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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
Very, very well said.
Yes.
This one’s for you, James Gawron.
God forbid we actually have a historically actuate narrative which is culturally correct for the time it is portraying. Liberals hate history because history itself teaches conservative values.
New Headline: New York Post demands that Hattie McDaniel’s family give back the Oscar
This is elegantly stated.
You’ve given the answer to a puzzle America is struggling to solve today; an answer so many have either missed or couldn’t put into clear words.
My hat is tipped to you, Richard.
This paragraph will be cited by me often in combating politically correct revisions of history.
Instead of “trigger warnings” (itself an ever so frightening firearms metaphor) we should insist on instead using “bubble warnings” when any idea, book, article, film or other art work is not consistent with PC orthodoxy and the experience of which would take one outside the bubble of comfortable hates and caricature.
I think the “bubble” metaphor is useful in that I can grant people the right to stay in theirs but they have no right to order me inside. Whereas if we accept the notion of “offensiveness” implicit in ‘trigger warnings’ then the burden is always on the non-PC to conform.
No twenty-first American of any race, ethnicity or religions thinks slavery is or ever was a good idea. One lesson of history is that really bad ideas sometimes command the support of ordinary good people (loyal Southerners in 1860, patriotic Germans in the 1930s, anti-authoritarian revolutionaries who become authoritarians, Obama supporters, etc.). Accepting and addressing the complexity of moral decisions and what it means for our own vulnerability only happens in outside the bubble. Reducing people to caricatures based on very narrow, anachronistic ideological measures is what you do inside the bubble. That it is vulnerable to being popped should not be my problem.
ISIS smashes cultural antiquities in Palmyra last week. Now we are talking about getting rid of “Gone With the Wind” in America. Maybe we have been spoiled and the barbarism is the natural state of affairs in human life.
I think there are a few magnificent ironies in trying to eliminate “Gone With the Wind.” One is that the first Oscar-winning performance by an American-American woman will be relegated to museums, hidden from public view. Another is that the white male hero of the film says the person who’s opinion and respect he would really like a female American-American (in a movie from 1939, no less.) Off to the basement with that.
Someday, I guess they will move to ban Fahrenheit 451 for its negative portrayal of censorship.
Not to mention that the climactic love scene, when Rhett carries Scarlet upstairs to bed under protest, is pretty unambiguously rape.
Excellent post.
Let’s start a list of all the creative works that would have to be removed from the public view based on the standard the politically correct left wants to apply to GWTW. Here are a few:
That’s a stunning still photo from GWTW at the top of the post – simple, beautiful, human. Qualities that are anathema to the artistic left, just as the film’s story is to the ideological left.
It seems to me that if you ban a book or film from the past that does not meet current thought, you could not produce books or film today on the fact they could be offensive sometime in the future. We need to use disappearing ink and film. It would prevent a lot of future anguish and upset. It assumes education is a failure and will be into the future.
I have seen the film Gone with the Wind multiple times, and what comes to mind is not the background of the war, but that it is a love story. The difference between GWTW and the Titanic or Pearl Harbor is the historical events around the story. GWTW had better historical reporting. I think the Titanic was pretty much pop junk. As my brother said (out loud in the theater while watching the scene where the boat is sinking, and the captain looks sadly at the audience), “Or yah, you expect me to feel something about this guy without developing his character.”
In a recent Milt Rosenberg podcast, Ed Hirsch stated that in order to communicate well, the unspoken that is assumed both parties know is vital in making the spoken make sense. If you cannot realize that history happened before you were born, you will never be able to understand current events or make future judgements.
Excellent piece. My “rule” has always been that everything should be judged in a way that is mindful of the context of its own times.
If, a couple of generations from now, killing animals for food consumption in industrialized nations is seen as barbaric, I would hope that our ever-increasing narcissism will not have reached the point of condemning our ancestors for eating burgers. But it probably will.
The more pressing issue is that this impulse to purge has no natural end. It continues unless it is actively and successfully opposed. Yesterday, it’s The Dukes of Hazzard. Today, it’s Gone with the Wind. Tomorrow, it might well be Back to the Future.
To wit:
Can anybody say “Fahrenheit 451”?
The funny thing is that “Fahrenheit 451” was embraced by the left because it feared what it view the right as doing in relation to the cold war. Now it describes what the left is doing for its own reasons.
We criticize the Taliban for blowing up the ancient Buddha statues, and ISIS for destroying priceless Assyrian monuments and artifacts. We say they are wiping out the remains of ancient civilizations. They would probably reply that these things are moral abominations in the eyes of God, and that God’s law trumps historic preservation.
Exercise for the class: When Americans go on a moral crusade to remove and in some cases destroy Confederate Civil War monuments and other such cultural artifacts, how is that different? Please don’t engage in the following sort cheap reasoning:
I don’t endorse Assyrian imperialism. I’m not a Buddhist (though at this rate, who knows?) And I am not an apologist for slavery or the Confederacy. But I venerate the remains of lost civilizations, not because those civilizations were necessarily good, but because they are signposts of human development, ingenuity, and ambition, and sometimes as warnings of what human beings can do at their worst. We preserve the remains of many cultures that practiced human sacrifice and genocide, for goodness’ sake. Let’s demonstrate some perspective.
An excellent piece, beautifully articulated. (Although the headline led me to expect a different argument.)
How have The Merchant of Venice and Oliver Twist and The Taming of the Shrew survived the censors? Or have they?
Claire,
Obviously, whoever wrote that little blurb of idiocy does not grasp the central idea of the a priori. Aphilosophical nihilism masquerading as judgement.
Now as far as “Gone With the Wind” goes, I simply can’t understand the problem. Whenever I see the film I root for General Sherman. He burned Atlanta.
Frankly Claire, I don’t give a damn.
Regards,
Jim
Gone With The Wind has some very forward-thinking ideas about women (the part about abusing convicts aside), but it’s fascinating that Margaret Mitchell never had Scarlett’s character apply her changes in thinking about women (a “pleasant fiction” that women were helpless and had no head for business) to slaves. The parallels between how women and slaves were viewed is astonishing, but Scarlett never once thinks, “Hey, everyone around me said that women can’t run a lumber yard, but here I am, feeding my family. Everyone also says that slaves need us to think for them, and maybe that’s not right, either. Mammy and Pork seem to do a darn good job of thinking for themselves.”
It’s not a simple book (or movie). Scarlett thinks simply about moral and cultural issues, but the actual work of art is quite complex. That might have something to do with how it has endured for the better part of a century – a century that has seen a remarkable transformation in the civil rights of African-Americans. It is completely unlike, say, a jar of urine with a crucifix in it, or a Pope made out of condoms – pieces of “art” that are blunt, morally simplistic, and leave nothing for discussion or thought.
If you haven’t read 1984 recently, go do so. It is taking on a whole new (different) relevance that wasn’t there 20 or so years ago.
…ahhhh…all is not lost. If a young girl can do a video like this then there is still hope. I call him “Tecumseh” those who knew him more intimately called him “Uncle Billy”.
Wait a second. How could I have left out the best Uncle Billy quote of them all.
A saner man there never was.
Regards,
Jim
I appreciate what you’ve written, Richard, but I’ll respectfully disagree on two points: I do dispute Gone With the Wind’s supposed racism, and I disagree in charging it with a cavalier attitude towards slavery. To both counts, I say that it depicts people. Individual people, with their individual qualities, faults, and strengths. Some were slaves, some were masters, and others were neither. They acted out their lives in the context they found themselves in, and that doesn’t mean that a depiction of them and their time has to slant things or write them to a theme that flatters our modern egos. In fact, to do so is generally cheap and lazy writing, and it would detract from the excellent quality of this work.
Depiction of both slaves and masters generally accepting their lot in life isn’t either racist or cavalier about slavery. It’s how things actually were. We’re projecting our modern obsessions backwards, and I’m glad to have a book and a movie that doesn’t assume that everything taking place in the 1860s must be about race. I believe, even, that this is truer to the era it depicts than the typical work that wants race and slavery to be the theme. It’s anecdotal, but this is also the impression I get of the time from my family’s writings of the time. We have my great-great grandmother’s diary, kept through the war, as well as her letters to family and friends, and my great-great grandfather’s letters to her. Her family had owned slaves but freed them 17 years before Tennessee seceded (she was a solid secessionist), and his family still had some (he voted against secession—my family is a bit embarassed by this today—but of course volunteered for the Confederate Army, which redeems him). She writes in both letters and diary on the politics and events of the time, but slavery just isn’t a theme. There was so much more to life, for better and worse. The only mention of the institution she makes is tangential—she worries about how their former slaves are doing in Liberia, after a neighbor had traveled there and reported bad conditions.
If anyone is interested, we scanned a few pages of the diary here, when A&E did a documentary on her: http://teva.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p15138coll6/id/2776/rec/4
Anyway, I don’t mean to hit Richard too hard for what is really a mild comment, but I want to speak out in defense of a wholehearted enjoyment of the movie, without imposing a “but.”
Yes. As Morituri Te mentions above, if we can admire the films of Leni Riefenstahl without approving of their message, there’s no reason why GWTW should be any different.
In the specific case of GWTW, though, I’m not even sure I’d agree that the film advances evil ideas. To me it seems obviously to be set in a mythical Golden Age that never existed. It might be based on a romanticized view of the antebellum South, but it’s about as realistic a place as Oz or Narnia. I don’t know whether Margaret Mitchell really believed the Old South was like that, but nobody believes it today, and a movie isn’t going to make them.
I was going to mention the Taliban and ISIS, but Quinn and Morituri Te have done a good job of capturing that already. It is sad that some of the same people bemoaning those actions are the ones leading the destruction over here.
I am certain that many who have jumped on the anti-GWTW bandwagon have never read the book or have never seen the entire film. GWTW is a tremendous social history…Margaret Mitchell’s family was a part of the rebuilding of Atlanta and many details in the story are from her family history.
If you can’t watch the burning of Atlanta and not shed a tear, well…cold.
Tim, your great-great-grandmother’s diary is fascinating…written, it appears, on ledger paper. How much does that detail tell us? No fancy writing paper, just whatever she could find…perhaps few accounts to keep in the midst of national turmoil. Lovely, legible handwriting. Thanks for linking.
Re comment #4: Hattie McDaniels Oscar is missing. It was on display at Howard University and disappeared sometime in the 1970’s I believe.
It is not the traditional 13″ statue. Back in 1939 Best Supporting Actors received a plaque.
Those evil southern slave owners had it coming. Why should we cry over them?
Thanks, 9th District! I’m pleased to see you noticed the paper she used. In fact, her family owned a store, and she kept her diary in a ledger book. She also wrote a play for her students (she was a schoolteacher), which she describes in the diary, and I was pleased to discover a brief draft of it on a back page of the same diary.
She was a talented writer, making beautiful and fascinating descriptions of even mundane life. But for most of the War, she was living in occupied territory, and not much of life had even the chance to be mundane. Her diary would be worth a movie, I think. She describes what it was like to live under enemy occupation. Two close calls with Federal troops searching for her brother, who was home on leave, but was out of uniform and would have been executed as a spy if they’d caught him. She and her girlfriend act as you’d expect, teasing the soldiers, who object to being called “Yankees.” “Then doff the Blue, and we’ll stop,” she replies. She’s terrified as they brush past his hanging uniform without noticing it, and then she’s embarassed as the polite captain says he has to search her bedroom: “And there were my hoops, hanging on the wall in all their glory…” Of course, a neighbor was acting as a spy for the enemy, and she suspected whom.
A gentleman friend, Robert Cotton, is home convalescing after an injury, but everybody knows he’s better and thinks poorly of him, considering him a malingerer. Still, he’s the only educated male company around, so she tolerates him. He brings her books on phrenology (she’s “skeptical of the new science”), discusses the education of women (she’d graduated college), and she puts up with his reputation. But I found out a few years ago that Cotton was in a Confederate special forces unit, “Coleman’s Scouts,” which operated behind enemy lines. So now I suspect his injury and malingering was a cover story to operate in occupied territory without being picked up.
I need to reread this again. It’s been years. And I should put my great-grandfather’s complete transcription online, where others can read it more easily.
Exactly which children are reading The Critique of Pure Reason? When I was in college, the rumor was that German philosophy students would read English translations because it was helpful to have at least one person (i.e. the translator) take a crack at what it might mean.
Unless by children, we are referring to college-age philosophy students. In which case, never mind.
We watched Gone with the Wind for the first time this past year. Leaving all the higher social meanings aside… Scarlett was a selfish, conniving, nasty character. Following her around wasn’t exactly pleasant.
Thanks for the link, Tim. I love reading letters/ diaries from the period and books based on same. I’d appreciate that complete transcription. Those papers are, to me, priceless.
Right, Probable Cause. The movie (and book) intentionally depicts so much of her bad character that our sympathies really lie with the supporting characters. And yet, for me, anyway, that just makes it all the more impressive and surprising when she uses this to serve something higher than herself—the survival of the family, for example. Interesting that she’s pretty much a stand-in for the author. It takes some guts to expose your faults to the world this way.