Bonnie and Clyde and the Aural Imagination of American Counterculture

Bonnie and Clyde’s soundtrack dramatizes a conflict between historicity and the temporal immediacy of lived experience. The film’s sound design offers a self-reflexive meditation on the photo- and phonographic capturing of human presence through mechanical mediation. This capturing, the author argues, functions as a metaphor for historical narrativity, a confining discourse to which the film seeks alternatives through a stylistic language drawing upon both visceral realism and ephemeral abstraction. Bonnie and Clyde’s unique bluegrass pop score extends the soundtrack’s larger concern with sensory immersion and mechanized, alienating distance, allowing the film to acquire a countercultural cachet suggestive of the “Happening,” a concept from avant-garde art that was broadly appropriated as a way of understanding of the popular zeitgeist.