Donald Trump Has the Absolute Worst Taste in Movies
On Thursday evening, at one of his ego-nourishing rallies, President Donald Trump took aim at Parasite, Bong Joon-ho’s South Korean satire that made history as the first foreign film to win the Best Picture Oscar.
“By the way, how bad were the Academy Awards this year? You see ‘em? And the winner is…a movie from South Korea. What the hell is that about?” bellowed a rather clammy Trump. “Was it good? I don’t know. I’m looking for like, let’s get Gone with the Wind. Can we get Gone with the Wind back, please? Sunset Boulevard, so many great movies.”
Let’s first address the dog-whistle inclusion of Gone with the Wind. There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Trump, who has the attention span of a meerkat on high-grade cocaine, has sat through Victor Fleming’s four-hour-long Civil War epic. What he may be aware of, however, is how the 1939 film—winner of 10 Academy Awards including Best Picture, and the highest-grossing movie ever when adjusted for inflation—is a neo-Confederate monument; one that romanticizes slavery and the antebellum South, and envisions its wealthy white protagonists as hallowed victims swallowed up by the chaos of Reconstruction. Hattie McDaniel’s Mammy, the head slave of the film’s sprawling southern plantation, comes from a long line of racist (and likely mythical) stereotypes of “mammy” house slaves (selfless, grandmotherly) dating back to Uncle Tom’s Cabin that were used by Confederate apologists to soften and even attempt to legitimize the unequivocally racist and dehumanizing institution.
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