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Author ORCID Identifier

0009-0000-9026-0372

Abstract

This essay applies René Girard’s scapegoat mechanism to an early genealogy of the outlaw-couple-on-the-run narrative and of the outlaw road movie more broadly. Through readings of You Only Live Once (1937), They Live by Night (1948), Gun Crazy (1950), and Bonnie and Clyde (1967), it argues that scapegoating in these films operates as a process rather than a single final act: the outlaw couple is first marked and excluded from ordinary goods such as work, respectability, and domestic space, then publicly blamed as a cause of disorder, then amplified through mythmaking, circulation, and repetition until finally sacrificed in a closing act of violence staged as social resolution. Across the sequence, this pattern is progressively reworked through domestic denial, media circulation, mimetic desire, and spectacle. While the earlier films present sacrificial closure more nearly as tragic necessity, the later films increasingly foreground the mechanisms that make it feel necessary, culminating in Bonnie and Clyde, where self-mythmaking, public circulation, and spectacular violence make the scapegoat mechanism newly visible. Drawing on Girard, scholarship on film as ritual, and work on the road movie, the essay argues that these films do not merely depict scapegoating but also rehearse its emotional logic for spectators while progressively exposing its costs, residues, and moral instability.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

VolNum

30

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