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
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 Bonnie often is the more proactive one, while Clyde is more withdrawn and sometimes has to calm her down when she gets too carried away or upset.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