by Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n
Private Papers<\/em><\/p>\n A<\/span>s\u00a0New York Times<\/i>\u00a0critic A.O. Scott wrote recently, forty years ago this summer the movie that changed the movies premiered. Anybody old enough to remember films before\u00a0Bonnie and Clyde<\/i>\u00a0can testify to the jolting power of Arthur Penn\u2019s kinetic blend of blue-grass slapstick, Depression-era nostalgia, and gruesome, stylized violence. But something else was revealed then, something that I, 14 at the time, was too callow and ignorant to notice behind the cinematic innovations \u2014 the moral idiocy that has since come to define pretty much most of American popular culture.<\/p>\n Bonnie and Clyde<\/i>\u00a0staked a claim to a moral seriousness that supposedly validated the stylistic innovations and elevated the film beyond mere flashy entertainment. Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, played with fashion-magazine glamour by Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, are \u201cjust folks,\u201d as Dunaway says in the movie, salt-of-the-earth Americans driven to crime by the machinations of the evil banks they rob for some justified payback, Texan Robin Hoods admired by the common-man victims of American capitalism. Yet the \u201cman,\u201d embodied in the sadistic Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, wouldn\u2019t let them be, hunting them down and slaughtering them in the movie\u2019s famous bloody climax, just after Bonnie and Clyde had finally found the soft-focus sexual fulfillment of a typical Hollywood romance.<\/p>\n The Marxiste folk-tale underlying the movie\u2019s otherwise conventional star-crossed-lovers plot was obvious, and as much as the cinematic innovations accounted for the film\u2019s popularity with many critics (The\u00a0New York Times<\/i>\u2019s Bosley Crowther was a noble exception). The movie was in fact a popularized version of Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawn\u2019s 1959 \u201csocial bandit\u201d thesis, a bit of communist agit-prop arguing that robbers and thieves were\u00a0really<\/i>expressions of the \u201cpeople\u2019s\u201d legitimate resistance to unjust economic and political structures. This notion helped to glorify and justify the violence against authority that exploded in the sixties, from the bombing of college labs to the depredations of the Black Panthers, the Oakland street gang that was shrewd enough to exploit the delusions of privileged white kids in order to provide cover for the gang\u2019s crimes.<\/p>\n T<\/span>he corollary to the \u201csocial bandit\u201d idea was that those responsible for maintaining social order \u2014 particularly the police \u2014 were in fact the goons of an oppressive establishment, and as such legitimate targets of retributive violence. The \u201cpigs\u201d were now the enemy, at best oafish dupes of the \u201cman,\u201d at worst sadistic crypto-fascists who delighted in inflicting pain on the \u201cpeople.\u201d This demonizing of legitimate authority is obvious in\u00a0Bonnie and Clyde<\/i>, where all the police are depicted as anonymous shock troops of capitalist oppression, spraying bullets with moronic glee, as in the scene showing the capture of Clyde\u2019s brother Buck. Frank Hamer is particularly creepy, obviously sexually oppressed and filled with vengeful rage over the gang\u2019s playful kidnapping of him (which never actually happened). His sadistic nature is obvious in the film\u2019s slow-motion climax, when he engineers the couple\u2019s death with a fusillade of excessive force, repeatedly raking the bodies with machine-gun fire.<\/p>\n And here we come upon the monstrous lie at the heart of\u00a0Bonnie and Clyde<\/i>. The historical Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were not beautiful Robin Hoods but psychopathic killers \u2014 Clyde had jug-ears and a weak chin, Bonnie the mean mouth and ferret eyes of a white-trash skank. Their sexual proclivities, which included their younger male accomplices, were sordid, not romantic, and their violence was usually an unprovoked pleasurable indulgence, like their killing of two highway patrol officers on Easter Sunday in 1934. Their 12 victims were mostly police officers who, in accord with the laws Barrow and Parker scorned, announced themselves as such before they were gunned down in cold blood. Nor did the gang rob that many banks, their targets just as often being small mom-and-pop stores. As for distributing the money to the \u201cpeople\u201d \u2014 those scenes in the film were actually based on anecdotes about John Dillinger \u2014 there is no evidence that these predators ever gave a dime to the victims of the Depression, some of whom the pair robbed.<\/p>\n So too with the movie\u2019s despicable portrayal of Frank Hamer, the Texas lawman who doggedly tracked the two and put an end to their murderous career. Hamer\u2019s methods do not meet our modern standards of police work founded on solicitude for criminals and a fetishizing of process. He lived in a tougher world where such luxuries were fatal. In fact, the reason he and his fellow lawmen killed Bonnie and Clyde the way they did was because of Clyde\u2019s long record of resisting arrest and shooting down police officers on sight. In life Hamer was one of those grim, unpleasant men whose bravery makes it possible for people like Warren Beatty and Arthur Penn to make \u201cmock o\u2019 uniforms that guard you while you sleep.\u201d<\/p>\n T<\/span>his distortion of historical truth has come to dominate American popular culture, which has made the leftist libretto its default narrative, one immune to the repeated demonstrations of its falseness and bloody failure. Warren Beatty\u2019sReds<\/i>, a ludicrous valentine to John Reed, one of Lenin\u2019s most useful idiots, used the same technique of papering over historical lies with cinematic glamour and wide-screen flair. Just about every Vietnam movie made is pretty much a lie, depicting brave Americans as psychopathic killers or drug-addled victims drafted into an unjust war to serve the capitalist Evil Empire. In fact, if I needed ten good men I\u2019d take any ten Vietnam vets picked at random over any ten college professors or reporters or movie directors. The same lying narrative is at work today in the depiction of the war in Iraq, where America\u2019s best are killing our enemies and giving Iraqis a chance at freedom. I bet that in most of the movies about Iraq coming out this fall, these brave soldiers will be portrayed as pathetic dupes of the evil Man and his \u201cillegal\u201d war, their heroism ignored, their beliefs condescended to, and their suffering sentimentalized.<\/p>\n Just as bad,\u00a0Bonnie and Clyde<\/i>\u00a0also enshrined the wrapping of this Orwellian reversal of historical truth in the glamour of style \u2014 the essence of what Tom Wolfe called \u201cradical chic.\u201d Truth doesn\u2019t matter, as long as you\u2019re in fashion. Politics isn\u2019t about coherent principle and the possible, it\u2019s about stylistic display, sensibility, and feeling, a way for the privileged to show how much better they are than everybody else. Worse, this attitude has legitimized a complete disconnect between word and deed, between what one says and how one lives. Privilege and power can now be enjoyed and indulged, as long as one mouths the proper liberal-left pieties: a 1400-dollar haircut is okay if one agonizes over the income gap, and pollution-spewing jet-travel accepted if one rails against global warming.<\/p>\n In short,\u00a0Bonnie and Clyde<\/i>\u00a0is a milestone in the transformation of American culture from one that reflects the mentality of adults to one that enshrines the mentality of teen-agers, a process documented by Diana West in her brilliant new book\u00a0The Death of the Grown-Up.<\/i>\u00a0Unfortunately, as West concludes, an adolescent disregard for reality and an obsession with fashion and feeling are dangerous indulgences in a world filled with ruthless enemies who see our cultural immaturity as the sign of our moral exhaustion and deserved extinction.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u00a92007 Bruce Thornton<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers As\u00a0New York Times\u00a0critic A.O. Scott wrote recently, forty years ago this summer the movie that changed the movies premiered.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[22,755],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1pX","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":5461,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-passions-of-the-left\/","url_meta":{"origin":5453,"position":0},"title":"The Passions of the Left","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 29, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"CIA's new revelations fans the flames of \"progressive\" myths of our past by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers The publication of the CIA\u2019s \u201cfamily jewels\u201d \u2014 the record of its domestic spying, hare-brained plots against Castro, and mind-control experiments, among other oddities \u2014 is sure to add fuel to that\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6606,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/bruce-thornton-on-secure-freedom-radio-with-frank-gaffney\/","url_meta":{"origin":5453,"position":1},"title":"Bruce Thornton on Secure Freedom Radio with Frank Gaffney","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 10, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Seth Jones, Bruce Thornton, Peter Pham, Diana West October 9th, 2013\u00a0\u00b7\u00a0Comments SETH JONES, Associate Director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the RAND Corporation, joins guest host DAN BONGINO, to help explain the terror threat from and historical background of the terrorist organization al-Shabaab. BRUCE THORNTON, a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9959,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/moving-forward-the-need-for-innovations-in-technology-and-strategy\/","url_meta":{"origin":5453,"position":2},"title":"Moving Forward: The Need For Innovations In Technology And Strategy","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 20, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Kiron K. Skinner \/\/ Strategika Two broad sets of U.S. military strategies during the second half of the twentieth century combined ideas, innovation, and technology in ways that offset Soviet conventional (and later nuclear) superiority in arms and military forces. These strategies also contributed to the overall state of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Strategika"","block_context":{"text":"Strategika","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/strategika\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":835,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/derbyshire-learns-what-we-cannot-talk-about\/","url_meta":{"origin":5453,"position":3},"title":"Derbyshire Learns What We Cannot Talk About","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 14, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine Wittgenstein once wrote, \u201cWhat we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.\u201d Ex-National Review writer John Derbyshire has just learned the modern American version of this truth.\u00a0What we Americans cannot talk about is race (except, of course, in the anodyne terms established\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. 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