Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Bonnie and Clyde
1967 · Arthur Penn · Bonnie and Clyde on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice how fast the film cuts in the opening scenes. (cutting)
Dede Allen refuses to let a scene settle. Short impatient strokes, jumps taken from inside continuous action, transitions that skip a beat. Restlessness arrives as rhythm before anybody explains it.
Payoff: The story lurches instead of flowing, so you feel the boredom and hunger rather than being told about them. In the reading: weak links. Slackened causality and elliptical transitions between scenes are what the reading calls weak links.
Watch how badly the robberies actually go. (staging)
The gang fumbles, scrambles, and runs. Clyde holds up a bank that has already failed and has no money in it. Penn puts them in flat open country where anyone can see them coming.
Payoff: Crime films usually hand their leads mastery, so all this incompetence keeps the pair exposed and ordinary-sized.
Watch them stop everything to take photographs. (setting)
Bonnie with a cigar in her teeth, Clyde brandishing a pistol, C.W. arranging the group like a portrait studio. Bonnie also writes verse about the gang and sends it out to be printed.
Payoff: The pictures are the real product of this spree, and they matter to these two more than the money does. In the reading: fabulation / legending. People caught in the act of legending themselves is what the reading calls fabulation.
Listen for banjo during the car chases. (sound)
Penn uses an existing Flatt and Scruggs bluegrass record rather than an orchestral score, so the getaways run like a hoedown. Elsewhere he pulls the music out entirely and leaves you in ambient sound.
Payoff: The vernacular music keeps the chases comic, which is what makes each turn into violence land so hard.
Watch the dusty, faded color of the landscapes. (light)
Burnett Guffey keeps the palette in bleached earth tones modeled on Walker Evans's Depression photographs. Highways, diners, and clothes are period-specific rather than dressed up.
Payoff: The image keeps the Depression real around them, so their fantasy plays against the country they are actually driving through.
Once you have seen it
Watch how little the road trip accomplishes. (structure)
They circle, drift, and go back to Bonnie's mother, where there turns out to be no home for them. Jobs come and go. Nothing accumulates toward a destination or a plan.
Payoff: The journey transforms no one, which is why the film never delivers the crime picture's reckoning. In the reading: the voyage/balade form. A trip that changes nothing and arrives nowhere is what the reading calls the balade form.
Watch the ambush for its different speeds. (cutting)
Penn ran several cameras at different frame rates. Allen assembled the sequence from overlapping slow motion, so the bodies convulse for longer than real time would allow.
Payoff: Stretching the deaths past what is bearable takes the place of the decisive act this genre usually ends on.
Listen for the birds before the guns. (sound)
A flock startles out of the trees. Bonnie and Clyde exchange one long look. For several seconds nobody can act and there is nothing left to do but see it coming.
Payoff: The two spend their last seconds watching rather than doing, which is the opposite of how crime films finish.
Carry this in: Watch them pose for photographs. These two want to become an image more than they want to get away.