Gone With the Wind

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But I think it's okay to watch a movie, even if you do not agree with the political views of the characters in the movie though, isn't?

Is it that they were slave owners that bothers people?

You know something? I no longer care if the movie itself is politically incorrect by today's standards. It's still a damn good movie and the story of what went on behind the scenes actually made this movie less racist than meets the eye. For one thing it was one of the first Hollywood movies to hire black actors and not use blackface, and I highly recommend that people research actor Clark Gable. Like Mae West he was a supporter of African American rights looong before the Civil Rights movement. He even threatened to boycott this movie in Atlanta GA if the actors playing Mammy, Prissy, and Porky weren't treated with the same respect as everyone else.

GWIW is an utter classic, perhaps the greatest movie of the perhaps greatest year for movies. I hear that the novel is even better!

If we cannot appreciate them anymore, it's our loss.

I despise the censorship of history. Because there is no period of time in which we were anything like perfect, does that mean that we cannot enjoy our past anymore?

What about historical movies about Jesus, the Greeks, the Shoguns...do we have to stop enjoying them as well?

What's left? Today's Hollywood and its PC Putrescences?

I think what finally crossed the line for me over this PC bull was when they censored the episode "Mixed Blessings" from The Golden Girls. I hope I'm not the only one who saw the irony in censoring an episode with a strong message about not being racist as 'racist' all because of one dumb joke that alluded to black face when the ladies were wearing mud masks.

I guess old ladies can't wear mud masks on TV anymore either.

What is it about Gone with the Wind that is racist exactly? Is it because the slave woman cares about what Scarlet O'Hara wears and just is too passionate about her job, when she shouldn't be? Or is it something else?

Oh okay. It's been a while since I'v seen the movie, but the only slaves in the movie as I recall were the ones that Scarlet's family owned. So I assumed that her family treated them better than some may have with their slaves. I didn't think it romanticized slavery in general, I just thought her family was not as sadistic as some may be have been, and that it was not meant as a representation of every slave owner.

Fun Fact: Vivien Leigh the star of "Gone with the Wind" was born in Calcutta India of British and Indian parentage.

Her ravishing good looks must have mean't the talent scouts overlooked her dubious ethnicity to play the role of a "lilly white" antebellum princess

In "Birth of Nation" you can point to countless moments and say "that's racist".

In contrast, in GWTW you cant really point to any piece of dialogue, or specific action, and say "thats racist".

But the movie as a whole glorifies, and mythologies, the slave owning class of Whites in the antebellum South. So in that round about way you could say that it's "racist".

When I saw it in a theater in circa 1970 as a teen, I knew to take it with a grain of salt, and knew it was romantic escapist fiction, written during the Great Depression (an earlier era's take on a still earlier era of American history).
And I would say the same to young movie goers today. Go ahead and watch it, but with a grain of salt.

Tom Cruise starred in "The Last Samurai" set in the Japan of the late Nineteenth Century when Japan was going through civil wars and upheavel having to do with westernization and modernization. And that movie takes the side of, and glorifies, one faction:the archaic Samurai class (mideaval style warriors) who in reality probably deserved to be vanquished for holding Japan back. They were no more deserving of being glorified than the slave owning plantation owners of the American south. So GWTW is probably no "worse" (moral wise, or accuracy wise) than the "Last Samurai".

Oh okay. Well in GWTW, the whole South is destroyed by the North, so I took it as, they got what they had coming, and the movie's heroine, goes down a path of insanity, and is crazy by the end of the movie, so I thought that since she is portrayed as a villain more so, that the movie does not glorify her way of life, unless I interpreted it wrong?

As a Southerner, I feel I need to say something about this.

Like it or not, that's the way things were back in those times. But...If you knew your history, you'd know that the war was never about slavery. At most, only about 2% of Southerners owned slaves; do you think all of our boys would have fought just so 2% could keep slavery going? No. Plus, one of the first slave owners in the U.S. was himself a black man.
What you don't learn about these days is that the North still had slaves long after the war ended.

So no. The South is not this evil empire that we're constantly made out to be by all of the SJWs. The reputation is not deserved in the least.

Oh okay well it seems to that all of Scarlet O'Hara's actions are antagonistic, and by the end of the movie she has become so crazy and delusional, that she can't even accept the hole she has dug herself into and begins to have delusions of grandeur it seems.

So I didn't really see this as glorifying the South, since the story is told from the POV of an antagonistic character who digs her own grave in a sense.

But just because the movie shows black people wanting to be part of a governing system that doesn't treat them well, is that enough to make the movie racist? What about other movies that do this?

For example, the movie Bad Boys, has two black police officer characters. Will that movie be thought of racist in the future, because it shows black people choosing to be police officers, when they shouldn't join up with a government, that hasn't treated them well?

Or what about a movie like 48 hrs? It shows a black convict agree to help the police and shows him cutting a deal. But would that movie be considered racist, because it shows a black convict choosing to help the white establishment that indicted him?