#42 ‘Bonnie and Clyde’
Guns, Glamour, and the Fetishization of Doomed Rebellion
Bonnie and Clyde (1967) wants you to believe it’s a revolution—a jagged, sexy break from the sanitized violence and moral platitudes of Old Hollywood. And in some ways, it is: it's bold, bloody, and fueled by the same defiance it pretends to critique. But don’t be fooled by the berets and the banjo. At its heart, this film is yet another tale of male dysfunction given mythic weight, while the woman beside him gets immortalized for daring to hold the gun.
Warren Beatty’s Clyde Barrow is a limp-dicked dreamer with a gun fetish and an ego problem. He’s charming, sure, in that casually narcissistic way men often are when they’ve never been told no. He meets Bonnie (Faye Dunaway), a bored waitress yearning for something more than empty lipstick tubes and dusty front porches. But instead of offering her freedom, he hands her a pistol and a place in his fantasy.
And what a fantasy it is. Clyde doesn’t just rob banks—he curates the performance of rebellion. He wants the fame, the danger, the immortality. And Bonnie? She’s expected to perform devotion, hunger, and horniness—just not too much of any of them. When she demands intimacy, he recoils. When she writes poetry, he dismisses it. When she becomes the face of their legend, he pouts like the myth is slipping from his grip.
Bonnie is fascinating—smarter than the script gives her credit for, sharper than Clyde deserves. Faye Dunaway plays her like a woman torn between hunger and doom, lust and despair. But the film doesn’t let her evolve. She's not a partner—she’s a reflection of Clyde’s ego and the audience’s arousal. Her longing for purpose is packaged as youthful recklessness, her sexuality reduced to a narrative inconvenience.
And then there’s the violence. Bonnie and Clyde didn’t just raise the bar—it blew it away with a tommy gun. The slow-motion bloodbath that ends the film is iconic, yes. But it’s also indulgent. The film wants to have it both ways: to revel in the erotic charge of danger and then punish its characters for being too good at it. It’s a morality play where the audience gets off on the sin and still gets to feel virtuous when the hammer drops.
Women in this world are adornments, sidekicks, mothers, or burdens. Blanche Barrow is hysterical comic relief, a shrieking foil to Bonnie’s cool detachment. And Bonnie herself is punished for picking up the gun—not because she kills, but because she dares to find pleasure in it.
Yes, the cinematography is electric. Yes, the editing changed cinema. But Bonnie and Clyde doesn’t subvert the myth—it feeds it. It packages masculine violence in sepia tones and pelvic thrusts, then asks us to mourn when the bullet casings hit the ground.
3.5 out of 5 stray bullets
(One for Dunaway. One for that final, devastating silence. One for making Old Hollywood flinch. Half a star for style. The rest riddled through the windshield—because in the end, rebellion was always going to look better on him than on her.)
