So it’s come to pass that after 32 long years of studious avoidance, I have finally caught up with The Movie That Would Not Die. You know: the one you feel like you’ve seen it 10 times even if you haven’t seen it at all; the one not even mossier critics drag out for adulation very often, as its omnipresence renders such praising redundant. Even designated classics like Casablanca and The Wizard of Oz look obscure by comparison, and its only real rival for World Cult mastery comes at the hands of George Lucas and his painfully unstoppable Star Wars. But with much trepidation, I finally dove into this bulletproof four-hour perennial, swam the length, and came out the other side. And the massive, shattering truth I discovered was something I had dimly suspected all along: I am too damn old for Gone with the Wind.

I don’t mean to say that the film is pitched at the level of children or adolescents, because clearly it’s not. And I sure don’t mean that adults can’t enjoy it at this late date, because their numbers surely are legion. But it seems to me there’s something suspiciously callow about the whole enterprise that goes beyond its lionization of the Old South and its pathetic apologia for slavery. And it starts and ends with Scarlett O’Hara, who comes under so much criticism at the hands of other characters that you wonder for a moment why a distended epic (and a distended bestseller before it) was devoted to her. A friend of mine who’d also seen Gone with the Wind late in the game remarked that he was amazed a film had been made with such a supremely unsympathetic heroine—but in giving the stage to such a royal jerk, it creates an interesting if unsavory point about where identification can lead you.

Scarlett, you’ll recall, is the one who cared about herself more than others, land more than propriety, and Tara more than the love of condescending Rhett Butler. She schemes, she plots, she hates it when she doesn’t get her way—and she carries the torch for Ashley Wilkes well beyond the point when a normal person would have given up and moved on. Yet we’re absolutely confined to her fears and hopes and wishes, where everybody else revolves around her. Despite all of the abuse piled up by sisters and lookers-on, we’re asked on some level to admire her in all of her manipulative glory. And so the film becomes less than the righteous comeuppance of a schemer than an elegy to her thwarted desires, with her “tomorrow is another day” curtain line showing her defiant denial of the idea that you can’t always get what you want.

To an extent, this is part and parcel of the patriarchy both within the Civil War setting and the context in which the film was made. You couldn’t really make a film in which a woman achieves the kind of grand ambitions that men do—otherwise Rhett would be scolded for his similar extramarital arrogance, which clearly doesn’t happen. And it could be argued that wistful remarks on Scarlett’s failure are a sort of backdoor way of congratulating her for attempting to be as good as a man. But the film’s broad appeal goes beyond mere gender politics. It instead lies at the heart of what the erstwhile Dream Factory has always promised, or laments when it doesn’t show up: total indulgence of your heart’s desire, provided you know what that is.

Taken this way, the film runs from the vivacious beginning to the tragic end of an extended adolescence. Scarlett begins with her whole life in front of her, in a peaceful South about to be disrupted by civil war. She refuses to believe that anything bad will happen, is annoyed when her male suitors bring up the subject, and lives in blissful denial. Then two things interrupt: her lover Ashley Wilkes customarily marries his cousin Melanie, and the war destroys the security that she’s counted on all her life. Her dogged response to the situation is to deny that anything in front of her matters, that everything can be returned to zero and give her the mastery she so desperately needs. Patriarchy will stand in the way of her getting there, but the impulse is the thing that matters, and the film renders it in pornographic detail.

This is the key to its popularity—and why you may need to encounter it either when you are fairly young or when the culture you belong to seems more innocent. Scarlett’s denial of the adult world mirrors one’s own at a certain stage in life—and the film devoted to her progress is more than happy to render the horrors of maturation rather than any of its rewards. For all of its deification of Melanie Wilkes, there would be no movie if she were the focus—she’s an ideal that it’d be hard for the film to match. Scarlett seems more attractive, because her total capitulation to her desires is the sort of thing adolescents do best. And so her refusal to take on the mantle of adulthood—even when she does superhuman things that many adults could never be counted on to do—is less indicative of a tragic flaw on her part than a tragic inadequacy of the world’s.

It’s the kind of thing Ayn Rand would come up with if she weren’t so austere, if her “virtue of selfishness” was that of a sensualist instead of an ascetic. And her books are just as unfit for adult consumption as Gone with the Wind, which depict swooning base desires instead of interrogating them. Scarlett O’Hara ought to get what she wants; we all should, 24 hours a day, but in the end, we don’t. We have to figure out ways of rationing rules and being fair to as many people as possible, but that’s what adults, rather than young people figuring out who they are, have to deal with. The film doesn’t really show a woman who goes from youth to adult; it’s someone who stops dead at adolescence and won’t go further come hell or high water.

Of course, it leaves her in the lurch as well, which is its escape hatch; we don’t really endorse this woman, and tomorrow will be the same damned day as the one where Rhett Butler shunned her. But after extended portraits of her glorious self-involvement, the thought of her actually changing would make us angry. Gone with the Wind must be experienced under a less hedonistic American paradigm or the less hedonistic orders of your parents—and the adults who weren’t there to begin with have their own fond young memories to sustain their love for the film.

But there’s nothing here for me. I’ve been spoiled by any number of assorted other great works and guilty pleasures that have shown me that there are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamed of in the pubescent mind. And so while the appeal of the film’s craft and expense and art direction are in their way pleasurable, the core of its narrative is empty and hollow. I know too much about how to fill such voids, and the necessity of filling them for a healthy aesthetic diet. And God as my witness, I’ll never go hungry again.