Summary
In the car, Bonnie yells at Blanche for causing such a scene and almost getting them killed. Hysterical, Blanche asks her what she did wrong, and Bonnie says that she would have saved them a lot of trouble if she hadn't gotten so upset or if she'd gotten killed. Buck echoes that Blanche should not have gotten so upset, but Blanche holds him and tells him that she didn't marry him to see him get shot at. "I killed a guy, now we're in this," Buck says, which only makes Blanche cry harder. As Bonnie yells at Blanche, Clyde tells her to knock it off, and she tells him to pull over so they can talk. He drives into a field and the couple gets out of the car to talk.
Bonnie tells Clyde that they need to get rid of Blanche, that she's a "dumb, stupid, backcountry hick." Clyde yells at her for disrespecting his sister-in-law and denigrates Bonnie to show her that she's being stuck up. When Clyde insults Bonnie, she tells him that the only special thing about him is his "peculiar ideas about lovemaking, which is no kind of lovemaking at all." He starts walking away, and Bonnie runs to him crying, saying that she didn't mean it. Clyde hears something and they get back in the car and drive away.
In the car, Buck reads an article about Bonnie and Clyde in the paper. Bonnie looks delighted, and Blanche eats a doughnut. The group laughs as Buck reads the article, which mythologizes the group. Blanche gets annoyed when Buck is mentioned in the article, and Moss asks Clyde to pull over next to a pond. After they pull over, a sheriff in a cowboy hat in a red car pulls over nearby and gets out to investigate.
As the sheriff walks towards the car, Clyde shoots at him, and Buck jumps out of the car with a gun to help. They push the sheriff, a Texas Ranger named Frank Hammer, on the side of the car, and pull out his identification. Clyde takes Frank's badge and snatches off his hat, but Buck pulls him away, asking his brother why he has to make it all so personal. "We've got to discourage this bounty hunting of the Barrow gang," says Clyde, and Moss asks if they should shoot him. "No!" yells Blanche, frightened.
Bonnie suggests that they ought to take his picture and send it to the paper as a kind of practical joke. "Big old Texas Ranger waves his gun at us and we just welcome him like he was one of our own!" says Bonnie playfully, and the men smile and laugh. Clyde puts Frank's badge back on him and Bonnie and Clyde pose with Frank for a photograph. For one of them, Bonnie kisses Frank on the lips and Frank spits in her face.
Clyde becomes incensed, pushing Frank into the pond and trying to fight him. When Buck tries to prevent the men from fighting, Clyde throws him off, puts Frank in a rowboat and pushes the boat out into the pond, angrily yelling "We got you!"
The scene shifts and we see Clyde, Buck, and Bonnie robbing a bank. Clyde tosses Buck a bag to collect money and asks a man if his money is the bank's or his own. When the man says it's his, Clyde tells him to keep it. As a cop begins to move, Clyde shoots him in the arm, and threatens, "Next time I'll aim a little lower." The teller hands over the money to Bonnie and the group leaves, but not before Buck has stolen a security guard's sunglasses and told him to take a good look, "I'm Buck Barrow."
As the alarm goes off, Blanche screams for them to come and they drive off hastily. On the road, they get chased by several cars and there's a big shootout. Bonnie laughs as they speed across a field, evading the authorities yet again. In between shots of them getting chased, we see different witnesses getting interviewed. The man whom Clyde told could keep his money says that he wants to go to their funerals.
The Barrow gang manages to get away from the authorities and make it to Oklahoma. We see the cops who are chasing them; one of them wants to catch them even though they're across state lines, while the other insists that he doesn't want to "risk [his] life in Oklahoma."
In Oklahoma, the gang counts the money they've stolen and Clyde distributes it among them. Blanche whispers to Buck that she wants some of the money, but Clyde and Bonnie don't think she deserves it. Blanche yells that she should get some money, since she's wanted by the law same as everyone else. When Clyde hands Blanche some of the cash, Bonnie storms off.
Clyde follows her and insists that Blanche should get some of the money since she's family. When Bonnie counters that her family could use some of the money also, Clyde reminds her that it would be too risky to go and visit them now while she's wanted by the law. Suddenly, Moss informs them that their car isn't working and they'll have to get another.
Analysis
Bonnie and Clyde hit their first really bumpy patch over the fact that Buck and Blanche are traveling with them. Blanche and Bonnie are complete opposites. Where Bonnie dreams of a better life, cares about her own sex appeal, and is positively turned on by the thrill of crime, Blanche is a nervous and sensitive prude who wants nothing to do with breaking the law. The differences between the two women lead to a great deal of resentment in Bonnie, who calls Blanche names and upsets Clyde as a result. In order to put her in her place, Clyde reminds Bonnie that she's no better than Blanche, but the fight is a difficult one.
The conflict between Bonnie and Clyde is sexual as well as interpersonal. After Clyde insults Bonnie for thinking that she's so much better than Blanche, Bonnie lashes out and tells him that his style of lovemaking is peculiar, implying that he is impotent. Throughout the film, we have seen Bonnie and Clyde in some ambiguous and peculiar sexual situations, although it is never quite explicit what is going on between them. At one point, Bonnie goes to perform oral sex on Clyde and he refuses, suggesting that he is more sexually timid than his larger-than-life persona would suggest. When Bonnie calls him out for having a peculiar notion of lovemaking, this wounds Clyde, and he walks away, dejected. Thus, we see that their relationship is ignited by alternating moments of sexual thrill as it is connected to their life of crime, and then humiliation and rejection.
What makes Bonnie and Clyde such mesmerizing and proficient criminals is also what makes them messy criminals: their tendency to take and make things personal and to flaunt their law-breaking at the authorities. This tendency is epitomized in their treatment of the Texas Ranger, Frank Hammer. Rather than simply scare him away or get him off their trail in a simpler way, they get cocky and begin playing with him. It is Bonnie's idea that they should play with Frank, posing with him in a picture and even going so far as to kiss him. When Frank fights back, however, spitting in Bonnie's face, Clyde takes it one step farther by wrestling the handcuffed Ranger and putting him in a rowboat and pushing it out to the middle of a pond. Even Buck thinks that Clyde takes it too far by engaging so pointedly with the Ranger, and the viewer begins to see how Bonnie and Clyde might be hurting their plight by playing with their enemies in such a cavalier way.
The "Barrow gang," as they come to be called once Buck and Blanche join their ranks, is defined not only by their criminality, but also by the ways that their flamboyant approach to bank robbery makes them celebrities of sorts. They get written up in the papers like they are movie stars, and when they leave the banks they are robbing, they each look squarely in the eyes of their victims, wanting to be remembered. Indeed, even the people they rob have a kind of star-eyed response to their presence. We see a man getting interviewed as a witness, and he wears the bamboozled expression of someone who seems more like a fan than a victim. The film conflates criminality with celebrity to show the ways that the mythology of Bonnie and Clyde came to overtake them as they got deeper and deeper into their lives of crime.
The tone of the film capitalizes on the moral ambiguity of the characters. While events can get difficult and scary at times, with lives on the line and stakes high, the life of the Barrow gang also seems like a lot of fun. The director, Arthur Penn, contrasts the drama with the lighthearted comedy in a way that disorients the viewer, and convinces them to sympathize and root for the Barrow gang, in spite of their respective capacities for criminality. Every time we see them driving down the road, an upbeat and fast-paced banjo tune plays, which evokes the Southern setting of the film, as well as reflecting the thrill of the chase—however bleak the characters' futures might be.
