A Few Thoughts Regarding Bonnie and Clyde

Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow have been described as "Romeo and Juliet in a getaway car."

Hollywood's version of Bonnie and Clyde

Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway perpetuated the romantic myth, lionizing the bisexual bank robber and his muse in the Academy Award-winning 1967 film. Unlike Dunaway and Beatty's  portrayal however, Bonnie and Clyde were less glamorous, more gritty and complex. Still, the outlaw ideal of living fast and dying young that Hollywood perpetuated remains a potent part of American lore, and the adrenaline-filled scenes of bullet-dodging bad asses outgunning and outrunning the local yokel lawman to the county line - all to the backdrop of Foggy Mountain Breakdown --bolsters the almost irresistible legend of a modern-day Robin Hood and his White Trash Maid Marian.

The real Bonnie and Clyde

While the real Bonnie Parker lacked the high cheek bones and haute couture looks of Faye Dunaway, she was still a petite little peach. Standing just under five feet tall and weighing a feather-like 90 pounds, she had an affinity for fashionable and brightly-colored clothes. A talented writer who earned honors in grade school, Parker also won several literary contests in her teenage years. Married at age 15, her husband was later sentenced to five years in prison.Fraternizing with criminals, gravitating toward a life of crime, Parker became a 23-year-old martyr for the disenfranchised working class of the Steinbeck chronicled Dust Bowl, then 30 years later a pop culture icon of the rebellious Baby Boom generation.

Clyde Barrow was the fifth son of a "dirt poor tenant farmer" from a large rural Texas family. Eschewing the back-breaking work of a cotton picker, he pursued the quick and easy buck, becoming a petty criminal with a long rap sheet that preceded his bank robbing exploits. It was in Texas State Prison, serving time for auto theft, that colleagues of Barrows claim he turned from a "school boy to a rattlesnake." According to biographer John Neal Phillips, Barrow's criminal motives were was not to gain fame and fortune from robbing banks, rather to seek revenge against the Texas prison system for abuses he suffered while incarcerated.



A young Clyde Barrow

 Bonnie and Clyde lived out their brief lives in the enormous and oppressive shadow of the Great Depression. It was an era of farm foreclosures, breadlines and soup kitchens, in which the common folk of the day developed a festering resentment of the capitalist system, nattily dressed bankers and fast-talking government officials (sound familiar?). Within that context, the Barrow gang drew a generous portion of popular support. Parker played up on the sympathies, fueling the populist fires with poems and stories such as "Suicide Sal" and "The Story of Bonnie and Clyde."



The notion of two passionate outlaws terrorizing banks while romancing each other has been largely dispelled by reports that Clyde Barrow maintained homosexual relations with some of his gang members. Screen writers Robert Benton and David Newman originally penned a menage-a-trois scene with Bonnie and CW. Moss, but Warren Beatty objected to playing a bisexual, and the script was revised to imply that Barrow was impotent. I don't think Clyde's sexual ambiguity would have been as big a deal today as it was in the 1960s. In fact, it probably would have bolstered his status as a counter culture hero.

A very bad-ass Bonnie Parker

Given my generational experiences, I tend to link Bonnie and Clyde to Jim Morrison, Abbie Hoffman, the Black Panthers and the entire backlash against "the establishment" in the mid 1960s. It is that same sentiment of breaking on through to the other side, crossing forbidden lines and charging self-destructively head on into the dull, mundane, corrupt and soul-stealing jaws of a detatched, untrustworthy and elite-serving authority.

I would like to think that the rock and roll-like rage against the hopelessness and squalor of the post-Hoover Depression, along with the nihilistic rejection of lies and destruction during the Vietnam war and the Watergate era certainly resonate among many who are critical of our current situation; however I find that sort of defiant, rebellious posture strangely absent amid today's financial turmoil.



Whenever I hear Earl Scrugg's Foggy Mountain Breakdown, I want to drive the pedal to the metal, run a red light and break for the border. I can taste the Missouri mud and the Kansas dust as I race from the law and careen toward some unknown fate. I want to turn up the music, flip off The Man and dance on the edge for a brief self-destructive moment. Sometimes I think such thoughts are a vital valve for blowing off steam, an outlet that keeps me sane.