Gone With the Wind (1939)

Jon is making us watch Classic Films now. It makes me feel mortal. Like we are now middle-aged and don't have much time on earth left, so we have to break out all the Good Stuff.

The first one we watched was Casablanca, and this week we finished Gone With the Wind. We had to break up this 4-hour monster of a film over a few days, but that didn't diminish one's absorption - that world just sucks you right in, perhaps all the more so since it's so far from lived reality.

GWTW is set during the American Civil War, and it tells the story from the South's perspective. Now, I thought (like everyone else?) that the civil war was about the abolition of slavery. But in GWTW there's hardly anything about slavery. You'd expect the Southern slaves to get all riled up about ideology and rebel, but no - here they're depicted just going about their normal business.

Instead the war in GWTW seems driven by the male ego. One of the women (probably Scarlett O'Hara) complains that the men of the South get everyone in this pickle because they were so cocksure and just had to show off to the North. I guess that's from Margaret Mitchell - that eye-roll is always going to be the pragmatic female perspective on war.

It's strange to watch Southerners here depicted as slim, genteel, noble, tough, determined, and honourable - while the Yankees are fat, oafish, amoral brigands. Quite the opposite of how we see North and South of the US in mass media today.

Looking at the poster of GWTW - that iconic, neck-straining Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) and Scarlett O'Hara (Vivian Leigh) embrace  - you'd expect high romance. It's not even close though. 

You cannot sympathise with Scarlett O'Hara because she's just too much of a sociopath. She's so manipulative she's not even human, a Machiavelli in skirts, with glittering steely eyes. Her weapons are beauty and charm - she puts on a rictus grin when she needs to get a job done - although later she does get actual arms.

Rhett Butler is meant to be a cynical character along the lines of Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) from Casablanca. He sees Scarlett as she really is - a psychopath who will doom any man to misery - but he goes after her anyway. Rhett is an interesting character. He seems amoral initially, but he turns out to be a family man with a heart of gold after all. (You can tell because he's close to Melanie and Mammy, the two most virtuous characters.)

Interestingly Scarlett never gets a redemption arc. I thought she would when she gets to Tara after the war and toils nearly single-handedly to get her shattered home back into shape. But then she snaps back to Machiavelli mode once tempted by Rhett's money.

Yet she's the driving force of the film. You can't stand her, but you also can't help wanting to see what she does next. Maybe it's just Vivian Leigh's intense charisma. But what an interesting character. So much better than the pretty but bland Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca.