The Paradox Of Technology In George Roy Hill's Film Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid

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In an early scene of George Roy Hill’s film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), illustrious bandit Butch Cassidy walks into a bank and observes a series of security upgrades (e.g. an alarm system, safe, and locks). As Butch Cassidy exits the establishment, he asks the security guard, “What happened to the old bank?” The guard responds, “People kept robbing it.” Butch remarks, “Small price to pay for beauty.” Although Butch Cassidy’s disappointed assertion may have been rooted in disappointment for loss of a heist rather than loss of architectural merit, it leads one to question: To what extent are cultural attributes lost at the expense of new technology? I will consider this question as I examine the ways in which Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid highlights the paradox of technological advancement; technology …show more content…

Frederick Jackson Turner was largely influential in determining Americans’ perceptions of the West. While describing the settlement and gradual disappearance of the American frontier in his essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893), Turner extolled the American West as a hearth for democracy and other “forces dominating American character” (3). He supports this view by hyperbolically describing the frontier’s effects on settlers, “immigrants were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality nor characteristics” (23). Notably, Turner’s essay was written as a response to the 1890 census, which proclaimed the western frontier had become settled land. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is set in the late 19th century after the publication of Turner’s essay. It shows the final stages of the romanticized West’s disappearance evidenced by the two thieves, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid, struggling to find places for themselves in a modernizing

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