Anti-American Anti-Heroes
When the Barrow Gang was conducting its brutal robberies and murders, socialists found in their exploits an echo of their anti-capitalist cause. So it was small surprise that the release of Bonnie and Clyde in 1967 marked the New Hollywood wave in which anti-heroes exposing the facade of American life through acts of dysfunction were to become the new focus of movies. “Our best movies have always made entertainment out of the anti-heroism of American life,” Pauline Kael, the infamous film critic, gushed in her essay on the gangster film. The anti-heroes were meant to be the heroes because American life was not heroic, it was anti-heroic, and the mission of the culture was to indoctrinate Americans with that message. American heroes were not police officers, but the anti-heroes who killed them. 90 years after Bonnie and Clyde went down in a hail of bullets on the watch of Frank Hamer, one of the toughest Texas Rangers ever bred, and a half-century after the counterculture was launched w...