[Ciexyz]

I'm willing to entertain the views of both sides on the Civil War. However....I saw "Cold Mountain" recently and found it to be HORRIFIC, detestable, a smelly rotten film where EVERYONE was either brain dead or over-the-edge. I actually felt dirty after I left the theater, and the film weighed heavy on my mind for days afterward.

A nasty, dirty little film. Surely, surely, the ethics at that time were higher than what is shown in the film. I'd say that the film is a Hollyweird rewrite of history. Like every calvary officer from the old West has to be like Tom Cruise, haunted by his evil comrades who massacred Indians. No balance in this viewpoint, methinks.

[CobaltBlue]

Surely the explanation is nothing more revelatory than the fact that drama has to have conflict, otherwise it's not drama. The villain in Cold Mountain was given a "back story", that his family had once owned the entire mountain and he dreamed and schemed about getting it back.

Do such villains exist? And does evil prosper when all the good folk are otherwise occupied? Does power corrupt?

I suggest to you that the film weighed heavy because you'd never before confronted, in your mind, the total desolation that the war caused in the South. When you say that hundreds of thousands of men died or were crippled for life, it doesn't mean much. When you see family after family that has lost their main breadwinner, it is, indeed, a heavy thing.

And for what? I grew up in New Orleans, the richest city in the country before the war. Afterwards, the economic devastation was horrific. What was achieved by that horrible loss of life and property?

Yes, you were right to feel saddened.