How Bonnie and Clyde Foreshadowed Selfie Culture
It didn’t start with the iPhone and the Kardashians.
Mention “Bonnie and Clyde,” and, for many people, the first thing that springs to mind is the Arthur Penn movie, in which Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway play an impossibly glamourous couple who rob banks, party hard, and die young. Just in case you’ve never seen it, here’s the trailer (and then watch the whole thing; it’s pretty great, and shocking for its time):
The movie is riddled with historical inaccuracies, to put it mildly. The real-life Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were very different, products of the Great Depression and the West Dallas slums who screwed up most of the bank robberies they tried to pull, and managed to survive as long as they did only because of the habitual ineptitude of local law enforcement. They were, in short, a pair of kids (Bonnie was 23 when she died; Clyde, 25) who very quickly bit off more than they could chew.
But a funny thing happened to Bonnie and Clyde on the way to death and obscurity: they found a camera.
