Gone with the Wind

Thursday

Bill Kauffman

How one bad scene can ruin an otherwise great movie

Can one egregiously bad scene ruin an otherwise great movie? When I go on an early 1970s jag — revisiting the golden age of American cinema — I can never bring myself to rewatch Five Easy Pieces (1970), in which Jack Nicholson plays an upper-middle-class piano prodigy turned downwardly mobile oil field worker. It’s a fine character study poisoned, for me, by the famous scene in which a petulant Nicholson berates a diner waitress who stubbornly refuses his request to add tomatoes to his omelet.

scene

Sunday

Roger Kimball

Is this the end of history?

Midway through Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, there occurs this exchange between two characters: ‘“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”’ The process of civilizational bankruptcy takes a similar course. Casual, seemingly isolated attacks on the fabric of civilization feel at first like so many harmless insect bites. A speaker is shouted down. A statue is vandalized or removed. A college course once deemed essential is rebaptized as offensive: first it is pilloried, then it is canceled. People start quoting Tocqueville’s warning that in a democracy, as large inequalities dissolve, small inequalities are magnified, growing both rancid and rancorous.

end history

Tuesday

Solveig Lucia Gold

Cotton, slaves and arrogance: the message of Gone with the Wind

In an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times last week, filmmaker John Ridley urged HBO Max to remove Gone with the Wind from its platform. HBO Max capitulated right away, temporarily withdrawing the film until it can ‘return with a discussion of its historical context and a denouncement of [its racist] depictions’. As HBO weighs how to address what Ridley and others have described as the film’s romanticizing of slavery, I would encourage them to use the message of the movie itself as their guide.Gone with the Wind is about the perils of romanticizing. The movie begins with young men romanticizing the impending Civil War. ‘War! Isn’t it exciting, Scarlett?’ exclaims one of the Tarleton twins.

gone with the wind