On Memorial Day, Turner Classic Movies re-ran their Moguls and Movie Stars series of historical documentaries about Hollywood. In one of the episodes, they showed that scene from Gone with the Wind right before the intermission, where Scarlett O’Hara says: “With God as my witness, I’ll never go hungry again!” Seeing it again reminded me of what it used to make me think of when I would see it, which is that it would have been great if after that scene, Scarlett O’Hara started to get fatter and fatter throughout the rest of the film, until she became totally obese by the end. And as she got larger and larger, someone would ask her: “Scarlett, you used to be so thin and dainty; what happened to you? How come you’ve become so fat?” And Scarlett would respond: “I swore to myself before God that I’d never go hungry again, so now, every time I start to feel peckish, I stuff my face. Sometimes, I eat and eat even when I’m not hungry just to keep that promise to myself!” And after awhile, people would stop calling her Scarlett, and they’d all start calling her “Big Red”. Had they done that, it might have broken the anti-obesity mindset that we all have today. But probably not.
