Who were Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow? Psychopathic killers driven by murderous rage? Victims of social turmoil and an unforgiving criminal justice system that produced the very criminality it sought to contain? Robin Hood like figures challenging the intertwined institutions of capitalism and the state that had so failed them during the Great Depression? Romantic desperados who first yearned for then cursed the celebrity status that made it impossible for them to ever escape identification? Victims of an overbearing and growing police apparatus?[1]

From a period roughly dating from 1932 to their deaths in 1934, newspapers, newsreels, and radio eagerly served up their exploits to a public enthralled by the exploits of Depression era bandits.  The mostly small time crimes of the Barrow gang were not sufficient to draw attention, that credit goes to Bonnie Parker.  Her romance with Clyde and female criminality secured their enduring presence in our cultural imaginary in radio, novels, films, and most recently a 2013 miniseries, simply titled, Bonnie and Clyde. As a radio historian, I am interested in how our interpretations of gendered criminality might have changed in the almost 80 years between their deaths and now, by comparing the miniseries with the popular radio true crime series, Gang Busters, which weighed in with its own two-part dramatization of the manhunt for the criminal couple a mere two years after their violent deaths.[2]

Gang Busters imagined Bonnie and Clyde through the lens of gender deviance, stripping away both the romance between the pair and any hope of romanticizing them..  Bonnie was represented as decidedly unfeminine, the cold, calculating brains next to a weak, doltish, infantile, decidedly unmasculine Clyde.  The real hero of the episodes was retired Texas Ranger, Frank Hamer, whose normative masculinity was constructed as the ideal corrective to the pair’s gender failings. The overt moral message of the show was that the public themselves enabled such crime sprees because their over romanticization of bandit crime prevented them from supporting tougher crime legislation.

Simulcast across sister cable channels History, Lifetime, and A&E, the lavishly produced Bonnie and Clyde promised, apropos of its cable homes, to offer both historical accuracy and an updated interpretation of the gendered politics of crime.[3] Do Bonnie and Clyde fare better than they did in Gang Busters?  Well, Clyde does.  So well, in fact, that he is promoted to series narrator, given the power to shape our understanding of the story. If 1936 Clyde is weak and stupid, 2013 Clyde is gifted with a mystical penchant for prognostication and deep abiding love for Bonnie that begins before he even meets her.  While the miniseries nods to the poverty that led to Clyde’s life of crime and his horrific experiences at Eastham prison in Texas, as the story progresses, Clyde’s primary motivation seems to be, first, pleasing Bonnie, then making sure that she does not go to jail.  His own history does not seem to bear on his future actions. While Clyde’s faithfulness to Bonnie never wavers, his understanding of her lust for fame increases, and he finds himself driven to continued acts of crime in order to satiate her.  The romance of the doomed couple is given center stage.

If Clyde is driven by love, Bonnie is motivated by fame.  She comes off as a cast member of Real Gun Molls of Dallas—a shallow starlet brandishing her sexuality in search of reality TV style fame and tight control over her criminal brand. Her biggest dream is to leave behind the presumed squalor of her middle class Texas life for the bright lights of Hollywood. All mediated stories play fast and loose with historical “facts,” but which liberties get taken say a great deal about contemporary concerns.  A small but significant liberty hinges on a series of photos published that show Bonnie gamely playing with those signs of male criminal virility—cigars and guns. In reality, the photos, themselves largely responsible for the couple’s celebrity bandit status, were published after police recovered the undeveloped roll of film following an unsuccessful raid on the Barrow gang in Missouri. In the miniseries, Bonnie masterminds the pictures, insisting that they all dress well.  In the absence of Instagram, she mails them to scrappy, fictional newswoman, P.J. Lane, who bears a striking resemblance to Rosalind Russell’s Hildy Johnson in His Girl Friday, and stands for The Newspaper and its publicity machinery. Celebrity is Bonnie’s game. While Clyde’s fantasy sequences are grisly premonitions of impending violence, Bonnie’s are gauzy images of her as a ballerina soaking up the applause of adoring fans.  We see her gamely pouring over newspaper clippings and trying out their celebrity bandit name, opting for Bonnie and Clyde over Clyde and Bonnie.

In its attempt to strip all glamour from Depression era celebrity bandits, Gang Busters flattened the pair into one-dimensional gender deviants, incapable of romance, and lost to any hope of audience sympathy or identification.  Bonnie and Clyde centers, rather than shies away from, the romance between the pair. In our contemporary age of the “complex” male anti hero (Walter White, Don Draper), Clyde is more fully imagined as sensitive, knowing, beleaguered by love, and often troubled by the morality of the pair’s actions.  Bonnie, however, is imagined through contemporary post feminist anxieties over the meaning of femininity in the era of constant display.   Instead of pathological gender deviant, she is now little more than a narcissistic fame monster. The radio series opts for a tale of pathological criminality, while the miniseries opts for an insular story of romance that centers on Bonnie’s dangerous lust for fame and Clyde’s inability to control it.  In Gang Busters death is the only option to stop their killing spree. In Bonnie and Clyde, Clyde’s only option is to drive them to their death to arrest Bonnie’s quest for fame.  80 years later, Bonnie doesn’t seem to have come very far at all.

So, let’s examine the evidence – the moments of coded meaning and excess that indicate a queer longing for acceptance and love. The first part of our story introduces us two queered misfits, Rudolph and Hermey, both struggling with forms of difference.  Born to the Donners, young buck Rudolph is a source of pride until Mr. Donner sees his son’s bright, shiny red nose.  While generally a benevolent figure of myth, this Santa does not offer a moment of Lady Gaga acceptance for little monster, Rudolph. Faced with the possibility that Rudolph will not ascend as a member of Santa’s sled team, Donner decides to make him a “normal little buck,” hiding his “nonconformity” with an uncomfortable nose cap; i.e. Rudolph is closeted.

His outing comes while playing reindeer games. When young doe Clarisse winks and flirtatiously tells him he is cute, Rudolph flies, falls, and loses his nose cover. While his male peers and authority figures mercilessly tease him, Clarisse is pleased to meet the real Rudolph and assures him he is wonderful as is. Lest we assume that Clarisse somehow secures Rudolph’s heterosexuality, the song to encourage him, “There’s Always Tomorrow,” is an obvious riff on the queer camp classic, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

“There’s Always Tomorrow”

Then there is Hermey, the elf who wants to be a dentist.  If Rudolph is forced to hide his difference, Hermey is determined to embrace his, despite an elf boss who berates and belittles him for his strange desire. It would take someone with more fluency in psychoanalysis to make sense of the aural fixation at work , but his blonde swoosh of hair, red lips, and indeterminate voice,  at once childish and fey, put him somewhere in the vicinity of the sissy stereotype. While his fellow elves sing their elf jingles dressed up in gender appropriate pink and blue, Hermey practices his craft. This misfit runs away in search of his own better tomorrow.

In the background is the Abominable Snow Creature, more often heard than seen, with a ferocious growl and imposing appearance. He hates everything about Christmas.  The Abominable functions less as a character than as a placeholder.  If Christmas stands in for a heteronormative world order, he is the necessary remainder, the excess that secures the center of this Christmas world.

Hermey and Rudolph meet and the young queer pair of misfits find themselves in a cold, hostile world, under constant threat by the Abominable, who finds them thanks to Rudolph’s shiny nose.  It is on the road that they meet gold prospector, Yukon Cornelius.  With his handlebar mustache and general macho tendencies, he too carries coded signifiers of gayness.  But unlike our young friends, Yukon seems entirely unfazed by this, indicated both by his relationship with his pickaxe, and casual dismissal of the Abominable as a mere “Bumble.”  Fleeing the Abominable, our newly queer trio ends up on the Island of Misfit Toys, greeted by the lisping, depressed Charlie in a Box who explains that they are toys with a difference, shunned by children and gathered into their own community of comfort. Here our trio is granted brief asylum, but not permanent residence in their newfound queer community.

Island of Misfit Toys

It is then that Rudolph decides to go it alone in order to protect his friends from the danger he brings them.  He heads off to face his greatest fear – the Abominable, i.e. the reality of his difference.  In a scene that terrified me as a child and still rings with a sense of despair, young Rudolph stands alone on a sheet of ice and heads back to the mainland while the Abominable roars in the background.

As we reach the climax of the story, a grown up Rudolph returns home only to find that the Donners and Clarisse have been taken captive by the Abominable.  While Rudolph tries his best, it is actually Hermey and Yukon who come to the rescue.  The latter’s utter disregard for the “Bumble,” combined with Hermey’s newfound talents as a dentist, spell his end. It is telling that the Abominable loses his power to inspire fear at the moment that our queer pair make peace with their own differences and return to Christmas town. To my mind the end can be read in a couple of ways. On one hand, we can see that the Abominable simply ceases to be monstrous as queerness itself loses its negative purchase.  As our queer trio returns as heroes who have vanquished the horror of queerness by finding first self, then group acceptance, it ends with a message akin to It Get’s Better. On the other hand, I sometimes wonder why our queer trio have so much invested in Christmas. Our queer denizens find acceptance as useful citizens reproducing Santa’s patriarchal, authoritarian, gender normative world order, leaving aside their bonds with each other in order to assimilate back into normal.

See, easy. Indeed, a quick web search yields a number of pop culture stories and web sites wondering if Rudolph is gay, especially since the mid 2000s. If in 1964, Rudolph could only whisper its queer longing for acceptance through subtext, today, Rudolph and Hermey’s queer tale of acceptance could easily be a story arc on Glee or any ABC Family show. Now the subtext (if it ever was) is simply text.