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by DieBruderBauer 1246 days ago
The movie is beyond racist. If you don't believe me just watch it. You don't even need to be an identitarian to see it's horrifically outdated.
3 comments

The very idea of art becoming "outdated" because of changing political and social norms is absurd. Even if most of us no longer share the sentiments behind a piece of human cultural history or its creators, doesn't mean we should reject it as a part of our history or not be able to appreciate something of it at the very least for reasons of historical learning. A vast proportion of history's most interesting thinkers, creators and writers were full of flaws that in some cases would today be considered literally criminal, should they be erased from modern appreciation because of this foolish idea of "outdated"?
Mickey Rooney's performance was called out as racist even back then, these aren't some new decency standards we made up along the way.
Who says erased? They're just outdated, that's all.
For many of them, not even that. Is Socrates outdated, or Thomas Jefferson? How about Picasso? The first of these is widely believed to have been what we would today call a pedophile (this being common in his culture and time), the second was a slave owner and the third was an abusive, jealous womanizer.

Or how about Gone with the Wind itself: The novel and book deal with many universal themes of families, love and human ties being destroyed and deformed by terrible circumstances outside of individual control. Many, many victims of political and social tragedy from any time in history right to the present can easily identify with that central concept without being completely blinded into flippant, fashionable woke dismissal by focusing only on the type of society portrayed in the book and film. The movie's central emotional drama is nearly universal to human history. This is why it was so enormously popular, and its central emotional concept still is today.

In the movie, Mickey Rooney plays a horrible caricature of a Japanese man, Mr. Yunioshi. But in the book, Mr. Yunioshi is just a Japanese man, not a racist stereotype.
Gone with the Wind is horrifically racist yet quite reasonably justifiable to watch on its merits.
What merits?
I understand your sentiment, and agree with it in some contexts, but look what HBO Max added as an intro [1]: "a prime text for examining expressions of white supremacy in popular culture ... it is precisely because of the ongoing, painful patterns of racial injustice and disregard for Black lives that Gone with the Wind should stay in circulation and remain available for viewing, analysis and discussion. ... an opportunity to think about what classic films can teach us." [2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gone_with_the_Wind_(film)#Anal... 2. https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/12/opinions/gone-with-the-wind-i...