Perhaps it is because I’m a woman, but for me Bonnie and Clyde has always been much more about Bonnie than Clyde. Bonnie is the character that experiences the most profound change through the course of the film. In the beginning, she is a naïve teenager expecting Clyde to change her life. At first he seems to do just that, freeing her from her life as a waitress and bringing her on the road. However when Bonnie discovers Clyde’s sexual impotency, she realizes how the truth about Clyde, the vulnerability of Clyde, doesn’t coincide with her outlaw daydreams.

Yet Bonnie loves him for who he really is and her reluctant chastity provokes her to form an identity for herself that is beyond her sexuality and beyond her prescribed gender role (in stark contrast to Clyde’s prim and nagging sister-in-law Blanche). It awakens in her her creative, independent, and, yes, violent self. She uses crime and poetry as her tools of discovery. It is her poem, “The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde”, printed in a national newspaper, which not only defines her legacy, but also defines Clyde’s. It is Bonnie’s words that immortalize them both.

Interestingly, it is after she reads him her poem (he watches her, but also listens, which subtly inverts Laura Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze of cinema) that Bonnie and Clyde are able to consummate their relationship. More than the violence she participates in, I think it’s Bonnie’s sexual and gender identity revolution that makes her a rebel. (And sorry I wrote so much! I just really love this film.)