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Gone with the Wind Needs to Go
But what does it say about us as a nation if we continue to embrace a movie that, in the final analysis, stands for many of the same things as the Confederate flag that flutters so dramatically over the dead and wounded soldiers at the Atlanta train station just before the “GWTW’’ intermission?
The above didn’t appear in The New York Times or Slate. Nope. It appeared in the New York Post. I’ll give you a moment to emit a gentle sigh of regret about the ironclad nature of O’Sullivan’s First Law.
GWTW would never be made today. The story, characters, and dialogue speak of a time and place that has mercifully passed into American history. Even if you can dispute the film’s racism, it undeniably displays a cavalier attitude toward slavery and the lives of American blacks during Reconstruction. Even the most robust of viewers must wince a little at several moments through out the film.
It is, nevertheless, a great work of art, one of the greatest films ever made. To deny its prominence in the American film canon reveals a totalitarian instinct that demands the total subordination of art to political correctness. Therein lies a grave danger. Each age has its idols and its hypocrisies. If each generation censors what it finds even mildly objectionable about the past, what will that leave us? There is a human tendency to assume that the values of the moment are correct and true, everything that came before is false or wicked. It’s a peculiar form of vanity.
When Thomas Bowdler edited the racy bits out of Shakespeare, he intended to create a version accessible to young children. The modern Bowdlerizers are far more ambitious. Even for a (supposedly) mature adult, watching a seventy-five year old film — one that has been watched by the vast majority of Americans many times — is an unbearable trauma and grave injustice.
To watch a film, to read a book or listen to a lecture is not to condone everything being shown, written, or spoken. To assume otherwise is to inhabit the most narrow of moral universes. Watching GWTW is no more an endorsement of slavery than reading Hamlet shows a support for vigilante justice. To demand that the sweep of artistic creativity fit within a contemporary political mould is to critically undermine that creativity.
This still leaves us with a great old film with some terrible ideas just below the surface. The educated adult keeps in mind that — like all art — it is the product of a place and time. That it has transcended that place and time, and its particular evils, is proof of its inherent greatness. To the young viewer, this must be tactfully explained. To attempt to ban or delegitimize a great work of art, if only because it reveals the mark of its origins, shows a pettiness and ignorance that should always be opposed.
The attempts to marginalize GWTW are a tactic in the culture wars. Go after something beloved but whose underlying values the modern world now finds abhorrent. Very few people are brave enough to defend anything that can be successfully labelled racist. Soon that thing, be it a work of art or an old symbol, slips out of the mainstream. It’s never a one off victory. It’s a process. As more things get labelled racist the smaller the mainstream becomes. Unopposed all that will remain is a sterile nothingness that has been suitably stamped and approved by the great good.
Published in Culture, Entertainment
Q,
Gay porn OK. Condoms OK. Billy has two mommys and Jane has two daddys just great. The Critique of Pure Reason “danger, danger“.
BTW, the passages for which the idiot wrote the warning don’t actually occur in The Critique of Pure Reason.
If the 9 year old got through The Critique of Pure Reason then plunged into The Critique of Pure Practical Reason, then devoured The Critique of Judgement and then took a little detour through Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone and finally made it half way through The Meta-Physics of Morals the child’s mind might be “triggered” by unpleasant thoughts like Heterosexual Monogamous Marriage.
How diabolical!! Wait a minute, that’s covered in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone.
Regards,
Jim
Don Rickles, call your office.
I treat that 9 year old like the little girl in the shooting gallery in the first Men in Black movie, and pretty much for the same reason.
How can you not love Ricochet that we have a conversation like this!
Agreed. When I taught film studies to college students I showed them The Birth of a Nation (there is really no good way to study the history of American film without including D.W. Griffith), a movie which makes Gone With the Wind’s depiction of slaves and their lot seem positively nuanced and enlightened. I introduced it delicately and led the post-film discussion with care (and trepidation), but the students seemed to have no trouble grasping the idea that “problematic” art can be viewed in context and that we need not be afraid to confront ugliness, even when mixed with beauty.
I have no love for either Griffith or his film (a film which he hoped would “transform every man in [the] audience into a good Democrat” by the way). I’ve never been a huge GWTW fan either. Not my cuppa. But the idea that films which make us uncomfortable about our past should be banned, either by law or by custom, ought to set off all kinds of alarm bells.
All I know is if AMC doesn’t do a GWTW marathon on Thanksgiving Day this year, I’ll start a riot. Scarlett O’Hara is my spirit animal, especially when it comes to the holidays with extended family. How many times I’ve watched GWTW while rolling out pie crust and mentally preparing myself for the impending arrival of the in-laws. If she can live through the Yankees, I can get through another uncomfortable meal with passive aggressive relations.
Lou Lumenick is a left-winger.
By the way, I noted elsewhere that I recently read Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice for the first time. It’s the most anti-Semitic thing I’ve ever read. (Though one of the Canterbury Tales was cut from similar cloth.)
Shall we erase it from history? First of all, it’s Shakespeare.
But more importantly, it’s a record of the societal prejudices in that point in history. To wipe it out would be a mild form of Holocaust denial.
Are they trying to get kids to read it? Is there a place that tells us where all the sex scenes are?
The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe is pretty up there on the anti-Semitism scale. But interesting in its own right and as a precursor to Shakespeare’s Richard III.
Sometime, I fear, there will be no history of literature. There will only be what is political acceptable and what is forbidden.
On the subject, there was recently an article about the opening of a new airport in North Korea. It’s believed that the Supreme Leader had the architect killed.
Apparently, at one point, work was suspended. Quoth the article:
There was a time when something like that would sound like crazy talk.
Gone with the Wind is probably one of the best movies ever made. Hands down.
94% currently at rotten tomatoes. Made 100 times its budget in the box office.
Anyway, you can’t make a movie “go away”. So this is all silly theatricals by the usual suspects.
The scene in the clip linked by James actually depicts when General Hood set fire to the Atlanta railroad depot prior to Sherman’s entry into the city. All but one of the rail lines had been cut (literally) and Hood took a scorched-earth approach to leave nothing militarily useful behind.
That clip, by the way, was the first scene filmed in the movie–they burned down a backlot on the Selznick International (now called Culver Studios) property. Vivien Leigh had not yet been cast for the role so if you watch again, the long shots show “Scarlett” covering her face with a shawl.
Plus, Max Steiner’s music is awesome.
9th,
You mean Tecumseh didn’t burn Atlanta??!! Oh Man, Now I’m really depressed.
Regards,
Jim
9th – David Selznick was an independent producer. The backlot fire at Culver was, at the time, RKO. One of the larger sets burned to the ground was King Kong’s temple.
At the time, Selznick was Louis B. Mayer’s son-in-law and he coveted MGM’s biggest star, Clark Gable. That’s how MGM got distribution rights and eventually, the whole picture.
EJ–Of course, you’re right. The golden age of Hollywood–when huge sets were built with human hands and not computer mice….
James, Union troops did, indeed, burn a great deal of what was left after the Confederates evacuated. A lot of the city had been damaged by Union shelling during the seige. They concentrated on blowing up warehouses and roundhouses near the rail lines. The Confederacy made excellent use of railroads during the war…manouvering troops and materiel quickly.
A Catholic priest, Fr. Tom O’Reilly, is credited with appealing to Sherman’s staff to spare the Catholic church, several other churches, city hall and the courthouse. These buildings were occupied by Union troops, but they were spared. In the novel, the O’Hara family is very Catholic…less so in the movie.
Well OK. Now I can sleep soundly.
Regards,
Jim
Don’t despair – he spent the 15 years following the war burning out Indian villages, a skill he picked up prior to the Civil War while burning out the Seminoles.
I loved this piece and the comments.
But for the record, I absolutely hated the movie. I have never had any patience for stupid women.
(chuckle) Western Lit would be pretty sparse without Characters Acting Stupidly.
Melanie, though. Melanie is practically a saint, and she’s a good influence on Scarlett.
“Characters” I get.
But I hold women to a higher standard.
iWe – GWTW is a chick thing. From the day it was published to today.
I’ve only seen the movie twice, once on television (NBC paid a boatload for one showing in 1976) and once in a restored movie palace where forcing a movie shot in 4:3 ratio onto a wide screen annoyed the crap out of me.
Scarlett is just annoying. Melanie is TOO good. Ashley is foppish. Gable carried the picture as Rhett. Selznick made a deal with the devil to get him but it saved the picture.
Randal,
Listen my friend the Seminoles would slip into your camp for a little night raid and butcher your men. Assuming you didn’t die of Malaria.
Regards,
Jim
EJ, and why they gave Robert Donat the Best Actor is beyond me. Sweet performance, but the equivalent of nominating the next Republican in line. If the Academy wanted to give Spencer Tracy the nod for Boys Town so be it.
Gable proved that real men cry, even in 1939.
9th – I read somewhere that LB Mayer lobbied to prevent Gable from getting the Oscar.
Gable was loaned out to Columbia as a punishment in 1934 and ended up winning the Oscar for “It Happened One Night” and Mayer didn’t want him to win again for another non-MGM picture.
The story could be just that – a story. But Mayer could have had an eye on contract talks. He was not a well loved man. His funeral was well attended and was said to populated by folks who mostly showed up to make sure he was really dead.
By the time Sherman’s gang got to Columbia, SC they were burning churches to the ground. After looting of course.
Mark Steyn points out today that GWTW has been banned before. The Nazis banned it when they found that the occupied French identified with the Southerners and saw the invading Germans as Yankees. No Rhett for you!
It strikes me as unfair criticism to expect a film made in 1939 to have 21st century sensibilities. People who are going to take pen to paper (fingers to keyboard) to discuss the film have an obligation to educate themselves as to what the world was like at that time. (I’m not talking about criticizing its artistic merit.)
This reminds me of the way people criticize Thomas Jefferson for owning slaves. As if his critics wouldn’t have if they were born into a wealthy planter family in 18th century Virginia.
I can’t imagine why they would do that.
Just like the people who claim they would have stood up to Hitler in 1936 and are now cheering on a nuclear deal with Iran…
Because the purpose of history is to gloat at how stupid dead people were and not to learn anything from their mistakes and/or successes.