In movie theaters across the country, audiences are increasingly being encouraged to laugh at things no sane person should find amusing — at the sight of extreme, graphic, bloody, sickening violence. The trend began almost 30 years ago when audiences saw Bonnie and Clyde, perhaps the first American movie to combine scenes of slapstick with other sequences that depict shocking brutality. This uneasy juxtaposition of two polar elements has since become a popular convention of the modern film from Schwarzenegger to Tarantino. Ask today’s movie audience “What’s so funny?” and it’s far from unlikely they will regale you with an account of a scene in which someone was shot in the head.
When Bonnie and Clyde was released in 1967, its unapologetic violence caused an uproar. Bonnie and Clyde was an unsettling hybrid film: not a dramatic comedy or a romantic comedy — both of which audiences had come to expect — -but a violent comedy that punctuated its wisecracks with bullet holes.
