At 13, I loved Rhett Butler, and there are a few similar scenes there.

I still love Rhett Butler, despite the rapeyness of the carry-Scarlett-up-the-staircase scene.

Hey, I own my contradictions.

I still love Rhett Butler, despite the rapeyness of the carry-Scarlett-up-the-staircase scene.

God, me too. But I do know that when I was younger, the scene that fascinated me was the morning after scene, trying to figure out what all those different expressions on her face could mean.

I didn't see the movie until I was about 15 or 16. But I read the book at 12.

the scene that fascinated me was the morning after scene, trying to figure out what all those different expressions on her face could mean.

The wow-I-just-had-a-good-fucking scene?

(Which pisses me off more, because it tries to undercut the rapeyness by saying, "No, see, she ended up LIKING it, so it wasn't rape!")

Grumble.

Probably, if I were directing it, I would have tried to cut the rapeyness by making it clear that it was a mutually agreed upon game of theirs or something. But I am the person who directed Grease and found it so problematic I tried to direct around Sandy completly changing herself to get the boy.

ETA: which is not inherent in the text, IMO. It seems like he raped her, and then she liked it. I would have just tried to change it.

I'm having problems with the song "Baby, It's Cold Outside," also. Because, damn it, SHE SAYS NO.

But I love that song, and I'm annoying my own self by getting my feminist ire on about it.

It is a problematic song, Steph. And I love it too.

I also (I R DUM) just this second realized that Rhett and Scarlett are a model for Chuck and Blair on Gossip Girl.

The wow-I-just-had-a-good-fucking scene?

Yeah. I mean, I get it now, but *then* it just intrigued me.

And oddly, when I saw Unfaithful years later, Diane Lane's scene on the train, with all those shifting expressions and emotions, reminded me of it.

I just looked to see how that scene plays out in the book, and it's essentially the same. Maybe worse. Way too long to type out the whole thing, but a few bits of it:

He hurt her and she cried out, muffled, frightened. Up the stairs, he went into the utter darkness, up, up, and she was wild with fear. He was a mad stranger and this was a black darkness she did not know, darker than death.

Suddenly she had a wild thrill such as she had never known; joy, fear, madness, excitement, surrender to arms that were too strong, lips too bruising, fate that moved too fast. For the first time in her life she had met someone, someone stronger than she, someone she could neither bully nor break, someone who was bullying and breaking her. Somehow, her arms were around his neck and her lips trembling beneath his and they were going up, up into the darkness again, a darkness that was soft and swirling and all enveloping.

When she awoke the next morning, he was gone and had it not been for the rumpled pillow beside her, she would have thought the happeneings of the night before a wild preposterous dream.

The man who had carried her up the dark stairs was a stranger of whose existence she had not dreamed. And no, though she tried to make herself hate him, tried to be indignant, she could not. He had humbled her, hurt her, used her brutally through a wild mad night and she had gloried in it.

(And, reading this now, this is really not something that I should have been reading at 12. My teacher called my mother because I was reading "A Time to Kill," but no one had any objections to this.)

I was just thinking this morning that the bit of Gone With the Wind that I always remember is young Scarlett at the barbecue and the authorial aside that if she were to be successful in marrying Ashley she would become one of the boring matrons she so despised, but she never considered that. Rhett carrying her up the staircase I only remember from seeing countless clips of it.