Two stories of the Great Depression

Bonnie & Clyde is a cult movie—films as disparate as Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers and our own Hindi Bunty aur Bubli claim it as their inspiration. But it is also an old movie. It was released in 1967, and today the age shows. The actors appears wooden, their mannerisms contrived, the violence that shocked original audiences so artificial. Its combination of gangster film, on-the-road movie and tale of star-crossed lovers may have been new then, we have seen it many times over since.

But what still made the film interesting for me was its social backdrop of the Great Depression. The Great Depression was an economic disaster of immense proportions for the capitalist world. In just the four years between 1928 and 1933 real per-capita income in the US fell by about a third—something very hard to imagine today when bad times for developed countries just means slower than average growth. At the peak of the Depression one of every five persons in the US labour force was unemployed. And what was really frightening about this disaster was that it was brought about not by war, natural calamity or some other destruction of the community's productive resources but by a breakdown of the economic order itself. Five decades after the Depression an economist could still publish a book with the title Can It Happen Again? and know that everyone would understand what 'It' referred to (the economist was Hyman Minsky).

It is this bleak world of the Great Depression that the Bonnie and Clyde inhabit. Just like the real-world bandits they are named after, Bonnie and Clyde rob banks. But in the Great Depression even bank robbery is not what it used to be. Clyde dashes into a bank building to find that it is just a dusty shell. The only employee there, who seems to have lost interest in everything, lets him know that the bank failed three weeks ago. Another daring bank robbery and dramatic car chase ends with robbers discovering that their bags of loot contain only a handful of notes. "Times are bad", Clyde says.

Times are worse for the poor. We see a family forced out of the farm which was their home because they could not pay their debts to the bank. We see encampments of the poor who are migrating across the country in search for work. And in true Robin Hood tradition, Bonnie and Clyde stand with the poor. They lend their guns to the dispossessed farmer so he can shoot holes in the sign that say that his home is now some bank's property. They rob banks, but let farmers keep their own money. They tell a bounty-hunting Ranger they have captured that he should have been back in his jurisdiction protecting the rights of the poor.

In turn, the poor help Bonnie and Clyde. We are told of times when the poor held up 'the laws' so that Bonnie and Clyde could escape. Again, when they are wounded and helpless, a camp of migrant workers feeds and helps them.

Here, then, is the chance of telling the story of Bonnie and Clyde as that of social rebels who represent the resistance of the poor. But keeping true to the Hollywood mainstream, Bonnie & Clyde gives this the go by. In this film, Bonnie and Clyde's sympathy for the poor is just noblesse oblige—the charity of the 'strong' for the 'weak'. They don't think of themselves as being one of the poor. Just the opposite. Their entire quest is to escape the ordinary life, to be somehow different.

The film shows this both implicitly and explicitly. The other members of the gang provide a foil to Bonnie and Clyde precisely by their ordinariness. The sidekick, C.W. Moss, is shown as not too bright and lacking in moral character. In the end, he betrays Bonnie and Clyde because his father tells him to. Blanche, Clyde's sister-in-law, is shown to be a stereotypical housewife who panics during gunfights and keeps talking about criminals "paying their debt to society" and yet demands a share in the gang's loot.

But even more revealing is the sexual tension that exists between Bonnie and Clyde themselves. The movie opens with a naked Bonnie banging her fists against the bedrails. She has a house and a job in the middle of the Depression. But she is frustrated. Because there is nothing for a waitress in a cafe in a small town to do but the "watch the grass grow". When Clyde shows up in her doorway trying to steal her mother's car, she is immediately ready to walk away with him. Seeing him rob a grocery store and steal a car gets her aroused. But then she discovers that Clyde suffers from some kind of sexual dysfunction. "I ain't much of a lover-boy", he says. She is about to walk away is disgust, but he shouts at her,

If all you want's stud service, then get on back to West Dallas and stay there the rest of your life!

This stops her. He promises,

We can be somethin' we could never be alone. I'll show you...when we walk into the Adolphus Hotel in San Antone', you wearin' a silk dress, they'll be waitin' on you and believe me, sugar, they're gonna know your last name.

And the partnership of Bonnie and Clyde is born. What wins her over is not any struggle against injustice but the promise of escape from a mundane life. In this Bonnie and Clyde is much more a film of 1967 than a film about the 1930s. For unlike the Great Depression, the sixties were a time when the capitalist economic system was doing very well for the developed countries, producing unprecedented rates of economic growth. It was also a period of social advancement for the people of these countries. Yet, it was also a period of great dissatisfaction, particularly among the youth, with the culture and politics of that time. It was the decade of student rebellions in universities, of rock and roll, of anti-Vietnam protests. And ultimately the spirit of Bonnie and Clyde is the spirit of this rebellion against the apparent banality of everyday life.

Near the end of the movie Clyde overcomes his sexual dysfunction. Bonnie and Clyde are together reading Bonnie's poem about themselves that has been published in the newspaper and then they make love. It is celebrity rather than liberty that finally is the turn on.

It is not my intention to belittle the rebels of the sixties. But if we want to understand why they could change so little, their failure to join up with broader sections of the people in their societies (except for a few occasions like France 1968) must be a large part of the explanation. And that brings me to the other story of the Great Depression from the title of this post—Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath. The social background is the same. But now the protagonists no longer stand apart from the people. They are the people themselves—the novel consists of chapters describing the conditions of dispossessed farmers migrating in search of work interleaved with chapters describing the travails of one such family, the Joads. And the struggle that moves the novel is not the struggle of finding a way out for oneself but the struggle for changing the conditions that make ordinary life so miserable to begin with. The novel has a tragic end, but the tragedy does not leave us hopeless. As one of the characters, Tom Joad, forced to go into hiding by the goons of the plantation owners, tells his mother:

“I'll be everywhere—wherever you look. Whenever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Whenever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there . . . . I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’—I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there.”