On Film/Opinion

Why we love Sweet American violence

Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty embodied a dark part of the American psyche as a Romeo and Juliet on the lam in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, which used a graphic violence that was all the more horrific for its playfulness.
Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty embodied a dark part of the American psyche as a Romeo and Juliet on the lam in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, which used a graphic violence that was all the more horrific for its playfulness.

Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde might have been the first movie I loved for itself. It's one of the first I saw without adult supervision. I was 9 years old.

I probably shouldn't have seen it as a pre-adolescent, but I did. When my father took me to see Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid shortly after it opened in 1969, Bonnie and Clyde was already part of my frame of reference.

I distinctly remember (just as distinctly as I remember seeing Bonnie and Clyde at a matinee) talking about it with him afterward. I told him I thought the endings of the two films were virtually the same -- the glamorous and outnumbered outlaws died in a hail of authoritarian gunfire. But he argued that because George Roy Hill has ended his movie with a freeze-frame rather than jerking bodies, he had allowed for the possibility that Butch and Sundance had in fact escaped.

My dad thought Hill's ending was better; I think that the ambivalence of the ending is wishful but tonally appropriate. Butch and Sundance didn't get away. Like Bonnie and Clyde, they died in a hail of gunfire. But it was pretty to think they might have.

(What I didn't know then is that Butch and Sundance's ending was a homage to 1959's The 400 Blows, François Truffaut's semi-autobiographical film that also ended on a freeze-frame. Truffaut's purpose was to explicitly renege on the tacit contract between filmmaker and audience -- in exchange for spending two hours or so attending to the filmmaker's narrative, we expect resolution.

But in The 400 Blows, Truffaut doesn't give it to us. He frustrates us by suggesting that there's more to the story of young Antoine than we're going to get to see. Something beyond the frame. Hill doesn't really do this in Butch and Sundance, but he teases us: What if the outlaws got away? And for a possible answer, we can see Mateo Gil's 2011 Blackthorn, which stars Sam Shepard as an aging Butch Cassidy living in Bolivia. (I love how movies converse with each other.)

Anyway, Penn's Bonnie and Clyde was a movie for its time -- it was released during the Summer of Love but anticipated the curdling of the hippie. Vietnam was playing in American living rooms every evening. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. had months to live. Charles Manson was creeping-crawling through the Southern California desert. LBJ would soon abdicate. It didn't seem like the center could quite hold; outlaw nihilism felt like a reasonable option.

Bosley Crowther wrote a long and peevish review of Penn's film in The New York Times that called it "a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that treats the hideous depredations of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cut-ups in Thoroughly Modern Millie ... [S]uch ridiculous, camp-tinctured travesties of the kind of people these desperadoes were and of the way people lived in the dusty Southwest back in those barren years might be passed off as candidly commercial movie comedy, nothing more, if the film weren't reddened with blotches of violence of the most grisly sort ... This blending of farce with brutal killings is as pointless as it is lacking in taste, since it makes no valid commentary upon the already travestied truth."

He concluded with the statement: "I'm sorry to say that Bonnie and Clyde does not impress me as a contribution to the thinking of our times or as wholesome entertainment."

Some people say he was fired for that misjudgment. And maybe he should have been -- Crowther, who was 62 years old at the time, went on to write three more negative pieces about the movie and referred to it negatively in several reviews of other films before he was replaced as the Times' critic in early 1968.

Meanwhile, in the New Yorker, Pauline Kael wrote that the violence in Bonnie and Clyde was "a kind of violence that says something to us; it is something that movies must be free to use."

Kael makes some very subtle points in her review; she didn't like The Dirty Dozen and wrote that the violence in that film "personally [the italics are hers] offended" her -- she wouldn't deny the filmmakers the right to use its graphic depiction as a tool. There is a danger in depictions of violence; people can be warped by what they experience and consume. But "[p]art of the power of art lies in showing us what we are not capable of. We see that killers are not a different breed but are us without the insight or understanding or self-control that works of art strengthen. The tragedy of Macbeth is in the fall from nobility to horror; the comic tragedy of Bonnie and Clyde is that although you can't fall from the bottom you can reach the same horror."

We manufacture monsters out of people. There but for the grace of art go all of us. The unrefined soul is dangerous, liable to act out of fear and the tribal imperative. Movies are like travel in that they might cure us of prejudice and ignorance. I would not regulate what they can show us.

There has always been a constituency for dark stories; our American tradition is rife with murder ballads and bloodbaths. Shakespeare wasn't dainty -- there is a dark yen in the human animal, a drive for extinction that rivals the urge for sex. And it is from these base and desperate urges that art is made. We make things from bones and blood and the humors of the body, as well as from invisible things that float on air.

Part of the power of art is also that it shows us we are not so different from our monsters. Goethe could not imagine a crime he was incapable of committing; Kael says art might save us from nihilism. The schoolmarms and the White Citizen Council fear that impressionable minds will imitate the beautiful violence or the unleashed sexuality they see on the screen: Monkey see, monkey do.

It's naive to imagine that some people don't directly copy what they see on screen. The movies teach us how to talk and dress and flirt -- if you're the sort of person who is inclined to kill, then maybe the movies give you ideas on how to do that. Violence in the media we consume is a risk factor, but human beings have always been consumed by this sort of material.

Violence is an essential ingredient in our myths and stories; it permeates our literature, our culture. I am prepared to concede that American culture is more violent than most, to accept the evidence of my eyes.

We come from Puritans; it is our tradition to find more horrors in the flesh than in flying steel. We invented gunfighters and made serial killers into celebrities. To be American is to enjoy unprecedented freedoms, and among these freedoms is a license for a species of perversity: We like the bang, bang, you're dead stuff.

photo

There is no way that Butch Cassidy (Paul Newman) and the Sundance Kid (Robert Redford) are ever going to get out of this scene alive in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

MovieStyle on 06/05/2020

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