Abstracts

Brian Goss
University of Illinois

"THEY'RE YOUNG! THEY'RE IN LOVE! AND THEY KILL PEOPLE!": MORAL PANIC, RECUPERATION, AND ARTHUR PENN'S BONNIE & CLYDE (1967)

Released in 1967, Bonnie & Clyde (Director: Arthur Penn) was both one of the most controversial and commercially succesful of films of the late 1960s. The first wave of reviews that greeted the film presented a scattered critical response, ranging from unbridled vituperation (The New York Times), to contemptful dismissiveness (Time) to praise (New Yorker); while the critical response was not monolithic, it was weighted toward what Stuart Hall, et al. (1978) refer to as a "moral panic" which mainly revolved the film's intense violence and alleged aggrandizement of two murderous depression-era gangsters. However, as the film's popularity with public---youth, in particular---began to manifest
itself, some of the critical response shifted. Time made the
extraordinary move of rescinding its earlier, hostile review and devoting a cover stroy to Bonnie & Clyde and its place within the "New Wave" of youth-oriented films. The critical reversal was occasioned in part by a discourse that affirmed the legitimacy of the market via its capacity for segmentation; in this case, segmentation that had "discovered" the category of youth recuperated the initial panic response as the market was posited as "liberalizing" new spheres of social life.

In characterizing the process of recuperation, I re-work some concepts
that Dick Hebdidge uses in Subculture: The Politics of Style
(commodification, Otherization, domesticization) and apply them to the
response to Penn's film text.