
gang of idiosyncratic individuals begins to unravel. At various points they are
shorn of their vehicles, the up-tempo music slows with new car thefts, and
Bonnie steadily abandons any hope of transforming their freedom into something
sedentary and real. In effect, the declining fortunes of the gang, combined
with Bonnie’s sense of impending calamity, communicates the transience of the “freedom”
they had attained. The bright possibilities of the road and subversive autonomy
were exposed to be only temporary successes against the repressive forces of
mass society. In the end, we never see the fallen heroes, only their bullet-riddled
car.
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