Bonnie & Clyde

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According to The Genre Reader, there are three typical patterns that a gangster film follows:

            Secularized Puritanism – This is the belief that we are all condemned; we are guilty, and nothing alters that. Second, we are all helpless; election, if it comes, is an action initiated by God over which we have no influence. Lastly, we are inescapable moral agents; we are born in sin, there is no neutrality. We cannot escape the onus of choice even if that choice is ontologically meaningless.

            Social Darwinism – This suggests that because of advances we have made as a society, traditional evolution has come to an end and that those with the means to survive, do. Human beings are subjugated to their environment, therefore are products of it.

            Horatio Alger Myth – A boy is separated from his family either through misfortune or the machinations of his relatives, and denied his rightful inheritance. His quest then becomes to reclaim what he believes is his.

            Bonnie & Clyde, directed by Arthur Penn, follows one of these: Social Darwinism. Neither Bonnie nor Clyde seems to have come from wealthy backgrounds or have any indication that they’ve lived relatively comfortable lives before the story begins. Bonnie lives with her mother and is a waitress and a local café, and Clyde has recently been released from state prison, where he was serving two years for armed robbery. He cut his toes off so as to avoid work detail, after which he was released two weeks later for good behavior. Therefore, I don’t see how the Horatio Alger myth would apply to either of them, because they don’t seek to claim what they feel they have been wronged from. Along the lines of secularized Puritanism, it states that we have no influence over what we do; that God controls all our actions even if we believe that we have the will to freely choice what we do. Bonnie and Clyde both face many choices throughout the movie, some of which eventually lead to their demise down the road. They could have very easily picked opposite routes, but neither did.

            Social Darwinism is the theory that I feel fits best with this movie. People are products of their environment; you can argue that even in real life. There’s a common saying that illustrates this, “you can take the boy out of the (insert city), but you can’t take the (insert city) out of the boy”. Studies have shown that around age seven, you develop the personality that stays with you for the rest of your life. Therefore, your upbringing in your early years greatly shapes how you turn out as an adult.

            Clyde went to jail for armed robbery. The goal of prisons is reform. In the 1930’s, prisons served as work camps where criminals were subjected to hard labor in order to deter them from committing crimes and going to prison. Clyde was in jail two years, and went to the extreme of chopping off his toes so that he wouldn’t have to work and would be paroled. As soon as he got out, he went right back to robbing banks. He learned nothing from his time in jail. The danger and thrill of robbing banks was ingrained in his personality. He could’ve just as easily cleaned up, gotten a real job, and made an honest living. Instead, he tried to steal a car, which turned out to be Bonnie’s mother’s car.            

            One thing Clyde seemed to struggle with was after he killed a man chasing the getaway car after committing a robbery. Clyde was torn by the morality of the issue. His brother later asked him about it, saying, “It was him or you, right? It was either going to be him or you?” Clyde responds that it was, justifying it in the terms that it was purely the situation, and that he wouldn’t normally kill a man. He was simply looking out for #1; if he wouldn’t have shot him he would’ve surely gone to jail. Clyde felt no remorse in robbing banks, yet the thought of killing a man weighed on his mind. But because he was robbing the bank and in danger, he killed him. The only reason he was in the situation to begin with, though, was because he was robbing the bank. His actions were based on his situation and environment.

            While you wouldn’t think at first glance, Bonnie & Clyde is a gangster film. One thing that rings true about most gangster films is that the main character (the bad guy you root for) always gets what’s coming to them. I can’t think of a single gangster movie where the main character gets away scot-free. Every single one either ends up in jail or lying in a pool of their own blood. They never ride off into the sunset with all the money they’ve made and the woman they love, there is no happy ending in this genre. That’s almost what makes this kind of movie fun to watch. You always end up rooting for the villain, even though you know what he’s doing is wrong and immoral. No one wants Ray Liotta to go to jail at the end of Goodfellas, but it’s even worse to see him end up in the witness protection program. Even though he’s done so much wrong over the course of the movie, you get the feeling that ratting out his associates is the worst possible thing he could’ve done. Scarface wouldn’t be the same movie if Tony Montana doesn’t go out in a blaze of coked-out gunfire at the end. You know it’s coming, you don’t want to see it, but it’s inevitable, and it makes the movie. The final scene in Bonnie & Clyde reminded me of Sonny’s death scene in The Godfather Part I. You know that the ranger from Texas is out more for vengeance than he is for justice, so you know they’re going to die in the car. It’s the same thing with Sonny. As soon as the attendant ducks down and closes the window, you know it’s over for Sonny. When the doves fly out of the brush, you know Bonnie and Clyde are getting what’s coming to them. Though it may not follow the conventional gangster plotline because of time and setting, it relates back to the old saying, “The more things change, the more things stay the same”.  

 

P.S. This was all I could think of when I saw Gene Wilder Image

Rio Bravo

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Rio Bravo, by Howard Hawks, is a pretty basic Western by every standard. Westerns, along with probably musicals, are the two genres that are most easily identifiable in form and elements. Going into a Western, you generally know what you’re going to see. There’s almost always very clearly defined good (the sheriff or other law character) and bad (the outlaw or tribe of Indians), with some kind of sidekick (usually a deputy or young gun), and a love interest (an always stunning young woman), that always ends in good defeating evil. Because of this, The Genre Reader even states that Rio Bravo has all the stereotypical western characters. “The main characters are readily identifiable genre types characterized in largely conventional ways: the drunk, the smiling killer, the unbending sheriff” (213). Very few Westerns seem to be made today, simply because of this. People now want to be surprised be a film or see new techniques used (like non-linear storylines or twist endings). The only three Westerns that have been made recently that I can think of would me True Grit, 3:10 to Yuma, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, two of which are remakes. I took a film class in high school, and my teacher told that the only two art forms that have their roots entirely in American culture are jazz music and the Western genre of film. There’s something uniquely American about Westerns, they hearken to something we’ve been ingrained with since we were kids about good and evil. Who didn’t play cowboys and Indians as a kid? The funny thing about the common image of cowboys, though, is that it’s almost pure fantasy. The way media portrays cowboys comes from fictional novels that were written when the West was still being conquered during the late 1800’s and the early 20th century. Actual cowboys lead pretty boring lives, consisting of long cattle drives with few partners that would take months at a time. But, just as the media has been known to do, they sensationalized it.

            Rio Bravo features the quintessential Western hero, John Wayne. When you think Western, John Wayne is immediately the person you think of. The next closest person who would pop up is Clint Eastwood. It’s made in standard Western style. There are very few non-diegetic within the film. The only two I can remember are the reoccurring Mexican fight song that plays throughout, and the opening title that sets the time and place of the movie. At some points the Mexican fight song even becomes diegetic because the band is shown playing it. Whenever it plays in the movie, you get the feeling that a fight is going to take place very soon. It just sounds like a song that would play at high noon when a shoot out is about to happen. It has a slow tempo, with a trumpet playing a solo and soft guitars in the background, giving it a very Western-ish feel.

            Diegetic elements control most of the movie. Very rarely do you know anything that the main characters do not. There is no “voice of God” narration, and dialogue is always limited to the characters on screen at any given time. The scenery is also a large diegetic element in the movie. John Ford was famous for using vast landscapes as the backdrop for his movies, and Hawks employs the same usage in Rio Bravo. Scenery is a cornerstone of every Western. As pointed out in class, this movie has been remade several times, except in different settings. Assault on Precinct 13th is the exact same storyline, except it’s set in Los Angeles (or Detroit, depending on which version you watch). Ghosts of Mars (directed by John Carpenter, who also directed the original Assault on Precinct 13) also follows the same storyline, except it’s set on Mars. John Wayne and Dean Martin walk the main street not once, but twice, giving you an actual feel for the town, letting you get accustomed to the scenery and a better understanding of the community. A majority of the movie takes place within the jail and the saloon, two very common western settings. The saloon contains swinging doors and a spittoon, two things that you would appear odd if they weren’t there. Another diegetic element of the movie is the costumes. It features everything you would expect a cowboy to wear; cowboy hat, boots with spurs, a gun on his hip, etc. John Wayne always wears a white or creamish colored cowboy hat, while the villains wear black ones, signifying their bad intentions. Though John Wayne carries a gun on his hip, he carries a rifle at all times, symbolizing the “walk quietly but carry a big stick” mentality that’s present in many westerns. The love interest in the story often dresses scandalously (for the time period, at least). She intentionally tries to make John Wayne mad by wearing tights in order for him to get to admit that he cares about her. It’s considered unmanly to admit that you have feelings for someone in the western, further implementing the quite, thick-skinned hero image.

            As I stated earlier, there’s no omniscient narration. The audience always knows exactly what the characters know. There are no unseen twists coming; the story is straightforward. By keeping all the information unrestricted, it allows the characters to move the story along without hitches. If the audience were to know something the characters didn’t, it would make the audience move to conclusions faster than the characters. We move at the same speed as them, giving the movie a more real and believable feeling.

            Many elements of westerns can be seen in movies today. The opening of Star Wars: A New Hope shares many similarities with the opening of The Searchers by John Ford. Though it’s a genre that has fallen by the wayside, the western is an extremely important one in American cinema. 

This Film Is Not Yet Rated

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This Film Is Not Yet Rated, directed by Kirby Dick, tackles something that affects our every day lives, yet no one really thinks about. How are films rated? Whenever trailers for upcoming movies are shown, they list reasons for the rating at the directly below the rating. These are called “rating justifications”, and are provided to “serve and inform parents and moviegoers about the movie content which resulted in the assigned code” (Potts and Belden, Parental Guidance: a Content Analysis of MPAA Motion Picture Rating Justifications 1993-2005, 2009). No one thinks twice about the MPAA, but it’s something that very few people in the country seem to know about. Until watching this movie, I never knew that the identities of the raters are kept secret. There’s no other national organization that I can think of keeps its members secret.

            This film also shows what we value as a society. As shown in the film, we are desensitized by violence, yet are up in arms about sexual content. Violence is clearly something that’s more harmful. Sex is something that everyone eventually learns about; it’s a natural part of life. While exposure to it should be limited when kids are young, it’s to the point where they are overprotected from it. John Waters brings up a good point about sex. He claims that because of the Internet, all teenagers have seen more hardcore pornography than their parents. This is probably true. Pornography is extremely accessible through the Internet; you hardly even have to try to find it. Literally all you have to do is google “porn” and millions of results will show up. It’s been estimated that for every one regular Internet site, there are five pornographic sites on the Internet. Kevin Smith had an interesting viewpoint when talking about what we think should be worse when rating a movie. He said that violence against women should be above all else. When thinking about it, he makes a valid point. Sex is socially acceptable when it’s behind closed doors. Countries are at war all the time, and war violence is often times used to show the horrors of war i.e. Saving Private Ryan or The Hurt Locker. Rape and sexual assault are in no way, shape, or form ever condoned in our society. Yet there are plenty of movies with extremely graphic rape scenes. Take The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo for example. I’d like to think that I’ve seen a lot of movies, and that I’m usually pretty good about sitting through graphic scenes, but the rape scene in that movie has easily been the most I’ve cringed during a movie. Darrin Aronofsky, director of Requiem for a Dream (which received an NC-17 rating), offered his thoughts on violence in film as well. He talks about how you can kill as many people as you want, and as long as there’s no blood, the film will receive a PG-13 rating. If there is violence along with blood, it receives an R. But if there’s graphic sexual content, the movie will automatically be R or NC-17. He believes this should be flipped. Violence with blood should be used to show the reality and consequences of firing a gun, violence with no blood should be reserved for older audiences because they should be well aware of the consequences of violence, and that sex should take a backseat to violence in the ratings system. In theory, this makes sense. Kids play videogames all the time that have violent content but not always blood. As a kid my mom never liked me playing those kind of games for that exact reason, because it promotes the idea that if you perform violent acts, you simply come back to life with no consequence.   

            When looking at the MPAA, you need look no further to see who it’s run by to notice flaws. The six main corporations involved with it are Walt Disney, Paramount, Sony, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, and Warner Brothers. That’s all six major filmmaking studios. The MPAA claims to be looking out for concerned parents, but it’s clear that they’re more focused on making money for movie studios. Studios make more money when films have a PG-13 rating as opposed to an R rating. Therefore, the raters have strict guidelines for a movie to get a PG-13 rating. For instance, they can only say the word “fuck” once in a film if it is to be PG-13. When you think about it, this is fundamentally ridiculous. This would assume that if you’re 16 and under, it’s a word you don’t hear or use on a regular basis. I curse like a sailor, and have since I was probably 14, and I wouldn’t consider myself to be in the minority who has. In reality, language is the last thing the MPAA should be worried about when rating movies.

            The film also addresses the history of the MPAA and how it became to be. It all started in the 1920’s, when Post Master General William was hired by the three major film studios at the time to “restore decency to the movies”. A code was written that movies followed until the late 1950’s, when it began to be challenged. Jack Valenti then started the MPAA as we know it. He had previously served in Washington. The film industry thought that by selecting him as the head of their association, that they would be able to avoid government regulation. Valenti serves the big six, who together control 95% of the films made in the U.S. and 90% of all media distributed within the U.S. When raters are hired, they sign a contract that states that they will remain silent about their colleagues and the rating process without first consulting Valenti. Since 1968, only two past raters have broken this silence. There’s no transparency in the ratings board, therefore it goes unchecked because there is no other viable option.

            Overall, I thought this was a great movie. I usually like documentaries. My favorite part of the movie was the interview with Matt Stone talking about Team America: World Police. In the movie, there’s a puppet sex scene. The joke is that it’s puppets, not real sex. It’s funny. But when the ratings board saw the first cut of the scene, they told him they could only have two positions. That doesn’t really make for a joke. So they purposely shot extra footage, footage they wouldn’t have left in the movie anyway, so that they would be told to take it out, thinking that they had done their job of changing the movie. Even if it was just for one scene, he still figured out a way to beat the system.