Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Gone With the W...hat?

Being a son of the South, I've always been aware of a book titled "Gone With the Wind" and the big screen adaptation of it, but I've never bothered with either. It always seemed like some long-winded, tedious tale of love conquering all or some such shit and possibly a thinly-veiled attack on General William Tecumseh Sherman's righteous burning of the state of Georgia.

One thing I had noticed about "Gone With the Wind" is that women seem to love it. Probably not all women, but certainly my mother and my oldest sister enjoy it, with my sister being particularly enamored by it. I'm pretty sure the list of women who love it is longer than that and I can add Buck's girlfriend Luba to the list. She was flipping channels and ran across an airing of "Gone With the Wind" on Turner Movie Classics, declared it her favorite movie, and started watching it. I found this odd, that she's a big fan of a movie about women in the Southeastern United States circa 1865, given than Luba is a modern woman of Ukranian descent. I suppose her lineage is irrelevant and a love story transcends culture.

I wander in and out of the living room a few times before settling in to watch the last hour and a half or so, out of boredom of course, and I have to say that unless I missed something unbelievable during the first two hours then I have no fucking clue why anyone likes this for anything other than the wrong reasons. At first Rhett Butler seems the charming rogue, well-mannered but scheming, until I witnessed Butler's mental cruelty as he belittled, bullied and threatened to beat Scarlett with a buggywhip; Butler engaging in marital rape, which Scarlett seemed to enjoy; Butler leaving the country with his and Scarlett's daughter with no regard for Scarlett's objection; what may have been a forced miscarriage; and finally after Scarlett comes to terms with her love for Rhett, Butler packs his bag and hits the road with the immortal line "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." Sure, I put a rape baby in you and then goaded you into taking a swing at me afterward, causing you to fall down the stairs and presumably lose said baby, but fuck you, I got mine. Also, Scarlett's close friend gets pregnant after being given medical advice not to do so and dies (presumably) as a result, plus Rhett and Scarlett's daughter dies in a horse-riding accident.

Margaret Mitchell apparently had deep-seated emotional problems and I'm pretty sure this movie just reinforces the terrible idea that all women really want is a slap in the mouth and a good deep dicking, plus they'll gladly risk their life to pop out some more kids. In the event that I did miss something in the beginning of the movie, or left-out parts of the book, that unlock the Wu-Tang Secret of "Gone With the Wind", feel free to let me know, but holy shit is my mind numb.

1 comment:

Jake Palumbo said...

I've gotta share this with some folks, LOL to drive home that they worship false idols.