I see. TBH, Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin does quite a bit of probing of that dissonance.
Absolutely. And Uncle Tom’s Cabin has the additional merit of using Tom, an enslaved black man, as the protagonist - in the abstract, I think that’s a more worthwhile story to tell than one about slavers and their empty escapades.
But because of the existing cultural legacy of Gone With the Wind and other Lost Cause stories, I think there would be some value in subverting that tale. Tell the same exact story, but strip off the Lost Cause veneer, and suddenly the cast of planter-class character are revealed to be callous and vain at best and horrible monsters at worst, playing out their petty dramas while doing their damnest to try and preseve an institution that causes immense suffering for their personal benefit.
Has a movie ever been made using The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall as the source? It’s a parody of GWTW told from the viewpoint of a slave and was a best-seller. I’d love to see that!
It’s a great idea, but one of the problems, it seems to me, is that you’d have to add a second plot - one that focused on the African-American characters, and their experiences during and after the war (half of GWtW takes place after Appomattox; it’s as much a story of Reconstruction as it is of the war, and the problems the main characters are dealing with aren’t petty). That would obviously mean more time, and the movie runs four hours already. To bring it down to a length that a studio would be willing to release, you’d have to cut the Scarlett-Rhett-Ashley-Melanie plot down to the point that it really wouldn’t be recognizable as GWtW at all, as opposed to a movie based on the original film.
Maybe it could be done like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Show the new main characters just occasionally interacting with Scarlett, Rhett, and all the GWTW stalwarts; sewing for hours to make a dress out of curtains, that sort of thing.
The problem with that approach is that it’s inherently comedic/ironic. If you’re trying to show the sordid underbelly of Gone With the Wind, you probably don’t want to play it for laughs.
This would work, and I don’t think it would have to be comedic. Just show how fundamentally irrelevant Scarlett’s drama is to the actual real problems playing out among the people she’s oppressed. Those issues should take a narrative backseat to the lives of the enslaved.
Sounds like you’re pitching the next hit HBO series!
Aside from depicting intentional cruelty by the enslavers, you could weave a complex web of events where very dramatic problems are caused for the enslaved characters by actions the planter characters take for their petty romantic problems that cascade to embitter the lives of the enslaved.
Okay, as long as we seem to be actually doing this project, I DEMAND that the production also be informed by Tom and Lorenzo’s historical film costuming analysis:
Saw Blazing Saddles on streaming over the weekend. It aged very badly. I mean all of it. I could barely manage a smile.
Humor has moved on and left this in the dust.
I think a lot of it still works. But I think that, like all comedy, how well it works depends on how well it meshes with your own sense of humor (and to some extent on whom you watch it with).
Wasn’t it basically remade by Gene Wilder as The Woman in Red? Same issues: kinda homely guy gets super hot babe to desire him for nor readily understandable reason. That movie’s almost forty years old now, a period piece from the era if there ever was one.
If you wanted to deconstruct the narrative of GWTW, you could do worse than focus on the reconstruction era. I’ve done some reading in the last few years on how the newly freed slaves were organizing themselves to vote, and actually ended up in a lot of government positions, and were making good progress on creating a government that actually helped the majority of people. And then contrasting that progress with the rhetoric being spread by the former slaveowners, who did everything they could to spread bullshit lies about how these new voters were “destroying the country with socialism”.
Sound familiar?
So make a film that shows the real, serious work the newly elected Freedmen were doing, and contrast that to the ridiculous hype nonsense the slavers were spreading about.
It’s been done many ways. Consider Cyrano de Bergerac, reverse the genders in Arthur. It’s part of almost every romcom. It doesn’t matter what difference keeps two people apart, but the old guy:young woman combination is a wellspring of comedy.
The Woman in Red was a remake of the French comedy Le Grand Blond avec une chaussure noire (“The Tall Blonde Man with One Black Shoe”) and its sequel. They just changed the color of the shoe. I’ve seen all three, and I think the original French film is a bit better than the American remake.
I suppose it’s kind of the same idea, but you have the additional frisson of the attractive young blonde woman being an international spy.
I think you maybe mixed up your Wilder and your Hanks.
Not me – that was veryfrank
No, you’re both wrong.
The Woman in Red was a 1984 Gene Wilder film that was a remake of the French films, Pardon Mon Affaire and Pardon Mon Affaire, Too. It’s about a married man who becomes infatuated with a much younger woman. It wasn’t a remake of The Seven Year Itch, but it did include an homage to Marilyn’s famous street grate scene.
The Man with One Red Shoe was a 1985 Tom Hanks film that was a remake of The Tall Blonde Man with One Black Shoe. That one’s a spy spoof where a corrupt CIA official frames an innocent man for espionage, based on picking him at random out of an airport crowd because of his mismatched shoes.
As long as we are off on those kinds of tangents…
Back when it came out, I took a date to see Revenge of the Nerds. Sometime later she was asking me about the first one. I didn’t really understand, and we dropped it unresolved. Later, she again brought up ‘the first one’, she wanted to see it. After discussing it some more I realized she mistakenly though the “Revenge of” part indicated that it was a sequel:
I stand corrected. The similar plot plus the obvious hommage threw me. (also…39 years ago)
I still say it’s a Floor Wax.