Bonnie and Clyde and Christy Mahon: Playboys All

BONNIE AND CLYDE AND CHRISTY MAHON: PLAYBOYS ALL THE FILM VERSION OF THE STORY OF Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow uses methods explored over a half century ago in John Millington Synge's The Playboy of the T¥estern liVorld. The haunting relationship of the two works is confirmed by audience reaction to the film, which is as uncertain and uncomfortable as audience reaction to The Playboy generally is. The director of the film achieves his effects by handling the material of the film in much the same way as Synge had dramatized his material in his "shocking" 1907 comedy; and the results are the same. It was W. B. Yeats who commented in Dramatis Personae that The Playboy was a drama disturbing not only to Irish audiences, who sought to identify the source of their discomfiture in Synge's lack of piety toward Ireland and the Church, but also (and basically always) to that kind of middle-class "self-improving" audience he had observed at a Stratford-on-Avon production of the play. The same shock and discomfort has been typical of the audiences of Bonnie and Clyde despite Academy Award acclaim and recognition from a Catholic association (so far has the world turned since 1907, when certain Dublin newspapers admonished good Catholics to avoid Synge's evil genius), and more than a few critics who felt compelled to praise the film's effects proved uneasy about just what those effects meant. On the most apparent level, a comparison of the subject matter of Bonnie and Clyde and Synge's Playboy of the Western World reveals a number of points of similarity between the two works. Both deal with the folk hero, the man of simple birth, who through his actions touches the imagination of an unsophisticated rural people, who (along with the heroes themselves) tend to elevate and embellishmake myth of-the act of rebellion, thus fulfilling a vicarious desire to rebel on the part of all the inhabitants of limited and unsatisfying worlds, whether that world is in the west of Ireland or at the dead center of a national depression in America. Christy provides an image of daring and escape for Pegeen, who has often dreamed of "sailing the seas till I'd marry a Jew-man, with ten kegs of gold," as does Clyde for Bonnie, who instinctively knows there must be a life beyond the confines of the small, dusty, midwest town she lives in. Both Pegeen and Bonnie become a part of the imaginative creation of self for the hero so that with their support Christy becomes the champion of the games and Clyde the terror of the Southwestern 227 228 MODERN DRAMA September states. In each case, the result of action, of striking out against the limitations of life, releases the imagination and provides a major source of humor. Christy Mahon, having discovered himself in the mirror of Pegeen's eye as "a fine, handsome young fellow with a noble brow," finds the sleeping poet within, and in the innocent hyperbole of the newly discovered self outrages decorum in his lovetalk with Pegeen: "If the mitred bishops seen you ... , they'd be the like the holy prophets , I'm thinking do be straining the bars of paradise to lay eyes on the Lady Helen of Troy, and she abroad, pacing back and forward, with a nosegay in her golden shawl." Bonnie and Clyde, in a wonderfully funny scene, proudly identify themselves as bankrobbers with the same sense of discovery. Director Arthur Penn explains the intention of the scene in this way: ... at the abandoned farm, when the farmer says that the bank took his house away: at that point Bonnie and Clyde know they're robbers, but they don't know what they want to rob. They know that they're outlaws, but for what? At the end of that sequence we have a close-up of Warren saying, "We rob banks." It's an afterthought ; he discovers afterward what he was doing earlier. We are , dealing with a sort of primitive intellect. ... He must act but he doesn't know why.... Socially, the people were paralyzed by the Depression, ... I was...