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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
Liberals decry the cultural ascendancy of white Europeans. Still they all want to live in modern Manhattan, DC and California, which they wouldn’t set foot in any of it for an extended period without plumbing, a Whole Foods and Starbucks.
It’s an undeserved romanticism of cultures that, quite frankly, haven’t produced much.
Accurately depicted in the film:
My wife likes to challenge people who claim they would have been on the side of angels during the Holocaust by pointing out what the abortion industry is doing and that they can join her in the fight. Never had one take her up on the offer. She hasn’t been as strong in the cause lately, but is hoping to start taking a more active role with the pro-life community soon.
Bishop—This sort of thing should make us all more humble in our judgements of our ancestors. We are often so certain we would have had the “right” opinions if we’d lived at the time, when most of us would have had whatever the conventional attitudes of the time were. We can’t really know, and it should tone down our modern pride.
This is such a critical and beautifully-put point.
And we don’t have to use abortion (about which there is some dispute about a “full” live) – we can talk about all the murder of Christians worldwide.
I suggest you make this a new post. Challenge liberals who just know they would have resisted Hitler.
Re: comment # 21
Margret Mitchell couldn’t have had any influence on the making of that movie. It’s radically different from her novel, even though the plot is about the same.
Not only does Mitchell’s book not reflect a romanticized view of the antebellum South, it intentionally reveals the horror and brutality undergirding Scarlett’s world of all-day barbecues, enamored suitors and green flowered dresses, by explicitly and implicitly telling you about socially accepted cruelty in an offhanded, seemingly non-judge mental way.
Examples from the first 4 chapters
Chapter 1
—The Tarleton twins tell Scarlett that their mother’s new stallion “trampled two darkies”. For all the importance they place on this, the stallion might just as well have trampled two stray dogs.
—Beatrice Tarleton forbids the whipping of horses and slaves. Gerald O’Hara did once have a slave whipped, but the slave forgot to care for a horse.
Chapter 2
—To avoid tearing her away from her mother, Gerald O’Hara buys 12 year old Prissy. He fears that if his neighbors knew he indulged slaves to this extent they’d question his sanity.
Chapter 3
—The “…..passing slave traders en route to the cane fields of Louisiana” are mentioned in passing.
— Gerald and Ellen O’Hara will cast into outer darkness (will condemn to a life of toil in the fields) slave boys past the age of ten who show no aptitude for any of the trades Tara requires. We can gather that they are then as anonymous, and as insignificant, as the two darkies trampled by Beatrice Tarleton’s horse. (And, relative to other slaveholders, Gerald and Ellen O’Hara are good and kind.)
In the novel GWTW, slavery is like a spirit the reader always vaguely senses. Intermittently, it’s as nakedly apparent as a talking snake. In at least the first 4 chapters of the book, all the characters are oblivious to it. Well…….all except one little girl, Prissy. Here’s how she’s described….
Chapter 4
“She was a brown little creature, with skinny legs like a bird and a myriad of pigtails carefully wrapped with twine sticking stiffly out from her head. She had sharp, knowing eyes that missed nothing and a studiedly stupid look on her face.”
Stephen King has nothing on Margret Mitchell.
Ansonia, You confirm what I said about people never having read the book in the first place. It didn’t span over one thousand pages discussing fashion and beaus.
Bit of trivia. The famous words from the movie’s opening night were from Clark Gable. But Gable wanted to boycott the opening. MGM did not want Hattie McDaniel to appear at the opening because of Georgia’s segregation laws and what here appearance might provoke. Ms. McDaniel had to persuade Clark Gable to appear.
It speaks very well of the man.
The movie GWTW tells us a lot about the U.S. at the end of the third decade of the 20th century. The book, among other things, tells us a lot about the history of the South, the essence of slavery anywhere, and about the meaning and power of relationships. I think we should all make a point of reading the book, seeing the movie, and encouraging our kids and grandkids to do the same. And—I don’t mean to sound paranoid, but—it might be a good idea to own a copy of both the movie and the book.
The Nazis criminalized “degenerate” art. This sort of censorship is a hallmark of fascism and no different.