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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Snarky Oracle!" data-source="post: 444488" data-attributes="member: 57984">Yes, the sequel was something I only saw bits of -- Joanne Whalley came off more like Pam Ewing than Scarlett O'Hara. Like Hitchcock observed: casting is character. And after Selznick searching the world for the correct Scarlett and finding the right one with Vivien Leigh, how likely is it that some by rote TV miniseries more than half-a-century later will get it right again? Especially when they're just thinking feministically that Scarlett is "a strong woman" and that's all.I don't find Scarlett to be such a strong person in particular. She was spoiled and predatory, and exploited men like Ashley, Rhett (who at least knew what she was doing), Frank Kennedy, and anyone who could do her some good. Some people might call that "strength" and believe that Scarlett reciprocating anything would make her weaker and dependent.She was always totally dependent on men like Rhett, but as long as she was unconscionable about it and refused to genuinely care about them in return, she remains "strong and independent." Scarlett was a narcissist, probably with sociopathic tendencies, but that seems like "strength, defiance and control" to some.The final ending in GWTW exposes Scarlett as her own victim, one so selfish that she ran off the only wealthy man who (thought he) loved her despite his thinking he understood her flaws and issues and accepting it all... But Rhett realized in the end that he was projecting his own psychology -- that of an iconoclastic rapscallion with a deeper sense of fairness underneath the veneer -- onto that of Scarlett, a grasping, shallow woman who really cared about no one after all was said and done.It was no coincidence that Scarlett "suddenly realized" she "loved" Rhett just as he was walking out the door. Her "tomorrow is another day!" optimism is only about her future perseverance in finding yet another rich man off of which to glom. After he dies (and he will) she'll exist, if she's lucky, as a bitter and statured dowager who's eventually credited with the accomplishments of the men she'd exploited.Like what they say about old buildings, politicians and whores if they last long enough.But Margaret Mitchell herself didn't (last long enough). The poor thing dying on Peachtree Street less than a decade after the movie -- a movie that eerily showed almost the exact same thing happening to Scarlett on the very same street.<img src="https://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large/12-gone-with-the-wind-1939-granger.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" />I've often found that a fictional project that gets it as "right" as possible will tap into an objective frequency and accidentally reveal things well in advance. (Like the better years of THE SIMPSONS where even the presidency of Donald Trump is prognosticated decades earlier).... A man named Kennedy "shot through the head" always hits me as weird.BTW: In my teens and twenties, I had a friend who really resented Rhett Butler because she felt he'd gone back on the deal he and Scarlett had struck, that he had dumped her for just being herself. The fact that Rhett had overrated Scarlett's internal character simply his fault and his own miscalculation about what he could handle... All I could do was SMH silently.</blockquote>

Verification: Who played JR Ewing?