#6 ‘Gone With The Wind’
Four Hours of Confederate Cosplay and Toxic Romance
Ah yes, Gone With the Wind—the cinematic plantation fantasy that refuses to die, like a corseted ghost of white supremacy draped in velvet curtains. Released in 1939, it’s still bizarrely hailed as a “classic,” which is a nice way of saying “a breathtakingly long and problematic ode to the lost cause of the American South, held together by racism, melodrama, and the sheer willpower of Vivien Leigh’s clenched jaw.”
Let’s begin with the obvious: this film is a steaming, Technicolor fever dream of historical revisionism. It portrays the Confederacy not as a treasonous, slavery-defending regime, but as a noble, gallant society tragically disrupted by—gasp—progress. The enslaved characters are background furniture at best, comic relief at worst, and we're meant to believe that everyone on the plantation was just one big happy family, sipping sweet tea under the benevolent eye of their enslavers.
If you feel your blood pressure rising, good. That means you’re awake.
Scarlett O’Hara, our supposed heroine, is a shrill, selfish, manipulative narcissist who somehow becomes an icon of strength simply by outlasting everyone around her. “Tomorrow is another day,” she sighs famously—yes, and tomorrow she’ll still be insufferable. Vivien Leigh acts her petticoats off, but no amount of hair-flipping can disguise the fact that Scarlett is a petty tyrant who builds an empire on the backs of others and calls it pluck.
Then there’s Rhett Butler, played by Clark Gable with a mustache full of misogyny. He’s a smug opportunist with a penchant for manipulation and a deeply unsettling “romantic” streak that involves mocking, gaslighting, and—oh yes—marital rape. But hey, it’s okay because he smolders while doing it. Chivalry!
Their relationship is less a romance than a case study in codependency and emotional abuse, but it’s dressed up in sweeping music and epic camera angles to make it feel like destiny. If you ever need a reminder of how Hollywood used to define love, just watch Rhett manhandle Scarlett while she swoons into unconsciousness. Love, apparently, means never having to say you respect her autonomy.
And let’s not forget the glorification of the antebellum South, painted here not as a brutal slave economy but as a bygone paradise of manners and magnolias. It is plantation porn, plain and simple, with the Civil War treated as a mere inconvenience to Scarlett’s social climbing. The war is a backdrop, the enslaved are scenery, and moral reckoning is nowhere in sight.
Yes, the film is visually sumptuous. Yes, the performances are iconic. But no amount of Oscar gold can gild the rotten heart at its center. Gone With the Wind is a romanticized lie—beautifully shot, yes, but built on a foundation of racial nostalgia and gendered power plays. If this is what we're supposed to “not make ‘em like anymore,” then good.
1.5 out of 5 hoop skirts
(One star for Hattie McDaniel, who made history while being treated like garbage by the Academy. The half-star is for the set decorators who at least made the collapse of civilization look fabulous.)
