Violence In The Film 'Bonnie And Clyde'

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In the 1960s, the immense popularity that Hollywood had generated for almost half a century was plummeting. The younger generation had lost interest in the movies Hollywood was producing because they were too safe and predictable. However, any attempt to try anything new was met with backlash from the Hays Code, which strived to keep things conservative on screen. Hollywood was releasing one flop after another, until the movie Bonnie and Clyde came out in 1967, and changed everything. The film "Bonnie and Clyde" was directed by Arthur Penn and starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, and showed the audience a depiction of violence and sexual content that they had not been exposed to before. These changes were celebrated by the youth of the …show more content…

At no point in the scene does Bonnie do anything that reads as sexual. In fact, the only reason she is naked during this scene is to foreshadow her own sexual frustration later in the movie. At one point during the scene, she throws herself on the bed and begins to bang on the bars of the bed frame in anger. Her banging on the bars is her way of venting her frustration with her life. Jana Kay Lunstad, the Assistant Director of Writing and a Lecturer at Utah State University, has a similar take on this scene in her journal titled "But You Wouldn't Have the Gumption to Use It":Bonnie and Clyde and the Sexual Revolution. She states, I would argue that her sexuality also establishes a woman's need to satisfy herself, despite Clyde's fears and society's disapproval. The image of her on the screen does not play into male fantasies regarding the female body, but rather her presence as a fully sexual woman, within the context of the women's movement, affirms women's rights to exert sexual desire (Lunstad 11). Bonnie is not naked, to be an object for the audience to gawk at or to fill in some trope. Instead, the choice to make her nude was a way to humanize

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