Film number nine in my 100 Essential Films Series (if you missed the first one, you can find the explanation for what I’m doing here) has been staring me in the face for awhile now. The four-hour run time alone was a little daunting. But, with the current political, social, and cultural climate, I decided it was time to tackle Gone with the Wind. It’s the last movie in a trio of them from 1939, one of the greatest years in movie history. This was a first viewing for me, aside from feeling like I knew almost everything about it via cultural osmosis. I watched it through the streaming service Vudu, and the digital transfer looked gorgeous. Too bad the film’s actual content doesn’t match the visuals.
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before scratch-off
Gone with the Wind (1939)
dir. Victor Fleming
Rated: N/A
image: Pop Chart Lab
I’m wrestling with Gone with the Wind as our culture wrestles with it. HBO Max, the service that holds the streaming rights to the 1939 winner of ten Academy Awards, announced just a few weeks ago that it would be taking Gone with the Wind off of its service temporarily, so it can find a way to add context to the picture’s outdated and ugly depictions of race. They haven’t announced yet when the movie will return to the service, but Jacqueline Stewart, an African American cinema and media studies professor and Turner Classic Movies host, will provide the introduction to place the film “in its multiple historical contexts.”
This is the right decision.
The forthcoming introduction by Professor Stewart will, I’m sure, add rigorous critical and historical analysis – most importantly from a person of color. This will allow the film to remain accessible, but not irresponsibly so. Canceling the film completely would, as film critic Karina Longworth said about Disney’s racist out-of-circulation-for-decades film Song of the South, turn it into a fetish object. “I believe Hollywood’s history of racism should be openly discussed,” Longworth tweeted.
That’s what I want to do now, in the form of my reaction to watching Gone with the Wind for the first time, as part of my 100 Essential Films series.
Gone with the Wind is vile and insidious in how it depicts race, the Civil War, and slavery in the Old South. Its vileness didn’t surprise me. The ways in which the 80-year-old film depicts its black characters – speaking in heavily stereotyped, broken English, for example – while disturbing, wasn’t anything I wasn’t expecting.
The character Prissy, the house slave of Scarlett O’Hara, the movie’s hero, becomes a stand-in for all black people as mentally inferior and buffoonish. The offhanded way in which Rhett Butler, Scarlett’s on-again-off-again love interest, refers to Prissy as a “simple-minded darky” is odious, but not surprising.
What was enlightening for me about the experience of watching Gone with the Wind was its embracing of the equally odious idea of the Lost Cause understanding of the Civil War. I’ve understood, intellectually, the concept of the Lost Cause for some time. But Gone with the Wind gave me the perspective in a visceral, emotional way, as all art tries to do.
Based on the 1936 novel by Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind tells the story of Scarlett O’Hara and her travails as a belle of Georgia during the American Civil War. O’Hara sees much suffering – some of which she brings on herself, due to her unrequited love for Southern gentleman Ashley Wilkes – as she tries to hold on to her beloved family plantation, Tara, during Reconstruction.
Right from the opening crawl, the movie aligns itself firmly within the mythos of the Lost Cause. The concept, which started taking shape in the first few years after the war ended, positions the Confederacy – and the secession of its member states – as an attempt to preserve honorable and noble Southern culture from Northern interference.
That opening crawl, with its description of a genteel society, only remembered in books, “of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave… A Civilization gone with the wind…”, romanticizes something that never was. At the very least, Gone with the Wind is somewhat realistic about what caused the Civil War. Early in the film, as the men are discussing the gathering storm of conflict, one of them mentions the need to preserve the institution of slavery, with war, if need be.
Today’s proponents of the Lost Cause ideology completely ignore the many, many references to this fact, which is listed as the primary reason for secession in the Confederate Constitution itself. They prefer to talk vaguely about “States Rights,” while conveniently never mentioning the specific right that the Old South was trying to preserve.
The other main fallacy of the Lost Cause mythos – one that Gone with the Wind traffics in heavily – is the burnishing of the very institution of slavery. When Lost Cause revisionists do address slavery, they present it as an institution of noble masters presiding over their slaves with love and stern discipline. As stomach turning as it is, they paint slaves as having been happy in their lives of servitude. They knew their place in society – one in which white people ruled as rightful masters – and were content to serve in their prescribed roles.
Gone with the Wind works overtime to uphold this sickening worldview. The O’Hara family’s slaves, Mammy, Prissy, Pork, and Big Sam are presented as put upon, but ultimately loyal to their masters. The movie carefully avoids depictions of cruelty and violence towards the slaves in all but a few (and, in the movie’s view, warranted) instances. Scarlett slaps Prissy when the latter breaks down as Atlanta falls to the Yankees and the two women attempt to deliver the baby of Melanie Wilkes, Scarlett’s sister-in-law and her chief rival for Ashely’s affections.
Some critics took issue with Steve McQueen’s overly graphic depiction of the brutality inherent in slavery in his film 12 Years a Slave – it is, certainly, relentless, but ultimately serves a purpose – but it undoubtedly gives a more realistic depiction of the evil institution than Gone with the Wind does.
I was specifically clued into these issues of race and slavery throughout my viewing of Gone with the Wind because of the current cultural climate, but there are myriad other issues at play in the nearly four-hour-long romance/war epic. The gender politics of Gone with the Wind are similarly retrograde, and I could write a whole other review on the topic.
The most potent example of this is the famous “marital rape” scene towards the end of the film in which Rhett Butler doesn’t take no for an answer from his bride. The action is depicted as deeply romantic as Rhett sweeps Scarlett off her feet and carries her up the wide, beautiful staircase in the Tara plantation home. Rhett is apologetic the next morning – the movie gives him the nominal excuse of having been drunk the night before – but what’s more telling than his regret is Scarlett’s new disposition about this man she married more for convenience than for love.
The film cuts from Rhett carrying Scarlett up the stairs to her awakening with a big smile on her face the next morning. Scarlett has been put in her place by – from the movie’s (and traditional Christianity’s) perspective – her natural superior, a man. And just as the slaves are happy to fulfill their natural place in this white-supremacist, patriarchal society, so are the white women.
The actual production value of the film is its only saving grace. Gone with the Wind is unquestionably a work of art made with considerable talent and quality. The sweeping scope – like the shot of wounded soldiers following the Battle of Atlanta – and big-as-life action set pieces – like the burning of Atlanta – are impressive to behold, even after 80+ years.
Clarke Gable as Rhett Butler and Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara give memorable, iconic performances. Hattie McDaniel was the first black person to win an academy award, for her portrayal of Mammy – although, even that tale of triumph, which Hollywood champions every chance it gets, comes with its own disgraceful postscript. From Wikipedia: “She [McDaniel] and her escort were required to sit at a segregated table for two at the far wall of the room; her white agent, William Meiklejohn, sat at the same table. The hotel had a strict no-blacks policy, but allowed McDaniel in as a favor. The discrimination continued after the award ceremony as well as her white co-stars went to a "no-blacks" club, where McDaniel was also denied entry.”
With the proper contextual presentation about its poisonous legacy – Black people are seen dancing and causing trouble during the Reconstruction portion of the film, which presents the destruction of the orderly and proper Old South as a world turned upside down – Gone with the Wind can help us deconstruct the dangerous myths about our own history. Just like with the movement to remove Confederate statues, remembering history is not the same as honoring it. We can study, critique, and learn from these monuments to barbarity and cruelty – of which Gone with the Wind certainly is one –without celebrating them.
CORRECTION: In the original version of this review, I mistakenly stated that Hattie McDaniel “was barred from attending the all-white [Oscars] ceremony, and was only allowed to enter the auditorium briefly, to accept her award.” I have corrected that paragraph to include a more accurate description of what happened at the Academy Awards ceremony she attended. I regret the error.
after scratch-off
image: Pop Chart Lab
image: Pop Chart Lab