Bonnie & Clyde Style as Morality
Toback, James
A STRONG CASE could be made to show that America is a land that was won, expanded, divided, and healed by violence, a land in which a premium was placed on a readiness to fight and on a...
...Walker looks stunned, confused...
...celebration not because his victims (the banks) and his hunters (the police) are seen as bullying forces of greed, nor because of some touching love scenes with Bonnie and friendship with his brother, but because Clyde does everything with a flair...
...As Walker, Lee Marvin is a monomaniacally bitter crusader, looking for the money he helped steal but never received...
...Confusion of intention regarding the hero extends to the whole film...
...If the glorification of this new American hero is disingenuous in Bonnie and Clyde, it is ambiguous in Point Blank...
...As a "bad cat," Walker cracks only once, but this slip, rather than calling into question his claim to heroic stature, serves instead to define that heroism...
...But because of his grace, he is able to generate an admiration born of secret longing...
...the color is so lush, the range of settings so varied, the sound so resonant, that the reality of splintered bones, crushed testicles, and gushing blood is fairly well obscured...
...When at the end the goal becomes attainable as a small package of large bills, Walker turns his back on it and disappears, and it is impossible to imagine what in the world he can do next, for without an object or goal to enable him to flaunt his violent life style, he loses both our envy and his own reason for being...
...In one sense, with its comic banjo music, its array of stock towns 77 NOTEBOOK and stock townspeople, and its mood of overstated exuberance, Bonnie and Clyde can be taken as camp, a mockery of all the gangster movies of the thirties...
...BOTH FILMS REFLECT the new American ethic: an ethic of aesthetics...
...He drives wildly but always owns the road...
...If he had been clumsy, crude, or ugly, he would not be liked and, more significantly, he would not be envied...
...Violent films are no innovation...
...And it is expressed unremittingly—sometimes with skill, sometimes for shock, always with gore—in American movies...
...It is this style, this independence from restriction and convention, this implacable control that wins over the beholder...
...POINT BLANK DEALS WITH an even more hardened hero...
...Point Blank is a surrealistic vision of the Mafia ("The Organization") and centers on the quest of a former member to regain $93,000 he believes coming to him...
...he steals a car but wins the favor of the man he robbed...
...It is an ethic that celebrates Stokely Carmichael, William F. Buckley, and Murf the Surf—purveyors all of values that few rational people would share—because of the flair with which they project these values, while it condemns figures with the same values but much less flair, like Rap Brown, George Wallace, and Frank Costello...
...While we are meant to see that his is the self-destructive life of the hunted, the total vision that emerges is a kind of celebration...
...If there is truth in Leslie Fiedler's assertion that movies are "half-mythic entertainments that are the scriptures of our time," then it is likely that we can learn something about America from two popular films full of blood and killing: Bonnie and Clyde and Point Blank...
...When Walker is told by his sister-in-law that he "died at Alcatraz," that he has the feelings of a stunted barbarian, we know she is right, and doubtless are meant to shrink from him, or at most to feel sorry for him...
...Brewster, a king of The Organization, challenges Walker: "What is it you really want, Walker...
...he gets excited but rarely loses control...
...Bonnie and Clyde revolves around the exploits of the most famous bank robbing team in American history...
...A STRONG CASE could be made to show that America is a land that was won, expanded, divided, and healed by violence, a land in which a premium was placed on a readiness to fight and on a capacity—when necessary—to kill...
...He has at last been touched...
...it is hard to think of a screen hero who lacked a potent punch or failed to wield a deadly gun...
...But it is only in the past few years that serious films, those transcending the boundaries of simple "entertainment" and laying claim to the province of art, have become so frequently informed with an almost sensual lust for the depiction of brutality...
...But it tries to have it both ways, for there is also an inexorable current asserting the same valueless style of heroism that it mocks...
...Nonetheless, there is an underlying unity of spirit, a source of unarticulated assumptions from which both spring...
...What is it you really want...
...WHEN WARREN BEATTY, as Clyde, commits his first murder, he looks helplessly at Faye Dunaway, his bonny lass killer-comrade, and cries "I didn't want to kill him...
...All this is evident in the novels of Norman Mailer, the music of Aaron Copland, and the plays of Tennessee Williams...
...It is the possibility that it is the style of his quest rather than the goal of the quest that Walker really seeks and needs...
...It is his only lapse...
...Although portrayed as the victim of infidelity by his wife and treachery by his best friend, and although his enemy is a gigantic goon corporation, Walker becomes a hero primarily through the sheer form of his prowess...
...Ostensibly, they are concerned with different subjects...
...It is an ambivalent spirit which focuses on a new breed of American hero, a special kind of antihero who is defined by his style: not by his cruelty but by the way he is cruel...
...It's more than that...
...But director John Boorman has managed to suggest a possibility about Walker's life that cannot from then on be totally denied...
...But in the very next scene he is back to his pursuit with renewed eclat, tracking down a still greater Maffia figure with a still more compelling ingenuity and force, and thereby eliciting a sense of excitement which obliterates any possibility of revulsion or disapproval, Even the cinematography contributes to this impression...
...More than simply providing slick entertainment, Bonnie and Clyde and Point Blank serve the cultural function of presenting heroes who express the current infatuation with style—style as a value in itself, a replacement of values...
...But even in the context of such a history and a mythology that extends and exaggerates it, contemporary America seems particularly violent, seething with frantic calls to rebellion and apocalyptic suggestions of self-destruction: the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, Watts, Harlem, Detroit, the proliferation of the Maffia...
...A second later he is back in control, petrifying Brewster with his pistol...
...Money...
...From then on he and his pistol (which is conceived of—in simple-minded terms—as a substitute for his impotent sexual weapon) put on a display of consummate virtuosity—fighting, conning, stealing, escaping, and killing...
...He cons, chops, batters, and shoots his way through the murky network of The Organization until at last the money is there for him...
...He is a hero best described by the Negro term "bad," meaning "awesome"—someone to be reckoned with, or, more specifically, someone who is independent, tough, unafraid, terse, hard, and often funny...
Vol. 15 • January 1968 • No. 1
