So many takes, so many good lines! It's pretty melodramatic; watching now for the 2nd time, this time as an adult, it's a lot more interesting. Quite a bit of it is an example of a couple repeatedly failing to listen and learn how to get along with one another.

It's actually not about slavery at all, at least superficially. That legacy influenced the authors and the portrayals but it doesn't have much to say about it except the overall lack of focus on it being taken by implication to mean the movie's not very concerned with it, and some typical early american film socialist stinkers thrown in to slander free enterprise.

Probably this is my most unique viewpoint: that the movie, viewed without emotions, shows the massive success and benefits to everyone of feminist+free enterprise free markets, through Scarlett's successful business and ability to move on from the war. It attempts to hide this by pretending the only reason her northern style business worked was via convict labor, even though the north hadn't needed that to whoop the south materially.

Scarlett as a businesswoman

She's being:

• feminist
• using trade to heal wounds w/the north
• trading even with the evil yankee carpetbaggers, ending up making everyone rich
• it's a bit against the story that the movie shows her using convict labor (depicted by white prisoners) as a replacement for the old slave-labor system
• It's attempting to link northern factories and suggest they're similar to slavery, and that the owners are in the same class as the old slave-owners.
• The entire scene is pure socialism in that it's filmed to make Scarlett look bad, and treats the existence of business, of well-run systems to get and distribute material to rebuild that south as a pure given, which would exist either way, and as nothing to do with the her work.

Somehow despite itself the movie is making absolutely clear and true points about how free enterprise is the way to heal old wounds, as a viewer you feel that what she's doing is wrong. The movies casts the old slave labor aspersion at northern-style business, somehow, DESPITE the north just having fought a war which among other things, ended slavery. So, this scene is really really stretching to make its anticapitalist point - even though here capitalism was the thing which defeated slavery, this time in N.America just as it had done the same making the british empire rich enough to defeat and ban it worldwide.

I haven't looked it up but I assume there are a bunch of people with communist sympathies involved in its production. Later research shows that yes, this was the case.

The emotional side

As melodrama this maybe sets the stage for everything that came later. The two are SO over the top in their rude and sarcastic remarks to each other. Anyone who's been in an argument that somehow spirals out of control will sadly see reflections of that in the way these two talk so extremely roughly and so proudly to each other - her in her immediate flight to claiming extreme self-reliance the moment her frame is challenged, and his, not so directly but it's there, in how at every moment when he is challenged to deal with someone's emotional storm, or attempt to soother her, he refuses and instead runs off to his prostitutes.

This wasn't obvious to me most of my life, really - that this isn't just a case of her being out of control emotional; that he's also to blame here, and that there were plenty of cases shown where he, if he'd have been stronger and more tolerant of a few little words, could have secured his wife's respect, and would have kept both the potential children and her rather than losinga ll three.

It's the same lesson as has always been - that as the guy, sure his extremely bold, proud and high-handed approach to her, never taking her seriously works to attract her interest at first, while also being ofc tall, extremely bold, daring, admired but also an outlaw, but never forget also super rich, that in the end, to truly have a relationship he's really got to be her rock and learn how to soothe her. Despite all appearances there are eventaully things that can make her temporarily not be so extremely selfish (which may read as a rational approach to poverty, at least, as the completely bullshit line about "before what war and poverty did to you" would claim, but you'll note, she was even worse as a person before the war as a rich heiress. So poverty had nothing to do with it, in fact it improved her (given that she survived) - at least she knows how to work and is willing to get out an do things now.

### History

What went into making this movie?

Links

Sometime after watching this I found a youtube ivdeo which went over, with a modern therapy lens, every single interaction the two of them had. And it's plain as day here how their mutually hard-nosed styles with no slack or recovery possible led to the final outcome of breaking up.