Gender Roles In Bonnie And Clyde
Arthur Penn’s film Bonnie and Clyde, starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, tells and displays the story and career of the two notorious bank robbers Clyde Barrows and Bonnie Parker and their gang during the great depression. The film in many ways was a groundbreaker and a pioneer for the ”New Hollywood” in the way it distinguished and separated itself from the well established style of the classical Hollywood.
One thing that gets obvious just a few minutes into the film is that the main characters, whom we will grow to sympathise with, are actually the crooks. This is displayed to us from the beginning of the film where the opening scene shows us Clyde, getting caught by Bonnie while attempting to steal her mothers car. Clyde sincerely …show more content…
explains that he just got out after serving time in state prison for armed robbery. Bonnie, rather thrilled than discouraged by this fact is persuaded to partner up with Clyde and help him follow his future heists through. The fact that the main characters of the film seemingly doesn’t have to think twice before breaking the law, clearly breaks with the classical way of characterising Hollywood heroes. We are here swept into a story, told by a hero and a heroine who traditionally would be referred to as the ”bad guys”, whereas the classical Hollywood hero more likely would be the cop trying to catch them.
In Pathos of Failure: American Films in the 70s, Thomas Elsaesser argues that an alteration in the way of constructing and creating narratives and heroes is in progress. The journeys of the main characters aren’t the same drive- and goal oriented stories they once were. He continues to argue that in many of the 70s ”New Hollywood” films, like Five Easy Pieces, California Split and Two- Lane Blacktop, the lack of motif and motivation of the heroes separates these movies from the thematically equivalents of the 50s. Consequently, they also work well as illustrations of the shift from classical to new Hollywood.
One could argue that Elsaesser’s theories in many ways applies well to Bonnie and Clyde. Here we have two outlaws, seemingly unbothered by pursuing a career in crime, rather doing it as a response to boredom and lack of other things to do. We don’t really get much of a background story, more than the fact that the great depression has hit the country hard and difficult times lies ahead, to motivate and justify their way of acting. With this in mind, it would be no controversy to say that the characters of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow fits well into what Elsaesser refers to as ”unmotivated heroes”. There is also the obvious lack of a definite goal to their journey, which in a classical Hollywood film would’ve been essential, to strengthen their way of acting as unmotivated. Their is never a clear indication that their journey eventually will come to an end. The main characters doesn’t seem to have a clear goal that they strive towards. You get the feeling that it isn’t really a question of money either, even though that partly might have been the case at the beginning. Rather, it’s a question of freedom and being able to do something fun and thrilling despite the difficult conditions, due to the depression. Consequently, you also get the feeling that their journey will never end. They will continue doing it until they get caught because it makes them feel alive and free. Paradoxically, this might just add somewhat of a character motivation to the earlier lack of it, though still far from enough to justify both robbery and murder.
The classical distinctive dramaturgy with a clear beginning, middle and an end, here is also more subtle and different parts seems to fade into each other. You get the feeling that the beginning of the film transitions to the ”middle part” almost immediately and that this middle continues until just a few minutes before the film ends. This could be explained by the fact that the hero and heroine doesn’t really have any intentions to end their journey, which I argued above. We get thrown into the backseat of their car from the start and would probably still be stuck their if it weren’t for the unavoidable end to the journey. Bonnie and Clyde would simply never have stopped doing what they were doing because it was the only way they knew. Therefore, one could argue that the ending of the film with them finally getting caught and killed were the only possible way to end the film. Because if they hadn’t been caught, they never would’ve stopped and thus the film would’ve had to go on indefinitely.
The removal of the black list in 1960, which previously had prevented left-side filmmakers from making films the way they wanted, if even making them at all, in the late 60s began to take a more positive effect. 3 This opened previously closed doors for filmmakers to make films critiquing their own society in various ways. During the same period, the United States postwar struggles for racial equality achieved partial success under the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. The Civil Rights Act passage in 1964 outlawed any discrimination based on race, colour, religion, sex or national origin. The invention of the birth control pill contributed to a new openness about sexual behaviour and an alteration of the view of women’s roles in society started to emerge. An international critical political cinema began to take form and filmmakers started practicing a filmmaking of social protest. The struggle of the people and that of the liberal movements against their opponents was reflected in many of the new Hollywood films like Jaws, The Parallax View and Nashville.
Evident traces of these movements could also be find in the case of Bonnie and Clyde.
The filmmakers here play a lot with the norms associated with the roles of the different genders. It gets obvious quite early into the film that Bonnie doesn’t really fit very well into what, one could assume, would be the general assumption of the stereotype 30s woman. Neither could the character of Clyde be called the typical male hero, associated with earlier Hollywood films. Therefore the relationship between the both characters in many ways stands out in the way it breaks with the presumed roles of a heterosexual relationship. It could be argued that in many situations the roles of the sexes to some extent are reversed. Bonnie often is the more proactive one, while Clyde is more withdrawn and sometimes has to calm her down when she gets too carried away or upset. In the opening of the film, we’re shown Bonnie lying naked and bored in her room, angrily pulling the lattice of her bed, almost as if to say she was locked in by it. She then moves to the window where she spots Clyde trying to steal her mother’s car. Rather amused and happy that something out of the ordinary is happening, she decides to follow him in to town. Even though Bonnie isn’t literally imprisoned, the lattice of her bed have a symbolic value in the way it depicts her state of mind. The way she punches and pulls the lattice gives you the feeling that she feels imprisoned by the boredom and difficult conditions that comes along with the depression. You get the feeling that she’s just waiting for an opportunity to run away and that just about anything would be better than staying put where she is. Luckily, Clyde turns up and the fact that she gets amused and thrilled, rather than angry by the fact that Clyde is an outlaw who just tried to steal her mothers car, adds a certain adventurous feeling to Bonnie. This type of adventurous and straight forward trait of character, one could argue, isn’t one very closely
associated with the typical 30s woman, where traits like gentleness, discretion and empathy were higher valued. Bonnie also has a very liberal way when it comes to her sexuality, in contrast to that of women in earlier Hollywood films. After the first robbery, she literally throws herself at Clyde while he’s driving the car and Clyde is the one who stops her, explaining he isn’t much of a ”lover boy”.
The fact that in the relationship between the two, Bonnie often appears to be the one chasing Clyde, rather than the other way around, clearly breaks with the classical way of depicting Hollywood couples, where the man typically is very potent and proactive, while the woman is more withdrawn and shy. It’s also obvious that Clyde has a lot of respect for Bonnie and often feels that he has to prove himself to her. For example, when robbing their first bank, Clyde pulls his gun on the bank man who explains they failed three weeks ago and their’s no money left, Clyde forces the man to follow him out and explain the situation to Bonnie as well. Bonnie though shows Clyde little sympathy, instead bursting into laughter, as if to say, how bad of a bank robber are you really? Throughout the film, the couple of Clyde’s brother Buck (Gene Hackman) and his wife Blanche (Estelle Parsons) works as a contrast to that of Bonnie and Clyde. Here, we have a more traditional heterosexual couple where Blanche, in contrast to the adventurous and straight forward woman that Bonnie represents, seems to be way out of her comfort-zone throughout the film. Having Buck and Blanche as a contrast helps establishing Bonnie and Clyde as the groundbreaking couple they are. It’s obvious that Bonnie and Clyde, in many ways distinguishes themselves from the stereotypes of the classical Hollywood heroes. Rather than possessing traits associated with either classical heroes or people of the time era that the film actually is displaying, Bonnie and Clyde instead bare obvious traces of the equality movements and the sexual frankness of the 60s.
It isn’t just the narrative structure and the way the heroes of the film are portrayed that differs from from the classical Hollywood style. The film also differs widely when it comes to aspects like music and editing. The classical orchestral music, often used in classical Hollywood films to underscore the narrative of the film and highlight different moods of the characters, in Bonnie and Clyde is completely gone. 5 There is rarely any music to emphasise the feelings of the characters in different situations and in large parts of the film, there’s no music at all. The only obvious background music in the film is the upbeat banjo song ”Foggy Mountain Breakdown” by Flatt and Scruggs, which is played as the gang escapes the banks they’ve robbed. Here, the fast, happy banjo-fingerpicking in one way underlines the fact that they are in a hurry to escape, while also enhancing the feeling of getting a kick out of doing something dangerous. Though, the music in another way is quite contradictory, this being in the sense that the happy sound of the banjo doesn’t go along very well with the fact that they are actually killing people. Here, even though simultaneously underscoring the narrative of the film, it also works as compensatory tool in the way it takes your mind of the fact that they are really doing something horrible. This makes it easier to keep our sympathies with Bonnie and Clyde, despite what they’re doing. The editing in the film, with it’s average shot length of less than four seconds, and it’s deviations from the well established continuity editing system of the classical Hollywood, arguably had a pioneering effect for the new Hollywood. Even though it follows the rules of the continuity editing to the extent that the film flows on and the cuts doesn’t get disruptive, it clearly breaks with some features of the classical way of editing. The film often doesn’t follow the patterns of the classical editing where you would begin with an establishing shot and gradually move in closer with the following shots. Instead, the contrary is often the case with a close-up being the first shot used, as for in the first scene of the film. The scene here begins with an extreme close up of Bonnie’s lips, followed by a close-up of her face in the mirror. The camera then follows her in a medium close-up before showing another close-up of her face while lying in her bed, followed by an extreme close- up of her eyes. The pace of the cutting is slower in this scene, reflecting the boredom she feels. whereas the length of the shots after she partners up with Clyde are shorter, resulting in a more energetic and action filled feeling, reflecting the quick lifestyle of being a criminal on the run.
The editing is also used to highlight sexual tensions and the thrills of violence. An example of this is when they are drinking coca-cola and Clyde shows his gun to Bonnie. They here cut from a close- up of Bonnie, to an extreme close-up of her hand stroking the gun and then back to Bonnie who looks at Clyde with a challenging glance. The censorship is also much less evident which helps highlighting the violent nature of the film. We’re for example shown a close-up of the bank director when he gets shot in the face while clinging on to their car, and even more brutal, the finale when Bonnie and Clyde gets ambushed and shot to death by a hail of bullets. Here, with fast cutting between multiple cameras shooting at different speeds, the brutal death of the couple is portrayed.
The way Bonnie and Clyde broke with the ways of the classical Hollywood, with everything from location shooting to unmotivated heroes, arguably changed the way people would come to create films in the future. It is no doubt that its innovative thinking and the pioneering effect it had, was one of the key factors in the rise of the new Hollywood.
Bibliography:
Beorgakas, D ”The Hollywood Blacklist” in Encyclopedia of the American Left, Oxford University Press, 1998.
Bordwell, D, Thompson, K ”Hollywoods Fall and Rise: 1960-1980” in Film History: An Introduction (3d edu), McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2010, p. 472, 473, 476.
Corrigan, T, White, P ”Listenining to the Cinema: Film Sound” in The Film Experience: An Introduktion (3d edu), Bedford/ St. Martenʼs, 2012, p. 198.
Elsaesser, T ”The Pathos of Failure: American Films in the 70s” in The Last Great American Picture Show, Amsterdam University Press, 1999, p. 279, 280.
One thing that gets obvious just a few minutes into the film is that the main characters, whom we will grow to sympathise with, are actually the crooks. This is displayed to us from the beginning of the film where the opening scene shows us Clyde, getting caught by Bonnie while attempting to steal her mothers car. Clyde sincerely …show more content…
explains that he just got out after serving time in state prison for armed robbery. Bonnie, rather thrilled than discouraged by this fact is persuaded to partner up with Clyde and help him follow his future heists through. The fact that the main characters of the film seemingly doesn’t have to think twice before breaking the law, clearly breaks with the classical way of characterising Hollywood heroes. We are here swept into a story, told by a hero and a heroine who traditionally would be referred to as the ”bad guys”, whereas the classical Hollywood hero more likely would be the cop trying to catch them.
In Pathos of Failure: American Films in the 70s, Thomas Elsaesser argues that an alteration in the way of constructing and creating narratives and heroes is in progress. The journeys of the main characters aren’t the same drive- and goal oriented stories they once were. He continues to argue that in many of the 70s ”New Hollywood” films, like Five Easy Pieces, California Split and Two- Lane Blacktop, the lack of motif and motivation of the heroes separates these movies from the thematically equivalents of the 50s. Consequently, they also work well as illustrations of the shift from classical to new Hollywood.
One could argue that Elsaesser’s theories in many ways applies well to Bonnie and Clyde. Here we have two outlaws, seemingly unbothered by pursuing a career in crime, rather doing it as a response to boredom and lack of other things to do. We don’t really get much of a background story, more than the fact that the great depression has hit the country hard and difficult times lies ahead, to motivate and justify their way of acting. With this in mind, it would be no controversy to say that the characters of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow fits well into what Elsaesser refers to as ”unmotivated heroes”. There is also the obvious lack of a definite goal to their journey, which in a classical Hollywood film would’ve been essential, to strengthen their way of acting as unmotivated. Their is never a clear indication that their journey eventually will come to an end. The main characters doesn’t seem to have a clear goal that they strive towards. You get the feeling that it isn’t really a question of money either, even though that partly might have been the case at the beginning. Rather, it’s a question of freedom and being able to do something fun and thrilling despite the difficult conditions, due to the depression. Consequently, you also get the feeling that their journey will never end. They will continue doing it until they get caught because it makes them feel alive and free. Paradoxically, this might just add somewhat of a character motivation to the earlier lack of it, though still far from enough to justify both robbery and murder.
The classical distinctive dramaturgy with a clear beginning, middle and an end, here is also more subtle and different parts seems to fade into each other. You get the feeling that the beginning of the film transitions to the ”middle part” almost immediately and that this middle continues until just a few minutes before the film ends. This could be explained by the fact that the hero and heroine doesn’t really have any intentions to end their journey, which I argued above. We get thrown into the backseat of their car from the start and would probably still be stuck their if it weren’t for the unavoidable end to the journey. Bonnie and Clyde would simply never have stopped doing what they were doing because it was the only way they knew. Therefore, one could argue that the ending of the film with them finally getting caught and killed were the only possible way to end the film. Because if they hadn’t been caught, they never would’ve stopped and thus the film would’ve had to go on indefinitely.
The removal of the black list in 1960, which previously had prevented left-side filmmakers from making films the way they wanted, if even making them at all, in the late 60s began to take a more positive effect. 3 This opened previously closed doors for filmmakers to make films critiquing their own society in various ways. During the same period, the United States postwar struggles for racial equality achieved partial success under the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. The Civil Rights Act passage in 1964 outlawed any discrimination based on race, colour, religion, sex or national origin. The invention of the birth control pill contributed to a new openness about sexual behaviour and an alteration of the view of women’s roles in society started to emerge. An international critical political cinema began to take form and filmmakers started practicing a filmmaking of social protest. The struggle of the people and that of the liberal movements against their opponents was reflected in many of the new Hollywood films like Jaws, The Parallax View and Nashville.
Evident traces of these movements could also be find in the case of Bonnie and Clyde.
The filmmakers here play a lot with the norms associated with the roles of the different genders. It gets obvious quite early into the film that Bonnie doesn’t really fit very well into what, one could assume, would be the general assumption of the stereotype 30s woman. Neither could the character of Clyde be called the typical male hero, associated with earlier Hollywood films. Therefore the relationship between the both characters in many ways stands out in the way it breaks with the presumed roles of a heterosexual relationship. It could be argued that in many situations the roles of the sexes to some extent are reversed. Bonnie often is the more proactive one, while Clyde is more withdrawn and sometimes has to calm her down when she gets too carried away or upset. In the opening of the film, we’re shown Bonnie lying naked and bored in her room, angrily pulling the lattice of her bed, almost as if to say she was locked in by it. She then moves to the window where she spots Clyde trying to steal her mother’s car. Rather amused and happy that something out of the ordinary is happening, she decides to follow him in to town. Even though Bonnie isn’t literally imprisoned, the lattice of her bed have a symbolic value in the way it depicts her state of mind. The way she punches and pulls the lattice gives you the feeling that she feels imprisoned by the boredom and difficult conditions that comes along with the depression. You get the feeling that she’s just waiting for an opportunity to run away and that just about anything would be better than staying put where she is. Luckily, Clyde turns up and the fact that she gets amused and thrilled, rather than angry by the fact that Clyde is an outlaw who just tried to steal her mothers car, adds a certain adventurous feeling to Bonnie. This type of adventurous and straight forward trait of character, one could argue, isn’t one very closely
associated with the typical 30s woman, where traits like gentleness, discretion and empathy were higher valued. Bonnie also has a very liberal way when it comes to her sexuality, in contrast to that of women in earlier Hollywood films. After the first robbery, she literally throws herself at Clyde while he’s driving the car and Clyde is the one who stops her, explaining he isn’t much of a ”lover boy”.
The fact that in the relationship between the two, Bonnie often appears to be the one chasing Clyde, rather than the other way around, clearly breaks with the classical way of depicting Hollywood couples, where the man typically is very potent and proactive, while the woman is more withdrawn and shy. It’s also obvious that Clyde has a lot of respect for Bonnie and often feels that he has to prove himself to her. For example, when robbing their first bank, Clyde pulls his gun on the bank man who explains they failed three weeks ago and their’s no money left, Clyde forces the man to follow him out and explain the situation to Bonnie as well. Bonnie though shows Clyde little sympathy, instead bursting into laughter, as if to say, how bad of a bank robber are you really? Throughout the film, the couple of Clyde’s brother Buck (Gene Hackman) and his wife Blanche (Estelle Parsons) works as a contrast to that of Bonnie and Clyde. Here, we have a more traditional heterosexual couple where Blanche, in contrast to the adventurous and straight forward woman that Bonnie represents, seems to be way out of her comfort-zone throughout the film. Having Buck and Blanche as a contrast helps establishing Bonnie and Clyde as the groundbreaking couple they are. It’s obvious that Bonnie and Clyde, in many ways distinguishes themselves from the stereotypes of the classical Hollywood heroes. Rather than possessing traits associated with either classical heroes or people of the time era that the film actually is displaying, Bonnie and Clyde instead bare obvious traces of the equality movements and the sexual frankness of the 60s.
It isn’t just the narrative structure and the way the heroes of the film are portrayed that differs from from the classical Hollywood style. The film also differs widely when it comes to aspects like music and editing. The classical orchestral music, often used in classical Hollywood films to underscore the narrative of the film and highlight different moods of the characters, in Bonnie and Clyde is completely gone. 5 There is rarely any music to emphasise the feelings of the characters in different situations and in large parts of the film, there’s no music at all. The only obvious background music in the film is the upbeat banjo song ”Foggy Mountain Breakdown” by Flatt and Scruggs, which is played as the gang escapes the banks they’ve robbed. Here, the fast, happy banjo-fingerpicking in one way underlines the fact that they are in a hurry to escape, while also enhancing the feeling of getting a kick out of doing something dangerous. Though, the music in another way is quite contradictory, this being in the sense that the happy sound of the banjo doesn’t go along very well with the fact that they are actually killing people. Here, even though simultaneously underscoring the narrative of the film, it also works as compensatory tool in the way it takes your mind of the fact that they are really doing something horrible. This makes it easier to keep our sympathies with Bonnie and Clyde, despite what they’re doing. The editing in the film, with it’s average shot length of less than four seconds, and it’s deviations from the well established continuity editing system of the classical Hollywood, arguably had a pioneering effect for the new Hollywood. Even though it follows the rules of the continuity editing to the extent that the film flows on and the cuts doesn’t get disruptive, it clearly breaks with some features of the classical way of editing. The film often doesn’t follow the patterns of the classical editing where you would begin with an establishing shot and gradually move in closer with the following shots. Instead, the contrary is often the case with a close-up being the first shot used, as for in the first scene of the film. The scene here begins with an extreme close up of Bonnie’s lips, followed by a close-up of her face in the mirror. The camera then follows her in a medium close-up before showing another close-up of her face while lying in her bed, followed by an extreme close- up of her eyes. The pace of the cutting is slower in this scene, reflecting the boredom she feels. whereas the length of the shots after she partners up with Clyde are shorter, resulting in a more energetic and action filled feeling, reflecting the quick lifestyle of being a criminal on the run.
The editing is also used to highlight sexual tensions and the thrills of violence. An example of this is when they are drinking coca-cola and Clyde shows his gun to Bonnie. They here cut from a close- up of Bonnie, to an extreme close-up of her hand stroking the gun and then back to Bonnie who looks at Clyde with a challenging glance. The censorship is also much less evident which helps highlighting the violent nature of the film. We’re for example shown a close-up of the bank director when he gets shot in the face while clinging on to their car, and even more brutal, the finale when Bonnie and Clyde gets ambushed and shot to death by a hail of bullets. Here, with fast cutting between multiple cameras shooting at different speeds, the brutal death of the couple is portrayed.
The way Bonnie and Clyde broke with the ways of the classical Hollywood, with everything from location shooting to unmotivated heroes, arguably changed the way people would come to create films in the future. It is no doubt that its innovative thinking and the pioneering effect it had, was one of the key factors in the rise of the new Hollywood.
Bibliography:
Beorgakas, D ”The Hollywood Blacklist” in Encyclopedia of the American Left, Oxford University Press, 1998.
Bordwell, D, Thompson, K ”Hollywoods Fall and Rise: 1960-1980” in Film History: An Introduction (3d edu), McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2010, p. 472, 473, 476.
Corrigan, T, White, P ”Listenining to the Cinema: Film Sound” in The Film Experience: An Introduktion (3d edu), Bedford/ St. Martenʼs, 2012, p. 198.
Elsaesser, T ”The Pathos of Failure: American Films in the 70s” in The Last Great American Picture Show, Amsterdam University Press, 1999, p. 279, 280.