Gone With the Wind

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This is why there is a problem, if you cant see why there needs to be education about the movie then you are the problem

Long before Viola Davis’s Oscar nomination in The Help, though, Hattie McDaniel would be the first black actor in Hollywood to be nominated and win in 1940 for her role as the dutiful servant Mammy in Gone With the Wind. McDaniel was not allowed to attend the film’s 1939 premiere in Atlanta because of her race. And though she would make history at the 1940 Oscars ceremony at the Ambassador hotel in Los Angeles she was forced to sit in a segregated “colored section” separate from the white actors in an area created specifically for her during the evening’s event. McDaniel’s role in the film was such a fundamentally stereotypical representation of white society’s desired way to see black women that her character’s name, Mammy, came to be descriptive of that particularly pervasive stereotype. The sassy, cantankerous, asexual Mammy was a caricature of black womanhood and McDaniel was made to endure the implications of this caricature in the racist treatment she received on and off screen.

It's kinda sad, really ... I used to like the movie, back when all that was necessary to entertain me was a solid plot, well-written dialog, good acting, fine costumes, and expansive sets.

Now that I know what I know about the author, the book she wrote, the historical backdrop, and the misrepresentations of slavery, I feel the sensation of cold ashes on my tongue, like I've swallowed something rotten.

Sad, very sad.

Oh okay but I think you could say this about any movie from a different era though, where there are things in it you may not agree with it, but that doesn't make the movie bad does it?

For example, the movie Mildred Pierce (1945) is about a woman who opens up a restaurant franchise, in order to take care of her and her daughter, and the other characters in the movie do not like her doing this, and think she is too feminist for doing so. But just because things were different back then, does that make it a bad movie?

While the production quality has withstood the test of time, the content has not.  Unfortunately, if the offensive parts were excised, it would not remain the same movie.

For example, "Frankly, my dear, I no longer have any concern for your welfare" just does not have the same punch-in-the-gut impact of Rhett's original parting line.

And yes, just because you cut out some content of the movie, doesn't mean that people who hate the movie, are now going to change their mind on it.

For example one movie I hate is The Human Centipede. But if you were to cut out all the parts I hate, and then show it to me again, with those parts removed, I would still hate the movie, because it's still that movie.

Isn't cutting down Gone with the Wind, like beating a dead horse, and you cannot make people like it, who hate it?

The book the movie was based on promoted the Lost Cause mythology of the civil war.

Spike Lee says 'Gone with the Wind,' 'Birth of a Nation' 'should be seen'

So would people say that Hattie MacDaniel was an 'uncle Tom' at the time, for taking the role, and accepting the Oscar?

But that's what some of the previous posters were acting like when she won the Oscar, so I was asking the question based on their responses.

I don't really understand or like much this thing of many people just suddenly denouncing or declaring no longer a like for something because it appears to people as racist or other kinds of bigoted. Did you even like it before?

Why should people or things that may have done or said things that were even merely a little racist or bigoted many years ago be condemned completely for just those actions? That sounds an awful lot like religious fundamentalism. Are we not living in "1984" or "Fahrenheit 451"?

The thing about this, is that it's lead other types of censorship of entertainment to occur. I just heard that on the Simpson's they pressured the actor doing the voices of non-white characters to leave the show.

So how far is this going to go now? Are they going to take the Star Wars movies and recut them so that James Earl Jones is not voicing a white villain, and get a white actor to do it, down the road for example?