To think Gone With the Wind really isn't a romantic film?

[FestiveFruitloop]

Just finished watching it, hadn't ever seen it all the way through before. Toxic/abusive relationships, marital rape depicted positively (WTF??), racism and misogyny, manipulative characters... all I can say is I hope it's no longer considered romantic in this day and age. AIBU?

Scarlett married Melanie’s younger brother Charles.

As many have said, it is more than just a film or a book that has aged badly, it’s a snapshot of its time and should be viewed in the context of the time it was written in.

It's one of my favourite books, I read it for the first time when I was 13 and have re-read it several times since. Scarlett is completely awful, but she is tough and determined to survive, I think of it of a survival story and what a woman can do to stay alive in the wreckage of the only society she’s ever known.

How unpleasant.
We'll just need to agree to disagree on how "progressive" they were.

I watched it again this morning.Must be the longest film ever ! I had watched it years ago but had forgotten most of it .Just remembered there was no happy ending. In my eyes it was a love story though. They did love each other.
It made me want to watch the original Little Women film which I think Vivienne Leigh played Meg although I think her character in GWTW was very much an Amy .

I suspect it's more that people don't want to see/hear it being normalised...

If someone can't watch a film that was made more than 80 years ago (depicting a view from more than 150 years ago) without thinking that this is the current world view on slavery and women's rights, they really shouldn't be allowed to have a telly.

I just don't see the issue with films and books depicting the actual views of people, regardless of how unpleasant those views are; particularly when those events are in the past and the film can be seen in the context of the progress or otherwise since then.

Same for the state of films.

This was back in an era where it was worth going to the pictures. Culture is worse now.

We love GWTW and still quote from it like "oh fiddle de dee" and when squeezing through a narrow gap in person or in the car "breath in miss scarlett"

With apologies for an essay…

I remember when GWTW was broadcast on BBC over two nights (I think) at Christmas as the “big film” and sat down to watch it with Mum. It was a big event – the first UK TV showing of the film - if not quite as big as the original showing. I loved it. And I do think there was a lot of “romance” about the film, the romance about Selznick’s hunt for the actress to play Scarlett, the sweeping cinematography, and the film posters of Rhett with Scarlett in his arms – which were re-cast with Reagan and Thatcher by student protesters.

But I’m also looking forward to reading one of my Christmas books – “The Wrath to Come” by Sarah Churchwell, an American academic. She also loved the book and the film as a child but, my (pre-reading her book) understanding, based on listening to her on the Rest Is History podcast, is that for all that there are strengths in GWTW, the strength of Scarlett as a female character, problematic though she is, the resilience, and particularly how powerful that theme was when it came out in Depression America and the London Blitz, that its portrayal of the “lost cause,” the decent, honourable (kindly, slave-owning) South is a distortion that needs to be challenged. She does not see Mitchell as progressive in any sense.

Churchwell doesn’t want the film or book to be banned or supressed. It’s a major film in the history of film making. Atlanta burning and the fields of casualties are imprinted on my memory as much as any scene from a war film. But she says she wants its false history, its romantic mythmaking challenged. “American fascism was never exorcised,” Churchwell says, “but merely obscured beneath romantic mythmaking that displaced a reckoning with vicious aspects of the nation’s past.” And she sees a link with that failure to exorcise and the violent riots at the Capitol on 6 January 2021.

I’ve worked in the US for 10 years, albeit in a liberal city, and have a mixed race (step) grandchild, but I don’t have any secure sense that you are an “equal” citizen if your face is not white. The minute (morning after) Trump was elected, non-white friends were shouted at and sometimes spat at. So, my prior bias is that I think Churchwell is onto something and I’m looking forward to reading her book.

GWTW is one of my favourite pieces of literature because of how widespread the misunderstanding of it is.

It is a story about strength, resilience and ultimate will to survive. It’s also a story about gritty and gruelling realities of transitioning from idyllic childhood to adulthood woman hood in that time period. It depicts all of those spectacularly.

It is a love story, technically, but not a romance. Love is a key feature and lots of characters feel is very strongly for different things/people at different times. The love Scarlet has for Tara, Ashley, her parents, her past and eventually Rhett. But no one is ever really in love with each other at the same time so it’s not exactly a romantic love story no.

By now a days standards it’s grotesque but it hate censoring things retrospectively just because they don’t comply with today’s standards otherwise how do we partake in historical education. The trick is the educated and liberal enough to read terrible things and think ‘wow that’s awful so glad that isn’t acceptable anymore’

If someone can't watch a film that was made more than 80 years ago (depicting a view from more than 150 years ago) without thinking that this is the current world view on slavery and women's rights, they really shouldn't be allowed to have a telly

This 100 times over. You can’t pretend that these views didn’t exist just because you don’t like them today. Of course people in the South thought salvery was perfectly ok, or they wouldn’t have owned slaves. Of course they thought the KKK were hero’s and women, for whom the main goal in life was to marry ‘well’ had no choice really but to put up with all manner of misogyny and violence from men because what other choice did they have? Women still put up with crap like that today, in this country.

The book is far better IMO, it explains Scarlett’s thoughts and motivations better. She is a phenomenal female character.

I watched it today too and I loved it just as much as the first time. For me personally I quite like watching films that are a product of their time - where there’s no equal opportunities tick boxes to complete like every Netflix film going these days - sometimes we need to see how it used
to be to be able to see how far we’ve came.
Scarlett’s resilience is something to be admired. Plus when Rhett takes her out the horse and buggy for a kiss when he goes to join the war as the south’s burning behind them is very romantic IMO.

I have always liked it as an epic film portraying a deeply problematic era. But what part of history isn’t problematic? A WWI film where men were conscripted on pain of imprisonment, or worse, in the case of desertion?

I suppose I appreciate it for the idea that there are no moral absolutes. Good people (Melanie and Ashley) are complicit in and benefit from the appalling system of slavery. The Christian-minded, gentle Melanie shoots and kills a man who threatens Scarlett. The good-time privateer Rhett, at the peak of his success, then risks his life to join the lost-cause Confederate Army.

Scarlett fills that screen and grapples with her circumstances in a way that is far beyond what might be predicted from her upbringing or education. If it wasn’t for her help Melanie would have died in childbirth and they would have all perished on their way out of Atlanta.

There are some very funny segments, particularly the part where she wears the curtain fabric and another scene where she is babbling on at Ashley as he goes upstairs but he is clearly desperate to get into the bedroom and have sex with his wife!

It also makes clear the risks faced by women as soon as any war breaks out. Scarlett is threatened with rape and assault on two occasions in the course of the film, which may have given rise to discussion amongst a 1930s audience.

GWTW is one of my favourite films, it wasn't meant to be a sugar coated cookie cutter romantic movie.
Yes Scarlett was awful most of the time, but she was a strong woman, a survivor, showing that in tough times you have to be stronger than ever, you can't just tell the nasty man to put his gun down and go away because that's not allowed, or weep and rock in the corner, that won't cut it, you have to act.

The good thing about movies like this that have so many unlikeable characters is that you not meant to like them and if you don't like them they've done their job well, told the story, drawn you in and made you believe.
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I think films like this should continue to be shown they're a great talking point & something to learn from, just as OP has opened up the discussion here, it's a good way to get the perspectives of others.

I'm really fed up of cancel culture. If you don't like it switch over switch off, you don't have to try and stop others from seeing it. Nobody seems to want to agree to disagree anymore, they either don't know how or don't want to know. They're all "shut it down, ban it, you can't say that ,see that ,hear that" etc.. That's not progressive, it's a backward attitude imo

I know!!!!
He also had shocking halitosis that he purposefully made worse as he hated Vivien Leigh!!!!
Watching the kissing scenes where she is resisting him knowing that makes you see it in a different light too! 🤢🤮 Poor Vivien!!!

Weirdly! I rewatched this at Christmas and was googling about OdH and discovered / was reading about her and sister!!!! They really did NOT get on 😅

Margaret Mitchell said it was a story about survival and it is. It's not about slavery being fantastic (those in the book who can't adapt to losing it don't thrive), it's about losing the entire world that you thought would last forever and had an easy place in, and what you do then. She also never originally intended to publish it.

There are episodes of Friends that we now find unacceptable so a book of almost 100 years ago, depicting an even earlier world, isn't going to chime with what we know now. That's a good thing, but historical context matters too.

It isn't a love story. It's a survival story. Mitchell was descended from southern families and her family was very interested in the American Civil War, so that was the context she knew for a story like that.

It's also the most successful film ever made, adjusted for inflation. From a filmmaking history perspective, it's extremely significant.

People here frothing about people wanting to "cancel" either the book or the film of Gone with the Wind...

Please quote a single poster - one- who has called for that.

Nobody's asking to "cancel" GWTW, but we're allowed to criticise it. Or are you against free speech? 🤔

Also, I'm going to give posters the benefit of the doubt here, and assume they haven't read the book, because I'm pretty sure the KKK bit of the story didn't make it to the big screen...

Nobody's against the depiction of "history", or denies that "things were different then", although at the time of the Civil War Britain had already abolished slavery, along with the Confederate North.

My objection is how MM interprets history, and who she paints as "heroes", and why. Remember that this was written in the 1930s, at a time when the KKK had given ample evidence of what they had turned out to be- this was the era of "Strange Fruit", remember?

Yet she asks the reader to feel sympathy for the honest guys forced to start the KKK, to protect their families in the face of a wave of rape and violence perpetrated by dangerous emancipated black men.

Weirdly enough, this is the kind of defence still used by white people in the USA who feel the need to "protect their families" by shooting black people doing scary things like jogging in their neighbourhood, doing U turns in their drive or knocking on their door for help. So no, I don't agree that MM's stance was OK because it was "of its time" 😡

You should be very proud of Lancashire Mill workers who supported the fight against slavery refusing to touch raw cotton picked by slaves even though it meant they had little work and therefore no wages to support their families.

This ruins the modern "progressive" narrative that neatly divides everyone and everything into good and bad though SmugandProud

It's appalling shite but, amazingly, the book is fifty times worse.

It’s also worth watching knowing the family are Irish, like so many who’d sailed to the USA over the centuries.

Emigrants who’d escaped British rule but went on to be slave owners. A moment of shame and pride for us from Ireland.

And also worth noting that Katie Scarlett was 16 at the start of the story / the start of the Civil War. I could barely wipe my nose, let alone make a frock from curtains and set up a shop.

(Huge Shame at slavery, of course).

I think it’s romantic with a big R, as in the style and content being lush and large, rather than it being a slushy love story. A sweeping epic is “Romantic”, but the plot points in this specific epic are about war, loss, famine, exploitation, power, and violence outside conflict. Just because Scarlett marries a lot of men doesn’t mean the film is about romance, and as others have said the politics are of a very specific time and place and are frequently repulsive to us now.

Excellent book, and a good film too.

Just out of curiosity, who do you think is “frothing”, and who are you asking the question about free speech to?

I haven’t seen anyone “frothing”, or objecting to free speech.

I never said anyone on here had and I was generalising about cancel culture not specifically talking about GWTW .I didn't notice anyone "frothing" either 🤣

I'm not against free speech, that's what cancel culture lovers want to do all the time shut down what they don't like.

So where are these mythical "cancel culture lovers" then, chattymess?

And why the need to start banging on about it on this thread if no one was actually....y'know... loving cancel culture? 🤔

Who does she portray as heroes? She was clear that Melanie was the moral protagonist and actual heroine of the book, and while Melanie had slaves as they all did, I don't recall her ever complaining about emancipation. She said she would go with whatever Ashley thought best, and Ashley tells Scarlett that he was planning to liberate all his slaves once his father died.

It's hard to say what Mitchell herself really thought because there are so many characters with different viewpoints.