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The movie begins in sepia tones, with a scratchy, mock newsreel of the Hole in the Wall Gang robbing a train. “They’re all dead now,” we’re informed in a narration rectangle, “but once they ruled the West.” When the clicking newsreel finishes, the grainy quality of the video disappears, but the sepia remains. Now we see Butch Cassidy (Paul Newman) casing a fortress-like bank. Entering moments before it’s due to close, Butch registers all the changes that have been introduced since the last time he was there: armed guards, buzzers, alarms, bars on all the windows, an imposing new vault. Butch is clearly the Hole in the Wall Gang’s planner and detail man, the brains of the outfit. Indeed, he believes himself to be a man of “vision” and what he sees there in the bank is that “everything’s changed.” Robberies will require more planning now. As they make their way back to Hole in the Wall, Butch explains to the Sundance Kid that the future isn’t in America, where the gold rush is over, but rather in Bolivia, where gold, silver, and tin are everywhere being extracted from the earth and the payrolls are so heavy they’d “strain themselves stealing ’em.” Sundance, the gang’s enforcer by virtual of his steely gaze and lightning-quick draw, has his doubts, perhaps because Butch seems none too sure where Bolivia actually is, and he gently mocks his friend’s smarts, as well as, we suspect, the value of intelligence in general. “You just keep thinkin’, Butch,” he chortles. “That’s what you’re good at.”
Or anyway that’s what it felt like. First the pandemic, then a string of other disruptions—the murder of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter protests, Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn a free and fair election, culminating in the January 6 insurrection. All of this would change us, because how could it not? When lockdown ended and we regarded ourselves in the mirror, who exactly would be staring back at us?