Posted on 01/02/2025 6:02:56 PM PST by texas booster
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 with an appealing cinematic rebranding of the two criminals, a mentally unstable rich kid turned assassin became the new public face of the post-election counterculture.
Luigi Mangione is no hero except to those to whom American life is essentially anti-heroic. Luigi’s admirers are the same socialists who cheered on Bonnie and Clyde for robbing shopkeepers. Bonnie, Clyde and Luigi “made entertainment out of the anti-heroism of American life” and murder is the ultimate form of entertainment for anti-capitalist agitprop.
The three are not heroes because they are virtuous, they are anti-heroes because their admirers see America as evil, a corrupt oppressive capitalist society, hiding behind a heroic myth that must be deconstructed through propaganda, activism and terrorist violence.
(Excerpt) Read more at frontpagemag.com ...
And that leaves the anti-heroes who are not Communists, socialists or radicals, but unwittingly serve their larger aims of violently deconstructing the American narrative. They’re criminals or lunatics who become popular in the process of assailing some outpost of capitalism. Their actual politics matter much less than the politics that can be attributed or read into their actions.
The anti-hero’s only real requirement beyond that is capturing the attention of the public.
Bonnie, Clyde and Luigi were all adept at media savvy crimes. The two robbers and killers built their reputation through the newspapers, like less anonymous Jack the Rippers, even posing for their own pictures. Like the average mass shooter, Luigi Mangione had his own manifesto, but even long before there was any public manifesto, leftists had adopted him as a class warrior of their own cause. But what Bonnie, Clyde, Luigi and countless school shooters, and leftists, really have in common is a malignant narcissism that leads them to lash out at the world.
Their half-baked narratives, Bonnie’s poems or Luigi’s manifestos, are a lot less interesting than the eagerness of leftists looking for killers who share their politics. Manifestos or messages from killers are symptoms not causes. Bonnie and Clyde didn’t actually steal because they had to, but because they wanted to be famous. Luigi went to great trouble to disguise himself and carry out a professional killing only to slip and give away his identity because he wanted to be caught. Men who truly don’t want to be caught, don’t carry manifestos explaining why they did it.
Killers of this kind, whether they pretend to be terrorists, school shooters, mass shooters or criminals, are narcissists. What they want most is to make their mark on the world. They’re narcissists who fume at the lack of recognition. By spilling blood, they want to make sure that no one ever forgets them. People scour their diaries and writings for clues, but whatever their stated grievances, it all comes down to some variation of, “I am angry at the world.”
The stated ideologies, even when they exist, rarely matter. The ‘incel’ shooters like Elliot Rodges, the supposed victims of bullying like the original Columbine shooters, the transgender shooters like the Covenant School killer, never actually have anything else to really say.
They are malignant narcissists who want to break the world because they’re unhappy.
Other people to them are interchangeable pieces or, in the slang of modern always onliners, ‘NPCs’ who can be smashed or killed to make a point. An entire culture exists around gamifying mass killers down to treating their victims like game scores and turning them into memes.
And that same species of violent narcissism also lies at the raw ugly heart of leftist politics.
Before Bonnie and Clyde hit movie theaters, the first modern mass shootings emerged most decisively in the University of Texas tower shooting. A few months later, the first copycat mass shooting arrived with an attack at a cosmetology school. The media became the vector for creating the copycat killers through its obsessive coverage of these new anti-heroes: the frantic efforts to find social or genetic excuses for their crimes and save them from execution.
The serial killer, in reality fairly rare, became a national phenomenon because he expressed the leftist cultural narrative that American life was not heroic, but anti-heroic, and should be understood not through the best of us, but the absolute very worst of us. Serial killers and mass shooters became the ideal anti-heroes, madmen lashing out at the mad society that spawned them. Exploiting the rising interest in nihilistic criminals as a commentary on a nihilistic society, Bonnie and Clyde reimagined the classic criminal duo and made anti-heroes into the heroes.
From there it was a short hop to A Clockwork Orange and dramas that made nihilism its star.
But that was back when movies mattered. Social media made life into entertainment while movies became special effects cartoons for overgrown children. There is no need to make a movie about Luigi (though one is reportedly in the works anyway) because his story already played out on the news and in social media. Whatever the trial will reveal doesn’t matter.
The Left successfully made Bonnie and Clyde into a referendum on banks (even though banks were not at issue) and it similarly made Luigi Mangione into a referendum on health care. And underneath both is the “anti-heroic” narrative of American life as a struggle against capitalism.
Glamorizing Luigi is not only about defending his crime, but inciting copycats to kill some more.
Reeling from catastrophic election defeats and the abandonment of the working class, leftists see in Luigi an opportunity to reboot their movement around a counterculture of class terrorism.
The Left successfully made Bonnie and Clyde into a referendum on banks (even though banks were not at issue) and it similarly made Luigi Mangione into a referendum on health care. And underneath both is the “anti-heroic” narrative of American life as a struggle against capitalism.
Well written article by Daniel Greenfield that strikes.
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Daniel Greenfield's website: The Sultan Knish blog
Dime novels of the old west did similar.
Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker - Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway notwithstanding - were cold-blooded killers. So is Luigi Mangione.
Luigi may be basking in the limelight now, but something tells me that sixty years behind bars will temper that.
Clyde went to prison before starting the Barrow gang for various robberies. Barrow robbed grocery stores and gas stations. They said before he went to prison was different. His sister Marie said, “Something awful sure must have happened to him in prison because he wasn’t the same person when he got out.” Fellow inmate Ralph Fults said that he watched Clyde “change from a school boy to a rattlesnake”.
When in prison he was raped and he retaliated by attacking and killing his tormentor with a pipe, crushing his skull. This was his first murder. Another inmate who was already serving a life sentence claimed responsibility.
According to John Neal Phillips, Barrow’s goal in life was not to gain fame or fortune from robbing banks but to seek revenge against the Texas prison system for the abuses that he had sustained while serving time.
They kidnapped Dillard Darby and Sophia Stone at Ruston, Louisiana, in the course of stealing Darby’s car; this was one of several events between 1932 and 1934 in which they kidnapped police officers or robbery victims.[notes 4] They usually released their hostages far from home, sometimes with money to help them return.
Blanche was permanently blinded in her left eye during the 1933 shootout at Dexfield Park. She was taken into custody on the charge of “assault with intent to kill”. She was convicted and sentenced to ten years in prison, but was paroled in 1939 for good behavior. She returned to Dallas, leaving her life of crime in the past, and lived with her invalid father as his caregiver. In 1940, she married Eddie Frasure. She worked as a taxi cab dispatcher and a beautician, and completed the terms of her parole one year later. She lived in peace with her husband until he died of cancer in 1969.[146]
Warren Beatty approached her to purchase the rights to her name for use in the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, and she agreed to the original script. She objected to her characterization by Estelle Parsons in the final film, describing the actress’s Academy Award-winning portrayal of her as “a screaming horse’s ass”. Despite this, she maintained a firm friendship with Beatty. She died from cancer at age 77 on December 24, 1988, and was buried in Dallas’s Grove Hill Memorial Park under the name “Blanche B. Frasure”
I read and have Blanches book. She doesn’t in any way make being in a gang glamorous. She was just there because, same as Bonnie, she loved her man, Buck Barrow.
In fact Buck didn’t mean to be in the gang either, he met with his brother Clyde, when he got out of prison and already had done something and when the cops showed up Clyde made a run for it and the others were just piled into the car, unaware of what was going on. The Barrow gang happened kinda sudden like. Blanche tells that story in her book. She was not happy about it.
She ddid marry again, they said her second husband looked a lot like Buck.
The part of C.W. moss was based on a real guy. Jones had left Barrow and Parker six weeks after the three of them evaded officers at Dexfield Park in July 1933.[148] He reached Houston and got a job picking cotton, where he was soon discovered and captured. He was returned to Dallas, where he dictated a “confession” in which he claimed to have been kept a prisoner by Barrow and Parker. Some of the more lurid lies that he told concerned the gang’s sex lives, and this testimony gave rise to many stories about Barrow’s ambiguous sexuality.
He gave an interview to Playboy magazine during the excitement surrounding the 1967 movie: “That Bonnie and Clyde movie made it all look sort of glamorous, but like I told them teenaged boys sitting near me at the drive-in showing: ‘Take it from an old man who was there. It was hell. Besides, there’s more lawmen nowadays with better ways of catching you. You couldn’t get away, anyway. The only way I come through it was because the Good Lord musta been watching over me. But you can’t depend on that, neither, because He’s got more folks to watch over now than He did then.’”
I don’t think Mangione was anything like Clyde. Mangione was completely without remorse. A young well off punk.
Not that I admire Clyde he was a murderer but he was different than a privileged kid completely arrogant with really a sociopathic seeming character.
Clyde I think was an abused and desperate criminal.
Clyde Barrow is buried at Western Heights Cemetery in Oak Cliff.
We drive by it all the time, but in 45 years have never visited the grave.
The movie certainly glamorized the duo, and the last scene of them being shot all to pieces didn’t make any us my friends swear off a life of sin.
That is so true! Sometimes I just want to yell "Shut up to the media!"
That’s the important point. It’s not just Hollywood Leftists three decades later, Bonnie and Clyde were somewhat of folk heroes in some circles because of the economic deprivation of the Depression, resentment of banks which they were robbing.
And Jesse James, going back earlier.
And now we have Magione. Again a violent criminal and murderer, but something of a folk hero to some because of the disrepute that corporate America and especially the health insurance companies are held in.
Not just confined to the United States and old west dime novels. Che Guevara is a prime example of this.
Losers that can’t accept their failure lashing out at the world.
It looks like a lot of your post was from wikipedia and other parts may have been from you personally. If you quote another source extensively, it protects FR to cite your source. JimRob has gotten sued in the past over copyright infringement.
Interesting post in its entirety. I feel very sorry for Mangione’s family. His entire family has worked for three generations to establish themselves and avoid being characterized as criminal or shady because their ancestors three or four generations back came from Italy. Among the many relatives, they own several thriving businesses in Maryland open to the general public, and one of Luigi’s uncles is a Republican member of the Maryland legislature and also a principal of the conservative talk radio station. This is awful for them.
I do too. They will end up paying for this for years and seeing their golden boy whom they had high hopes for incarcerated for the rest of his life. I don’t know if he will or can get the death penalty but I think that may be somewhere on the board.
I usually do cite the source, forgot to was so tired when I posted it, should’ve. I don’t know if admin will let me but if they would I would.
Tried in NYC, probably no DP.
It would almost be a blessing to get it all behind them, since he took the life of someone who had not harmed him personally, shooting in the back. Cowardly.
Instead they will have to travel out of state to see him throughout their “golden years” and into old age, attend any possible parole hearings, put up with his delusions or mental illness as he deteriorates in the can, etc.
I was “adopted” as an adult by a wonderful, respectable Italian family. This hurts.
To Admin:
Some of Post 6 is from Wikipedia and I mistakenly left off the source. This is the source for post # 6:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonnie_and_Clyde
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