Bonnie and Clyde is about violence and crime, and the desire of the ego to define itself, to live in violence and crime if it can't in anything else. To this end it remains properly sympathetic to the characters it has plucked from history, the sympathy being given not to crime but to a process in which crime figures, to the action by which the ego displays itself as the embattled source of everything—crime, love, violence, goodness, error, dream.