Posted on 11/13/2004 11:12:00 AM PST by LouAvul
"Gone With the Wind" is fiction, to be sure, and while both Mitchell and Selznick maintained that the book and movie aimed for historical accuracy, it doesn't purport to be a history of the American South in the mid-19th century.
But, as a phenomenally successful pop culture artifact, the movie has made an incalculable contribution to racism in America.
FOLKS, it's JUST A MOVIE!
I'll say it a million times, but one must compare the life of the slave before the civil in the north and the south. The cause-effect relationship afterwards always cast the south as the bad entity. But that's the past, the two brothers have fought with each other and the family moves on, hand-in-hand together.
Riddick, vid-games 'movies' and such? I don't think it says anything about real people. It only suggests a number of things about the Hollywood elite, and that in the early 21st century they all simultaneously developed PEST syndrome, along with a tin ear.
I even used to go to Tom Hanks movies. I can't do that, now, knowing what a liberal fool this guy is in real life. That was the one reason I refused to see Eastwood's River movie, because the stars were so personally loathesome. I even used to watch Law and Order. But after I heard of the 'broken neck' guy's hissy fit that his candidate lost the election, I'm not even sure about that. Even if some accuse me of having the tin ear, it's not as if any of it were great art.
Apart from the moral issue of whether it's right for one person to own another, which is of course basic, slavery can be either dreadful or pretty decent, depending on the character of the masters and mistresses.
Two of the most admirable characters in The Odyssey are Telemachus's nurse, a slave, and Euthyphro, the pig herder who belongs to Odysseus. Both are loyal to the extreme, both love their masters, and both are treated basically as family. Perhaps there is no character in the poem whom Homer treats with greater affection than Euthyphro.
I've never witnessed slavery directly, but I have witnessed several instances of the old-fashioned "upstairs/downstairs" institution of life-long household servants. In the cases that I am familiar with, these people were treated as part of the family and were assured of lifetime security. They had a kind of love and respect and an ease of relationship that you seldom or never see in the households of super-rich yuppies today.
I wouldn't want to be a slave or a servant, but--strange as it may seem to a free American--there are genuine possibilities of love and affection and deep loyalty on both sides in such an institution. And of course there are also horrible possibilities of rape, abuse, and cruelty. Such is human nature.
To you.
To the PC crowd like this dolt in Sacramento, it is reality right up there on the silver screen....I mean it HAS to be real, 'cause it's in the movie!! Right?
I mean art is life...like, ya know? I mean, like, I can go to WalMart and buy me a life and toss it in the DVD player....it HAS to be real 'cause I saw it an' thought about it....
(sigh)
Yeah ... right ... I forgot ... Like Michaels Moore's "documentary" on Bush? LOL! They exist only because they need a hate target - now it's GWTW.
Yes, this is true. Before history texts were revised by victimology revisionists, they did portray slavery as less awful than we think of it today. And backed it up with facts and figures. I purchased a terrific old textbook at eBay and this is what it said:
A History of the South
Fourth Edition, Alfred A. Knopf 1947, 1953, 1963, 1972
by Francis Butler Simkins and Charles Pierce Roland
P. 125-126
BEGIN QUOTE: Abolitionist assertions that the bondsmen were frequently inadequately clothed, underfed, and driven to death are economically unreasonable. Masters wished to preserve the health and life of their slaves because a sick Negro was a liability and a dead Negro was worth nothing. A rough plenty prevailed on the average plantation. “The best preventive of theft is plenty of pork,” was the advice of a Virginian.
Slaves probably fared as well in the enjoyment of the necessities of life as did most of the free laborers of the country. One of the most respected of all Northern critics of slavery, Frederick Law Olmsted, wrote that the Southern bondsmen lived in quarters quite as adequate as those of most mill or mine workers elsewhere, and that the slaves were perhaps the best fed “proletarian class” in the world. He also testified that they worked less than did free laborers.
Incomplete statistics reveal that the slaves averaged somewhat higher sickness and death rates per thousand than did Southern whites as a whole. But the slaves were from all indications as healthy and long-lived as white common laborers in the United States before the Civil War. It was general knowledge at the time in Louisiana that the slaves were better off in these respects than were the thousands of Irish immigrant laborers engaged in clearing land and digging drainage canals on the sugar plantations. The planters were reluctant to commit their expensive chattels to this dangerous work, but preferred to hire free laborers, whose loss by death, sickness, or injury cost nothing. A careful study of the figures on a group of 875 plantation slaves whose records are preserved indicates their average life expectancy at the time of birth to have been longer than that of the general population of such cities as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia during the same period. An authority on urban slavery concludes that the medical care, health, and welfare of slaves in Southern cities were superior to the care, health, and welfare of the free Negroes; and the outstanding work on the life of Negroes in the North at this time shows that they fared no better in such matters than did free blacks in the land of slavery. END QUOTE
Well, we can't have that kind of information circulating now, can we?
One such was named "ROOTS", Another attempt might have been "GLORY"
True. It's kind of interesting to speculate what things would have been like then if they'd had the Internet. Would people have accepted things as readily as they did? If people could have seen and commented on things with today's speed and comprehensiveness, perhaps important changes would have come sooner. But in the end such speculation is idle or moot.
By this point in time, Gone With The Wind is just another in a long line of fictional representations stretching from The Birth of a Nation to Roots and beyond, each having their strong points and each wrong in some things, all worthy of some interest, but none a burning issue for today's public.
GWTW, in modern money terms, is still the most successful film of all time. It was successful because it is a story that people all over the world could identify with, and it just happened to be set in the South. A young woman from a privileged background is forced to face the destruction of the only world she knows and learn how to live in the new world left in its place. Lots of people, who lived through WWI and were in the midst of WWII, could identify with the theme of the movie, and with the various characters.
Nobody can take that away from the novel or the film, no matter how hard they try.
Don't get me started. I deserve reparations for my Irish ancestors in the South who worked harder than slaves for less compensation.
See post #27 on this thread quoting a pre-revisionist textbook on the South.
I have absolutely nothing to say.
And if you would just talk to "Mammy", who was a lesbian.........
For me GWTW was a book about a woman named Scarlet O'Hara. Her character is the dominating factor and overshadows the slavery/war issue. If you want to be fascinated by a complex human being, caught up in love, war and survival, such as Scarlet read fiction. If you want the real history of the Civil War, read a history book. If you want to learn about real people in the Civil War read biography.
It's not bad enough they try to rewrite history - now they want to rewrite novels???????
This is humor. I always looked at it from the other angle. Would a figure with the charismantic power of Rhett Butler ever have wasted six tenths of a second on such a solipsist as Scarlett O'Hara?
Quick, someone tell me the homosexuals in the Media aren't demonizing the South....
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