Movie Reflection - Gone With The Wind

Scarlett and Mammy, sharing an intense moment. 

My entire class sat and watched the movie " Gone With the Wind" directed by Victor Fleming. While watching the movie it got me to thinking. A question kept circulating around my brain, how freedom can have a different meaning depending on the person and perspective it's coming from. 

The movie like all other movies has some sort of excitement, in order to keep the audience engaged, many movies use love and romance in order to keep readers engaged while also trying to teach a broader lesson. The movie shows a story about conditional and problematic love, while surviving life during the Civil War. 

While like many other movies, the film also shows how freedom is represented differently. An example of this is how Southern whites are struggling to protect what they think is normal, like traditions and independence and how enslaved African Americans are being minimized and pushed to the side. 

Even tho the movie talks and focuses a lot about emotions and relationships, it is very romanticized which does take away a lot of key points that people should be focusing on. Romanticizing the antebellum South is already hard enough and having it romanticized can just make it harder to take serious because there is no clear divide between factual storytelling and fantasy. 

One thing that I kept coming back to during the movie was how the characters acted towards each other. They showed many different things that I wasn't expecting originally. They showed friendship and loyalty, they cared for each other especially when times got hard. 

War changed them. 

I think that with all the destruction caused by war along with all the loss it led people to the debate of what really matters and what people are willing to do in order to get through. 

To survive. 

The movie also shows how the struggles that people are facing were more from the perspective of white southerners. 

In the movie, slavery is more of a background instead of being presented as a bigger issue. It is like the background music you put on when you clean. This leads to the idea that the story isn't over. It can't be completed without fully talking about the horrors of slavery and how it impacted such a large group of people within the nation. 

The movie shows that people can experience true feelings, like love and grief. They can experience these feelings while still reaping the benefits of a society that is clearly unjust and wrong. 

Scarlett O'Hara, is a perfect example of how someone transformed themselves within the movie. At the start, she is so infatuated with love, romance and social status that nothing else matters to her. As the war goes on and continues to destroy anything and everything in its path, she becomes more in touch with reality and she focuses on the things that really do matter. 

She takes on full responsibility for surviving and learning how she can be more helpful in life. 

In a way, the movie can suggest how hard time can shed light on power and might that society has taken away from women. 

Scarlett being independent is complicated at times because she is willing to anything to protect herself and what she wants. She is very resilient but it also creates more confusion of whether or not being able to survive can make someone a good person with good morals. 

Rhett Buttler who is a wealthy gambler who later becomes infatuated by Scarlett O'Hara after meeting her and eventually goes on to become her third husband, offers a different perspective. He sees and understands that war is not just for the honorable cause, but that it also has some sort of financial gain coming from it. 

He doesn't go off to war and join the confederate army, instead he stays behind doing anything in his power to improve his financial status and gain as much as he can no matter what it takes and who it hurts. 

The behavior shown by Rhett is not just how people acted during the time of the civil war. Even in today's society people are always looking for anyway to profit themselves. Even though earning money during a conflict is not necessarily bad or immoral, it is still wrong to abuse and mistreat peoples suffering just to gain something.

Gone with the Wind, shows how freedom and independence as well as control can take over peoples lives and control how they shape their own successes and futures. 

In my opinion the movies value isn't the romance and love that is shared between characters but it is the challenges that people face during war time and how war can affect everyone in so many different ways, not just the soldiers fighting in those wars.