Monday we learned that a 25 year-old taking graduate-level journalism classes at New York University had no idea what an editorial was. Today we learn that “most” of the students taking a film class at Georgetown University have never seen “Gone with the Wind.”
[W]hen I asked 13 students in a Georgetown University film class if they’d seen it, most either hadn’t seen the film or had seen only parts of it. These students are serious about movies. But a lot of them sided with Mike Minahan, 20, who said when it comes to Gone with the Wind — frankly, he doesn’t give a damn.
“Everything I’ve seen about it says it, like, glorifies the slave era … and I dunno, what’s the point of that? I don’t see that as a good time in history … like, oh, sweet, a love story of people who own slaves.”
The students had two issues with Gone with the Wind: race and rape.
What a relief it is to know that the next generation of film reviewers, writers, and makers will be politically correct, uneducated, narrow-minded provincials completely out of touch with the real world. You know, just like the current crop of film reviewers, writers and makers.
A poll released Monday shows that 73% of Americans consider “Gone with the Wind” one of the best movies ever.
Not only are these close-minded students missing one of the grandest pieces of entertainment ever released in any medium, but a piece of cinema history that will live on long past any of us. In 1939, GWTW was an epic technical achievement. Seventy-five years later, in this age of CGI, producer David O. Selznick’s masterpiece is even more impressive.
Moreover, the idea that GWTW glorifies rape is laughable. Leftists are supposed to be Captains of Nuance and yet they seem incapable of understanding that this so-called rape is in reality the end result of a complicated dance of seduction between Rhett and Scarlett. As far as the film’s backwards portrayal of slaves and blacks, if you’re going to discount and dismiss any art based on current mores and values, you’re nothing more than a modern day Production Code.
We are supposed to be proudly and defiantly past the days where a Production Code interfered with the art of the motion picture. Judgmental prudes telling others what they should and should not see is supposed to be a thing of the past.
Michael Moore, Spike Lee, and Oliver Stone are as backwards and immoral as they come. Still, for going on six years, I have used the pages of Breitbart News and Big Hollywood to defend all three as creators of magnificent art. Art is bigger than your own beliefs and prejudices. It is even bigger than what is objectively right and wrong. People who can’t see past their own sanctimony should be majoring in Womyn’s Studies, not film.
John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
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