Carr, Steven Alan. From "Fucking Cops!" to "Fucking Media!": Bonnie and Clyde for a Sixties America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000

Steven Alan Carr’s essay From Fucking Cops to Fucking Media: Bonnie and Clyde for a Sixties America focuses on the cultural changes leading to and coming from Bonnie and Clyde. The article begins by outlining recent politician Bob Dole’s public outcry against media and its violent tendencies that deface “family values” (70). However, Carr compares Bob Dole’s deviant media (rappers, Murphy Brown, Natural Born Killers, etc) to Bonnie and Clyde, arguing that media now doesn’t represent a “mainstreaming of deviancy” but more of a debasement of media itself.
Carr then moves from the present to Bonnie and Clyde’s era, the birth of the counterculture in the 60s. Carr reminds us of the civil turmoil and transformation America as whole was undergoing. Vietnam, the civil rights movement and police brutality all excited the public’s mistrust of the state and authority as a whole. The American film industry was also undergoing a transformation of its own at the time with the demise of the studio system and the production code and the rise of influential foreign films from movements such as the French New Wave.
The 60s saw the birth of the counterculture, young adults who considered themselves on the margins of society. Many of the most influential voices of the time, such as Allan Ginsberg, were arrested for protesting the government. The government, in turn, reacted by “spying” on hundreds of thousands of citizens in an attempt to crack down on civil unrest and dissatisfaction with their government. This attempt, however, only served to solidify the defining aspect of the counterculture: their hatred of authority and control.
Carr uses these historical examples of 60s culture to place Bonnie and Clyde as the most influential film to date, and as a turning point in American cinema and consumerism. The film reflected the feelings and idealizations of the counterculture through its glorification of two criminals fight against authority and societal norms. The film was immensely popular, but received heavy criticism from film critics and public opinion groups, eventually leading to its withdrawal from theatres within the U.S. This, just like the government’s attempt to control dissent through spying, only served to bring the film to further prominence as a cult icon of sorts. The film, however, did more than just reflect the turmoil of the times and gave birth to the consumerization of the counterculture. The film helped present the counterculture, mostly young adults and teenagers, as the target audience for a new genre of film tailored directly to their desires. Bonnie and Clyde allowed the marginal, outcasts of society (as they saw themselves) to achieve consumerist prominence in America.

Treherne, John. The Strange History of Bonnie and Clyde. Briarclif Manor, NY: Stein and Day, 1985 

 

 

John Treherne’s book The Strange History of Bonnie and Clyde explores the real life story of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. The book follows the two mischievous outlaws in their killing sprees in the Midwest. The chapter Final Bullets describes the death of Bonnie and Clyde in an ambush in Louisiana. This final shootout was the most famous scene in Arthur Penn’s 1967 film and is the final touch in his vision of the two criminals as heroes.
The chapter begins with Ted Hinton and Bob Alcorn’s efforts’ to catch Bonnie and Clyde. He and a number of other policemen had tracked the couple to Gibsland, Louisiana, the hometown of their then partner in crime, Henry Methvin. Hinton and the others following the group had began to think of a way they could trap the sneaky crooks, “the hunters of Bonnie and Clyde had discovered early of their quarries’ most vulnerable trait: the strong psychological dependence on their families” (195). After the lawmen learned of Methvin, they tracked his family to Gibsland and preceded to arrange an Ambush that would finally put an end to the pair’s spree. Methvin had been separated from Bonnie and Clyde, and Hinton and Alcorn suspected that they would try and rendevue with him at his fathers house in Gibsland. The officers, 4 from Texas and 3 from Louisiana, hid in bushes along the side of a road just south of Gibsland. After two days of tiresome waiting, they finally captured Irvin Methvin, Henry’s father and used his car as decoy for Bonnie and Clyde. However, the arrest of Irivin Methvin was entirely illegal, along with their seizure of his vehicle for the ambush. The officers were almost ready to quit on the ambush when Bonnie and Clyde came rolling down the road. The rest reads just like the movie, with the two being riddled by bullets while they sat in the car, with no time to fire a single shot.
Treherne’s book recounts the actual death of Bonnie and Clyde as described by the officers hunting them and gives truth to the final scene of the Penn’s film. The book, however, is from the policemen’s vantage point and creates an entirely different imagery of the final shootout. Methvin and his father had no intention or previous knowledge of a setup like C.W. Moss and his father did in the movie. The blood soaked shootout in the film, however, seems faithful to its original story, and the scene that set critics aflame was possibly the most loyal to the real account.