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Thread: HBO Max and Discovery?

  1. #76
    Quote Quoting Dukefrukem (view post)
    Gone with the Wind is a pretentious bore. It's like 4 hours of a women whining where scenes are separated by lazy text crawls and bloated dialog. It could quite possibly be more overrated than Tree of Life.
    This seems like a caricature (and a bit sexist). Obviously female hysteria is a central feature of melodrama and Gone with the Wind is no exception. Part of what's interesting about the film's popularity from an historical perspective is it indicates that male audience members of the 1930s were more willing to see a long movie about a female protagonist than men today, suggesting that audiences at the time were somewhat less segregated along gender lines than they are now and that films about women had more cultural prestige--in contrast with the present where the most prestigious Hollywood filmmakers all tend to specialize primarily in boys' movies: P.T. Anderson, the Coens, Fincher, Malick, Mann, Nolan, Scorsese, Spielberg, Tarantino, etc., etc. (Of course, one might point out, for instance, that not all of Scorsese's films are macho dick-measuring contests like The Departed, but it seems safe to assume if he hadn't directed Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas, he wouldn't be thought of as a great director on the strength of Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and The Age of Innocence.) I would argue that one important reason for the precipitous decline in American filmmaking since 1960 is the extremely narrow range of acceptable subjects available to ambitious filmmakers: In the studio era, there were major directors specializing in women's movies (McCarey, Minnelli, Ophüls, Sirk) and men's movies (Ford, Fuller, Hawks, Anthony Mann), as well as those whose films don't fit comfortably into either category (Hitchcock being the most obvious example), whereas today both the industry and reviewers equate noirish lighting and angsty Method acting with artistic seriousness.

    Incidentally, why is onscreen text lazy here and not in every Ridley Scott film?
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  2. #77
    Replacing Luck Since 1984 Dukefrukem's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting baby doll (view post)
    This seems like a caricature (and a bit sexist). Obviously female hysteria is a central feature of melodrama and Gone with the Wind is no exception. Part of what's interesting about the film's popularity from an historical perspective is it indicates that male audience members of the 1930s were more willing to see a long movie about a female protagonist than men today, suggesting that audiences at the time were somewhat less segregated along gender lines than they are now and that films about women had more cultural prestige--in contrast with the present where the most prestigious Hollywood filmmakers all tend to specialize primarily in boys' movies: P.T. Anderson, the Coens, Fincher, Malick, Mann, Nolan, Scorsese, Spielberg, Tarantino, etc., etc. (Of course, one might point out, for instance, that not all of Scorsese's films are macho dick-measuring contests like The Departed, but it seems safe to assume if he hadn't directed Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas, he wouldn't be thought of as a great director on the strength of Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and The Age of Innocence.) I would argue that one important reason for the precipitous decline in American filmmaking since 1960 is the extremely narrow range of acceptable subjects available to ambitious filmmakers: In the studio era, there were major directors specializing in women's movies (McCarey, Minnelli, Ophüls, Sirk) and men's movies (Ford, Fuller, Hawks, Anthony Mann), as well as those whose films don't fit comfortably into either category (Hitchcock being the most obvious example), whereas today both the industry and reviewers equate noirish lighting and angsty Method acting with artistic seriousness.

    Incidentally, why is onscreen text lazy here and not in every Ridley Scott film?
    If Ridley Scott had four hours of runtime to tell his story it would be lazy too. Four hours! And you can't figure out how to tell that part of your story so you put in a paragraph scroll of "here's what's happening"??
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  3. #78
    Quote Quoting Dukefrukem (view post)
    If Ridley Scott had four hours of runtime to tell his story it would be lazy too. Four hours! And you can't figure out how to tell that part of your story so you put in a paragraph scroll of "here's what's happening"??
    There are two issues here that are both worth considering in detail.

    The issue of the film's length begs the larger question: Which kinds of films are worth more of our time and why? It's interesting to think about the kinds of films that tend to go long because it reveals certain tacit assumptions about what kinds of stories are considered important at a given moment in history. And again, in contemporary American cinema, what we find is that boys' movies are allowed to run longer than girls' movies: Superhero movies and Judd Apatow man-child comedies routinely run over two and a half hours, and Scorsese's trivial remake of Infernal Affairs is nearly twice as long as the original (and only about a third as good); on the other hand, Nora Ephron never made a film longer than 125 minutes (unless you count her screenplay for Silkwood), yet no one would argue that she's a less accomplished or interesting filmmaker than Apatow. In other words, one of the ways in which Gone with the Wind is out of step with contemporary sensibilities is that it expects us to give four hours to a story about a woman who isn't very likeable, whereas no one finds anything unusual about Sergio Leone making a four-hour film about an even more unlikeable rapist. (The first and only time I've seen Once Upon a Time in America was at a cinematheque screening in Busan, South Korea, in which every seat was full, and even though the film was shown without intermission, everyone stayed until the end.) Interestingly, it's impossible to have a discussion about Gone with the Wind that doesn't touch on its racism, yet no one seems to care much about the equally pervasive and even more unpleasant misogyny of Leone's film.

    As for the use of onscreen text, one can obviously think of other, equivalent devices (embedded voice-over narration or a montage sequence would be the most likely choices for a contemporary Hollywood film), although I don't see how Gone with the Wind would be improved if the filmmakers had opted for them or how they're any less lazy. If anything, it's indicative of how stylistically homogeneous American cinema has become that onscreen text is so little used these days and only in such a circumscribed and conventionalized manner: chiefly as preliminary exposition and to identify cities, as in Scott's films, or when the characters are texting each other in a film like Fruitvale Station. However, there are lots of other functions this device can fill, such as cuing the spectator to formulate hypotheses about what's going to happen in the story (e.g., the chapter headings in Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters), creating a more overt narrational presence that comments on the action from without (Soviet montage films), and making jokes (the intertitles in Buster Keaton's silent comedies, which use words more cleverly than the work of any contemporary American filmmaker).
    Last edited by baby doll; 06-17-2020 at 01:31 AM.
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  4. #79
    Replacing Luck Since 1984 Dukefrukem's Avatar
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    I admit. I complain about films length a lot here. And avoid watching long ones during the work week. I dont disagree with anything you said and my reaction to Gone with the Wing was likely more about my first time viewing, after hearing praise for my entire life. The one thing it does do well, is it's a technical marvel for it's time.
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  5. #80
    It's been more than a decade since I watched GWTW, but if there's something I remember about it, is that those 4 hours went by insanely fast. I was never bored with it.

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  6. #81
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    Quote Quoting baby doll (view post)
    For the film, what the pre-war South represents is primarily a society with clear, stable social norms and hierarchies which is literally blown up about forty minutes into the movie, and the rest of the film is about the characters trying to figure out how to live in this new, uncertain world they find themselves in. That racial issues largely take a backseat to the depiction of the war as a psychic trauma inflicted on the South and Scarlett O'Hara as a challenge to conventional gender roles reveals a lot about the racial consciousness of the film's makers and the fact that Hollywood wasn't much concerned with black audiences in the 1930s.
    Yeah... I agree with what you're saying, in theory, but in your writing and my reading we're both sorta chin stroking past the racist elements of the film.

    I'm not talking about overly racist elements, because there are almost none (Selznick quashed most of them early on). The ones that remain can be easily hand waved away by categorizing the work as "of its time."

    I think that is the big problem with the movie: It's too easy for non-Black audiences to shrug off the way the film celebrates the Confederacy and views the end of slavery as the end of civilization.

    Eg: how a conversation that might have been (or should have been) about race very quickly turns into a conversation about ... running times (?!).

    Quote Quoting baby doll (view post)
    This seems like a caricature (and a bit sexist).
    Quote Quoting baby doll (view post)
    Obviously female hysteria is a central feature of melodrama and
    How did you put these 2 sentences right next to each other and not immediately see the contradiction

  7. #82
    Quote Quoting Irish (view post)
    Yeah... I agree with what you're saying, in theory, but in your writing and my reading we're both sorta chin stroking past the racist elements of the film.

    I'm not talking about overly racist elements, because there are almost none (Selznick quashed most of them early on). The ones that remain can be easily hand waved away by categorizing the work as "of its time."

    I think that is the big problem with the movie: It's too easy for non-Black audiences to shrug off the way the film celebrates the Confederacy and views the end of slavery as the end of civilization.

    Eg: how a conversation that might have been (or should have been) about race very quickly turns into a conversation about ... running times (?!).
    I'm not saying the film isn't racist; I'm just saying the film's racism isn't the only or even the most interesting thing to talk about, and it shouldn't be the last word on the film.

    How did you put these 2 sentences right next to each other and not immediately see the contradiction
    Female hysteria isn't the same as whining, and saying that something is central to a genre is not the same as saying that's the only thing in it.
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  8. #83
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    Quote Quoting baby doll (view post)
    I'm not saying the film isn't racist; I'm just saying the film's racism isn't the only or even the most interesting thing to talk about, and it shouldn't be the last word on the film.
    It should absolutely be the last word on the film. Cf: "Birth of a Nation" and "Triumph of the Will."

    You can't separate the aesthetics from the message. Doing so is I dunno ... incredibly gross?

    Female hysteria isn't the same as whining, and saying that something is central to a genre is not the same as saying that's the only thing in it.
    Lemme spell it out: "Female hysteria" is in itself a sexist descriptor, for what should be obvious reasons, but even if you don't consider it to be, it's also inaccurate as there are plenty of male melodramas out there (eg: not limited to but including most contemporary action pictures).

  9. #84
    Quote Quoting Irish (view post)
    It should absolutely be the last word on the film. Cf: "Birth of a Nation" and "Triumph of the Will."

    You can't separate the aesthetics from the message. Doing so is I dunno ... incredibly gross?
    I agree that one can't separate the message from aesthetics, since the message is a product of the aesthetic (I made this point at some length in an essay on Basil Wright's Orientalist documentary The Song of Ceylon), but I don't find it very satisfying simply to point out that a particular film is racist, misogynist, etc. Any undergraduate with a Twitter account can do that. In the case of Gone with the Wind, my point is that the film is most profitably approached as a site of ideological contradictions, where various tensions within the US in the 1930s--related to race, yes, but also region and gender--are negotiated for the audience (hence, Selznick's insistence on toning down some of the more overt racism of the novel in order to make the film acceptable across the United States). Thus, the film is more interesting as an historical artifact than a film like Triumph des Willens, which presumes (and projects) a more homogeneous national audience.

    Lemme spell it out: "Female hysteria" is in itself a sexist descriptor, for what should be obvious reasons, but even if you don't consider it to be, it's also inaccurate as there are plenty of male melodramas out there (eg: not limited to but including most contemporary action pictures).
    The definition of melodrama is a whole thing unto itself, but for the purposes of this conversation, I've been using the term "melodrama" to refer to the Hollywood woman's film of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s and its literary sources. Some Hollywood films of the period do feature hysterical men (e.g., Robert Stack in Written on the Wind), but to say that the genre is primarily concerned with female hysteria seems to me eminently uncontroversial. In other words, claiming that melodrama (as I'm using the term) is centrally concerned with female hysteria is not to suggest that real women are inherently susceptible to the condition but that a body of films made in a patriarchal society, and embodying the attitudes of that society, have made gendered hysteria a central concern--a fact that has been recognized by feminist film theorists since the 1970s (see, for instance, Linda Williams' essay "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess," in which she theorizes horror, porn, and the woman's film as body genres centred on the spectacle of female bodies "caught in the grip of intense sensation or emotion").
    Last edited by baby doll; 06-17-2020 at 04:36 AM.
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  10. #85
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    Quote Quoting baby doll (view post)
    I agree that one can't separate the message from aesthetics, since the message is a product of the aesthetic (I made this point at some length in an essay on Basil Wright's Orientalist documentary The Song of Ceylon), but I don't find it very satisfying simply to point out that a particular film is racist, misogynist, etc. Any undergraduate with a Twitter account can do that. In the case of Gone with the Wind, my point is that the film is most profitably approached as a site of ideological contradictions, where various tensions within the US in the 1930s--related to race, yes, but also region and gender--are negotiated for the audience (hence, Selznick's insistence on toning down some of the more overt racism of the novel in order to make the film acceptable across the United States). Thus, the film is more interesting as an historical artifact than a film like Triumph des Willens, which presumes (and projects) a more homogeneous national audience.
    Yeah you're chin stroking Confederate propaganda that has real world consequences again.

    It isn't about merely point out the film is racist. It's about pointing out how it's racist, and how it's racist in a different way than other films, and about how you don't have to look very far to see that exact style of racism still in play right now, in media being made in the 21st century.

    This movie didn't exist in a vacuum. Its more palatable racism was a big part of the South reclaiming its identity, and why Americans don't recoil instantly from Confederate flags the way Germans (or anybody with sense) might with swastika flags.

    I mean, insert 1,000 word essay here, I guess, but three items to consider from the media (not even the real world!):

    (1) from 1979-1985 one of the most popular television shows in the United States prominently featured Confederate iconography in every episode

    (2) a major film studio rebooted that show as a feature film in 2005

    (3) from 2017-2019 HBO was developing a TV show called "Confederate," premised on the idea that the Civil War was a draw and that slavery was still legal in the South.

    You can deride "undergraduates with twitter accounts," I guess, but when those accounts post shit like "Why can't black people just get over it?" I can point directly at the influence of "Gone with the Wind" over multiple generations.

    How's that for an "historical artifact"?

    The racism of "Gone with the Wind" isn't about burning crosses and klan robes or about goose-stepping Nazis and krieg lights. It's more subtle than that, and in my mind that makes Selznick's film far worse, because the racism of "Gone with the Wind" isn't immediately recognized and rejected for what it is, and we're all still living with it. ("Heritage not hate" arguments in the virtual public square, lol.)

    Because, again, people might punch a Nazi on the street corner --- or at least shout him down --- but they won't blink at some self-styled "good old boy" with a Confederate battle flag decal on his pick up truck.

    The definition of melodrama is a whole thing unto itself, but for the purposes of this conversation, I've been using the term "melodrama" to refer to the Hollywood woman's film of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s and its literary sources. Some Hollywood films of the period do feature hysterical men (e.g., Robert Stack in Written on the Wind), but to say that the genre is primarily concerned with female hysteria seems to me eminently uncontroversial. In other words, claiming that melodrama (as I'm using the term) is centrally concerned with female hysteria is not to suggest that real women are inherently susceptible to the condition but that a body of films made in a patriarchal society, and embodying the attitudes of that society, have made gendered hysteria a central concern--a fact that has been recognized by feminist film theorists since the 1970s (see, for instance, Linda Williams' essay "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess," in which she theorizes horror, porn, and the woman's film as body genres centred on the spectacle of female bodies "caught in the grip of intense sensation or emotion").
    Yeah. But you understand that throwing out a phrase like "female hysteria" on a message board absent academic intent and appropriate footnotes merely reinforces an absurd dialectic and actively counters the point you're trying to make?
    Last edited by Irish; 06-17-2020 at 06:14 AM.

  11. #86
    Here till the end MadMan's Avatar
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    I dig The Tree of Life. I also loved OUATIA despite the main character being shitty (not the first or last time that will happen in a major movie). As for my opinion on The Departed vs Infernal Affairs, I think I covered it in my remake vs original thread. I'll see GWTW one of these days, but I doubt Irish is wrong about the film based on what I have heard and read.
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  12. #87
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    Quote Quoting baby doll (view post)
    Interestingly, it's impossible to have a discussion about Gone with the Wind that doesn't touch on its racism, yet no one seems to care much about the equally pervasive and even more unpleasant misogyny of Leone's film.
    The difference for me is that the misogyny of Once Upon a Time in America is a deliberate attribute of the characters. Leone is not endorsing rape but showing the morals and standards the mobsters live by. It's impossible to make the same case for Gone with the Wind. Its racism is also subtler yet permeates the whole film - but it's likely to escape those viewers unfamiliar with the History of slavery and the time period. I agree with you that it shouldn't be THE end-all discussion about the film but I for one am happy that the scandal (which stemmed from clickbait articles that implied it was being censored when it's not) got so many people to watch it.
    Last edited by Grouchy; 06-17-2020 at 03:36 PM.

  13. #88
    Quote Quoting Irish (view post)
    Yeah you're chin stroking Confederate propaganda that has real world consequences again.

    It isn't about merely point out the film is racist. It's about pointing out how it's racist, and how it's racist in a different way than other films, and about how you don't have to look very far to see that exact style of racism still in play right now, in media being made in the 21st century.

    This movie didn't exist in a vacuum. Its more palatable racism was a big part of the South reclaiming its identity, and why Americans don't recoil instantly from Confederate flags the way Germans (or anybody with sense) might with swastika flags.

    I mean, insert 1,000 word essay here, I guess, but three items to consider from the media (not even the real world!):

    (1) from 1979-1985 one of the most popular television shows in the United States prominently featured Confederate iconography in every episode

    (2) a major film studio rebooted that show as a feature film in 2005

    (3) from 2017-2019 HBO was developing a TV show called "Confederate," premised on the idea that the Civil War was a draw and that slavery was still legal in the South.

    You can deride "undergraduates with twitter accounts," I guess, but when those accounts post shit like "Why can't black people just get over it?" I can point directly at the influence of "Gone with the Wind" over multiple generations.

    How's that for an "historical artifact"?

    The racism of "Gone with the Wind" isn't about burning crosses and klan robes or about goose-stepping Nazis and krieg lights. It's more subtle than that, and in my mind that makes Selznick's film far worse, because the racism of "Gone with the Wind" isn't immediately recognized and rejected for what it is, and we're all still living with it. ("Heritage not hate" arguments in the virtual public square, lol.)

    Because, again, people might punch a Nazi on the street corner --- or at least shout him down --- but they won't blink at some self-styled "good old boy" with a Confederate battle flag decal on his pick up truck.
    I think you're confusing the thermometer for the weather. Speaking as a non-American, one of the most interesting aspects of the film for me is its depiction of the civil war as a physical and psychic trauma inflicted upon the South, which helped me to understand the white southern resentment of the North that made the film's mythologized version of the Confederacy appealing. In other words, southern resentment and the Lost Cause mythology aren't the product of people seeing a film that romanticizes slavery but economic disparities within the United States between one region and another, which were exacerbated by the war. (When Ross McElwee made Sherman's March in the mid-1980s, white southerners were still pissed about losing the war.) This isn't to say the film had no pernicious effects on American society, but the film's depiction of the prewar South wouldn't have been as influential as it was if people weren't already poised to accept it. In short, as with all things Gone with the Wind, it's complicated.

    Incidentally, in Germany the major economic disparity within the country is between East and West, and even within the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland, there's a split between the more respectable western bloc of the party and its more openly racist eastern bloc.

    Yeah. But you understand that throwing out a phrase like "female hysteria" on a message board absent academic intent and appropriate footnotes merely reinforces an absurd dialectic and actively counters the point you're trying to make?
    Well, forgive me for thinking you guys are smart.
    Last edited by baby doll; 06-17-2020 at 05:48 PM.
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  14. #89
    Quote Quoting Grouchy (view post)
    The difference for me is that the misogyny of Once Upon a Time in America is a deliberate attribute of the characters. Leone is not endorsing rape but showing the morals and standards the mobsters live by. It's impossible to make the same case for Gone with the Wind. Its racism is also subtler yet permeates the whole film - but it's likely to escape those viewers unfamiliar with the History of slavery and the time period. I agree with you that it shouldn't be THE end-all discussion about the film but I for one am happy that the scandal (which stemmed from clickbait articles that implied it was being censored when it's not) got so many people to watch it.
    Figuring out what is and isn't deliberate in a film is always a tricky proposition, especially in a film where the narration aligns the spectator so closely with the point of view of a single character: Is it Noodles who sees all women as virgins or whores or Leone? Certainly the film never shows us more of its female characters than what Noodles sees. I think one reason why Leone's film isn't more widely thought of as either a misogynist film or as a film about misogyny (and at least in my memory of the film, misogyny seems all-pervasive, from the opening murder to the climatic recognition scene) is that, on the level of plot and dialogue, it's never made an issue of. Thus, different spectators are likely to understand the film's misogyny in different ways: Some will attribute it to the character, some to the milieu represented, some to the filmmaker, and some won't notice it at all. (To put it Marxist terms, we might say that the misogyny in the film is "over-determined.") In any case, the point I was trying to make still stands: Contemporary audiences think nothing of giving four hours to a film about a loathsome man but are more reluctant to see an equally long film about an unlikeable woman.
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  15. #90
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    Quote Quoting baby doll (view post)
    Figuring out what is and isn't deliberate in a film is always a tricky proposition, especially in a film where the narration aligns the spectator so closely with the point of view of a single character: Is it Noodles who sees all women as virgins or whores or Leone? Certainly the film never shows us more of its female characters than what Noodles sees. I think one reason why Leone's film isn't more widely thought of as either a misogynist film or as a film about misogyny (and at least in my memory of the film, misogyny seems all-pervasive, from the opening murder to the climatic recognition scene) is that, on the level of plot and dialogue, it's never made an issue of. Thus, different spectators are likely to understand the film's misogyny in different ways: Some will attribute it to the character, some to the milieu represented, some to the filmmaker, and some won't notice it at all. (To put it Marxist terms, we might say that the misogyny in the film is "over-determined.") In any case, the point I was trying to make still stands: Contemporary audiences think nothing of giving four hours to a film about a loathsome man but are more reluctant to see an equally long film about an unlikeable woman.
    I find the misogyny deliberate precisely because it's so pervasive - the film starts with mobsters gruesomely killing a dame for no reason and devotes lengthy scenes to Max berating his mistress and to two separate instances of sexual assault, one of which is a key plot point. I'm not saying Leone is a feminist by any stretch of the imagination, mind you, but it seems to me to be a prevalent theme of the film, whereas the happy slaves of Gone with the Wind more clearly show the bias of the creators.

  16. #91
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    Quote Quoting Irish (view post)
    (3) from 2017-2019 HBO was developing a TV show called "Confederate," premised on the idea that the Civil War was a draw and that slavery was still legal in the South.
    Damn, I'd forgotten about that! I wonder what killed it for good - producers getting cold feet or the debacle that was the Game of Thrones finale.

  17. #92
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    Quote Quoting Grouchy (view post)
    Damn, I'd forgotten about that! I wonder what killed it for good - producers getting cold feet or the debacle that was the Game of Thrones finale.
    I thought it was because many felt it was a bad idea. Anyways there was a fake documentary called C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America that came out in 2004 so that concept wasn't that original.
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  18. #93
    Here till the end MadMan's Avatar
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    Also Gone Girl has a woman who is could labeled as unlikable/evil. Most people (myself included) ended up rooting for her by the end of the film. Not to mention endless film noirs featuring femme fatales, a concept that is older than GOTW.
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  19. #94
    collecting tapes Skitch's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting MadMan (view post)
    Also Gone Girl has a woman who is could labeled as unlikable/evil. Most people (myself included) ended up rooting for her by the end of the film. Not to mention endless film noirs featuring femme fatales, a concept that is older than GOTW.
    I remember rooting for her for most of film and losing all sympathy in third act. I didnt gain any sympathy for Afflecks character either btw, I just left the film feeling like they were both assholes and one was a murderer.

    Now I need to rewatch, dammit Madman, you're killing me.

  20. #95
    Moderator TGM's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting Skitch (view post)
    I remember rooting for her for most of film and losing all sympathy in third act. I didnt gain any sympathy for Afflecks character either btw, I just left the film feeling like they were both assholes and one was a murderer.
    This was my take away too. Can’t lie, but I did kinda raise a brow at all the people who hailed Amy Dunne as some sort of hero in that one. Hmm... ~.^

  21. #96
    I was team Margo all the way. Margo was best girl.
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    Pantheon, S1 (C. Silverstein, 2022)
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  22. #97
    Quote Quoting MadMan (view post)
    Also Gone Girl has a woman who is could labeled as unlikable/evil. Most people (myself included) ended up rooting for her by the end of the film. Not to mention endless film noirs featuring femme fatales, a concept that is older than GOTW.
    I'm not sure how this refutes my claim that contemporary reviewers treat films in masculine genres (and directors associated primarily with them, like Fincher) more seriously than genres coded as feminine such as melodrama, since film noir--and by extension, neo-noir, including Gone Girl--is, I would argue, very much a man's genre. After all, the danger of the femme fatale is that she acts like a man and thus represents a threat to traditional gender roles. This is also true, to a certain extent, of Scarlett O'Hara (whom one could argue is a proto-noir heroine: "Well, I guess I've done murder"), although her emotionalism, and the film's colour and lighting scheme, offset this somewhat: Hence, her comeuppance is that she gets dumped rather than murdered. Gone Girl is critically respectable at two and a half hours not only because it gives equal or more weight to the Ben Affleck character (who, for all his flaws, is still something like the moral centre of the film, and in any case, it's Affleck on the poster, not Rosamund Pike), but because it's female co-protagonist is a sociopath, which is the opposite of hysterical. In other words, even though it's based on a novel by a woman and features a female co-protagonist, generically speaking it's not a "woman's film" in the sense that Imitation of Life, Letter from an Unknown Woman, and Stella Dallas are women's films.
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  23. #98
    collecting tapes Skitch's Avatar
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    Anyway...


  24. #99
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    Quote Quoting baby doll (view post)
    This isn't to say the film had no pernicious effects on American society, but the film's depiction of the prewar South wouldn't have been as influential as it was if people weren't already poised to accept it. In short, as with all things Gone with the Wind, it's complicated.
    It's not that complicated. "Gone with the Wind" is part of a concerted effort to revise the historical record in favor of the South. This stuff didn't happen on its own (Google "United Daughters of the Confederacy.")

    Imagine flat-earthers or Holocaust-deniers won over public opinion, and won big for over a century. So much so that they're able to re-write school textbooks, change state flags, and place monuments around the country. All of which reinforces their bullshit for generations on generations.

    That's the sort of legacy we're talking about, and "Gone with a the Wind" is a major part of it. (Other recognizable parts include "The Clansman" and "Birth of a Nation.")

    This wouldn't be a problem if it weren't so popular, and part of the reason it remains popular is the sketchy way it deals with race.

    So my question is: If contemporary society can, for example, toss away D.W. Griffith, excise racist elements out Looney Tunes, and mothball "Song of the South," then why can't we see "Gone with the Wind" for exactly what it is?

    Because this film, more than anything else in the 20th century, is probably responsible for extending the shelf life on "Lost Cause" nonsense by a good 50 or 60 years. At least. All on its own.

    Fun fact: During WWII, the Nazis employed Lost Cause mythology in their propaganda, telling people that the Allies would do to their towns what Sherman did to Atlanta. They printed this shit in bulk and distributed it all over Europe. Eventually, it made its way back to neo-Confederate groups in the States. Think about that for sec

    Well, forgive me for thinking you guys are smart.
    Oh, for real?
    Last edited by Irish; 06-18-2020 at 05:17 PM.

  25. #100
    Replacing Luck Since 1984 Dukefrukem's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting Irish (view post)
    Google "United Daughters of the Confederacy."
    Wow. Where does this kind of motivation come from? You were that butt-hurt that the "south" lost the war you want to memorialize a losing army? For what purpose? I can only think of one. And it stinks.
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