Gone With The Wind (1939)
Dir. Victor Fleming, George Cukor (uncredited), Sam Wood (uncredited)
Written by Sidney Howard, from the novel by Margaret Mitchell
Starring Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable, Olivia de Havilland, Leslie Howard
I first watched GONE WITH THE WIND back in the heady first year or so of my transition from casual movie-goer to active cinephile, when I was trying to familiarize myself with some of the acknowledged classics of the medium that I had never encountered in my youth. That puts my sole previous viewing about twenty years ago, and my memory of it was pretty fuzzy; I remembered that it was startlingly racist, and that it was otherwise boring. That’s pretty much it.
I think my younger self was probably alienated by the stagey, dated melodrama, the rhythms of which would have been wholly unfamiliar to me at the time. And besides, what teenage boy was going to sit with rapt attention through a three-hour will-they-won’t-they relationship drama, no matter how epic the backdrop? But at any rate, revisiting it two decades later, I find that my original take was only half-right; it definitely is still startlingly racist, but it's also definitely not boring. In fact, even with the epic runtime, it’s pretty densely packed with incident. Much of that incident does not play the same way to modern eyes that it would have in 1939, of course, but that probably makes the movie more interesting, on average, rather than less. Enough so that this viewing left me wondering if the movie is possibly a little more nuanced –and perhaps even subversive?-- than it generally gets credit for. In some ways. Maybe.
I realize that’s a pretty bold suggestion to make about one of the most outwardly regressive movies that is still watched with any regularity, and there’s certainly a danger in minimizing the film’s moral odiousness. And make no mistake, it is odious, in plenty of ways which are by this point so obvious and extensively documented that I feel the need to mention them only in passing, confident that an in-depth accounting would be familiar to the point of tedium for any modern viewer. But all the same, there is, I think, a case to be made that the film may not be quite so straightforward an act of revisionist propaganda as it might at first seem. The root of this interpretation is drawn from the film’s strangely contradictory nature. In short, the disconnect between what the film says and what it depicts is sometimes so extreme that it’s hard to reconcile as anything but subversive.
The most obvious example is the very heart of the film
itself. Despite being billed as the "greatest romance of all time,"
it's almost unbelievable what a horrible, disturbing relationship Scarlet
O'Hara and Rhett Butler have. She is a profoundly selfish, unlikable character,
and he's slightly more likable only in that he provides the audience with a
surrogate to constantly mock and demean her. She openly hates him, and he doesn't
appear to think much better of her, except that he wants to fuck her. The only
rationale ever offered as to why these two repellent prigs should be together
is that they are kindred spirits… in the sense that they're both shameless,
ego-maniacal grifters who will do anything to get ahead. And they don't even
seem to relate very much on that level. Perhaps the single most positive
interaction they have in the whole movie is when he violently rapes her and the
movie makes sure we know she loved it. The word “passion” is appropriate only
in the sense of “passion play.”
I'm sure when I first saw the movie, I assumed all this was a terrible miscalculation: man, I can't believe they thought we'd identify with these sociopaths. Today, this seems more like a feature than a bug. If audiences ever took this to be a swoony romance, they did so in direct defiance of what the movie is overtly depicting. In fact, the movie seems to more or less openly present Scarlett as an anti-hero, a poisonous black hole of a human who will destroy anyone she comes in contact with in the vain, single-minded pursuit of a meaningless, materialistic delusion, more along the lines of THERE WILL BE BLOOD's Daniel Plainview than TITANIC's Rose. The movie is interested in Scarlett's long, miserable journey of self-destruction, but I don't know that it's necessarily sympathetic; at the very least, it is very closely attuned to (some of) the harm she's causing, and makes certain the audience is equally aware. In fact, it has a real penchant for kicking her while she's down; even at moments when we might be tempted to at least feel sorry for her (the end of her harrowing journey through war-torn Georgia, the final scene when she's thrown away everything that had any hope of offering her some happiness) the arc of the scene inevitably builds to a reveal of what a delusional monster she is. At the very least, the movie is clear that Scarlett is entirely the author of her own misery. Even the tribulations she isn’t directly responsible for – the desolation of her family homestead, for example—have the direct effect of making her a worse person, rather than bringing out the best in her.
If the movie is a critique rather than a celebration of its protagonist, is it too much, then, to wonder if the movie also harbors doubts about the story's much-celebrated veneration of the Old South? Is it possible that one of the most famously reactionary movies of all time is actually a little bit more ambivalent than its reputation might suggest? After all, Scarlett's destructive obsession (which the movie more or less unambiguously presents as a character flaw) stems from her romantic fixation --one can hardly call it love-- with Ashley Wilkes, positioned by the movie as the avatar of the chivalrous, gentlemanly high-society Southerner whose passing the narration lachrymosely laments. But surely I am not the only person who questions if the movie feels the same way. Wilkes is, in fact, portrayed as an almost unbelievably pathetic character, and played with all the charisma of a sodden slice of unbuttered whitebread (actor Leslie Howard reportedly hated making the movie, and it shows; never has an erstwhile romantic lead looked so miserable and defeated). He’s fretful, utterly ineffective, unable to fully commit to either his dull marriage with his sexless, naïve wife (Olivia de Havilland) or to the torrid affair Scarlett is begging him for, ultimately ending up a cowed lacky, dependent on Scarlett’s largess. What exactly is supposed to be appealing, here? And speaking of appealing, let’s refresh our memory about the unhappy circumstance which keeps Scarlett from her ideal man. Why, it’s his semi-arranged marriage… to his first cousin, under the rather profoundly disturbing theory that “like must marry like”! Surely no 20th century audience would be expected to be nostalgic for that quaint little custom of the halcyon days of the genteel South, not even in 1939.
And there’s more: Southern high society is consistently shown to be ruthlessly hierarchical and populated mostly by petty, hypocritical pedants, obsessed with restrictive social status. The movie’s most sympathetic characters are the outsiders and outcasts, including Rhett, brothel madam Belle (Ona Munson, THE SHANGHAI GESTURE), and even enslaved woman “Mammy” (Hattie McDaniel; we’ll get to her later), and most of the turns the movie presented as “victories” come from Scarlett’s fearless defiance of the restrictive social norms around her. In fact, even Scarlett herself is clinging to a system which was at best ambivalent to her from birth; as the daughter of an Irish Catholic, even her wealth and whiteness can’t entirely mask the suspicion and contempt her neighbors have for this family of “outsiders.”
But at least she’s rich; that much keeps her out of the ranks of the one group that the movie truly, openly despises: poor people. Poor whites, in particular; the movie doesn’t have a sufficient concept of black personhood to hold them in contempt for their poverty, or at least doesn’t feel comfortable excoriating them for it (which is arguably even worse, but as I said, we’ll come to racism in due time). But it has a revulsion for poor white people which makes its cartoonishly villainous portrayal of Northerners look mild by comparison. Even the enslaved people sneer in contempt at the “white trash” around the aristocratic slaveholders who are the only group afforded any concept of personhood. Indeed, it is Scarlett’s intense, all-consuming desire to never sink to their level which motivates the entire second half of the film. And well she should try to avoid that fate; in one of the story’s most mutely startling sequences, she is accosted by two ruffians while riding through what is essentially a homeless encampment. She is saved by a heroic former slave (!) who happens to be nearby, and no harm is done. She is confused, then, when the men in her life all vanish that evening for a mysterious “political meeting” which obviously has something to do with her experience during the day. We don’t find out until she does that their goal is simple and somewhat shocking: they’re going to murder the homeless people living in this shanty town. A population, I should stress, which until that morning also included former slave Big Sam (Everett Brown, KING KONG [uncredited]) who just saved her life.
Again, the story and the characters around Scarlett treat this turn of events as natural and inevitable. But there are little cues that make me wonder if the movie expects the audience to feel the same way. For one thing, it’s one of the few times we see Scarlett genuinely a little cowed by the furious indignation the other women direct at her over having inspired this dangerous misadventure. They hold her responsible, which she seems to find genuinely surprising and perplexing. That means the dramatic crux of the scene is on her feelings of chagrin and unfair persecution – a typically selfish framing for the character, except that for once, she really does seem to be unfairly blamed for something she couldn’t have predicted. This framing suggests that even if the movie never asks us to seriously consider the horror of the murders our male characters have just perpetrated, it does ask us to see this incident overall as a bad thing, the result of a brittle, inflexible “honor culture” which makes dehumanizing, irrational demands of its adherents and then places itself beyond question. Rhett, generally positioned by the film as the voice of reason, all but says as much. In that sense, the incident is a microcosm for the movie’s perspective on the American Civil War itself, which it portrays as the result of arrogant fools spoiling over a fight to prove their macho bona fides. It is certainly worth noting that the only thing that Ashley and Rhett ever agree on is that the war is an obviously bad idea, even if their own entanglement in Southern “honor culture” demands that they participate in it, anyway.
None of this is to say, of course, that GONE WITH THE WIND is in any way enlightened, or even presents a recognizable moral landscape to the modern viewer.* In fact, I think there is a more prosaic explanation for these moments of potential criticism, which seem so odd in a movie that literally begins with the on-screen text “There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South… Here in this pretty world Gallantry took its last bow.” The explanation is simple: the movie was made by a bunch of rich Hollywood sociopaths who could give two craps about some nostalgic drivel about rich inbreds two generations and a continent removed from them. They knew Americans were buying it, though –the novel was an instant bestseller just a few years earlier-- and were more than happy to provide them with any desired product in exchange for becoming wealthy beyond their most extravagant dreams. But that mercantile motivation makes it more of an interesting watch; a sincere, deeply committed love letter to Lost Cause nostalgia might be a noxious cultural curio, as with BIRTH OF A NATION. But a cynical, mercenary effort to sell America a love letter to Lost Cause nostalgia, spearheaded by a first-generation immigrant, and a Jewish one at that – now that’s interesting.
It means that much of this incendiary material is presented without the ardent personal investment which might cause a true propagandist to turn defensive. A true believer might, I think, carefully soften up some of the less palatable details in the service of creating a more sympathetic story. Under the auspices of cynical Hollywood rich guys, with barely a single native Southerner in the whole cast, the only investment is financial, and so startling little details like the Wilkes’ incestuous marriage are just left out in the open, to defend themselves, while the movie steams on with the narrative. Thus, the finished film has an odd, almost postmodern edge to it: it is the simulacrum of Lost Cause Apologia, a reflection of the aspects of this particular fantasy that Hollywood thought Americans would want to buy (correctly, it turns out), rather than a committed philosophical manifesto being offered for approval. As such, a source material which is, by all accounts, earnestly celebratory of the “Old South” is very lightly warped into something more dispassionate and, perhaps, revealing.
This approach, of course, takes you only so far; producer David O. Selznick probably didn’t harbor a great deal of nostalgia for the mythologized Old South of the opening narration, but the book’s –and therefore the movie’s-- racism was something of a different story. That was still alive and well, and very much a part of everyday life in Hollywood, and the movie is much more comfortable with its casual, dehumanizing racism than it is with the more baroque nostalgia for 19th-century Southern culture. In fact, it takes it utterly for granted. And yet, it is also not wholly unaware that this has the potential to be a problem; as the astute HBO introduction by University of Chicago professor Jacqueline Stewart points out, Selznick was well-aware that the book was broadly considered racist, and went out of his way to assure skeptics that his movie would handle the subject sensitively. And I think it likely that sensitivity genuinely was his intention, even if it was for purely practical public-relations reasons. And it may have been more than that: as the son of Jewish-Lithuanian immigrants, he may even have felt more keenly than most Americans the potential for harm in racially-charged media; responding to a socially-conscious Rabbi who warned him about the indefensible content of the book, he wrote “I hasten to assure you that as a member of a race that is suffering very keenly from persecution these days, I am most sensitive to the feelings of minority peoples.”
But even if his intentions were completely genuine –and you don’t get to be a big-time Hollywood producer without learning how to be at least a little disingenuous—the end result is absolutely painful to behold. Still, there’s the unmistakable sense that the movie is trying to be sensitive about race. Failing, granted, and spectacularly, but you can actually see here the first feeble flickerings of thought that the way African-Americans are portrayed on film might be a subject worthy of consideration. This was more or less entirely new to the mainstream Hollywood system. Everett Brown, who plays “Big Sam” here, had previously enjoyed a career almost entirely composed of threatening “native” characters in xenophobic jungle tales (for which he mostly went uncredited, including in KING KONG just a scant six years prior). Not so in GONE WITH THE WIND! Here, the movie presents him in an almost obsequiously positive light; he’s perpetually cheerful and good-natured, strong but gentle, and heroically saves Scarlett from what is clearly the threat of rape (he is rewarded with a spectacularly patronizing “you’re a good boy, Sam,” and then is never mentioned again, but the movie clearly agrees that he’s “good”). It is, from the perspective of the white filmmakers, obviously a role that no black person could object to, or see as racist – he’s a hero!
In fact, the movie is awash with black characters that it clearly likes; in the rare cases we see black characters portrayed negatively, the movie very deliberately moves to insulate itself from the hateful caricatures of BIRTH OF A NATION (a movie just 24 years old in 1939, the same age as JERRY MAGUIRE is right now). When the camera disapproving pans by a group of “uppity” newly freed former slaves, foolishly agreeing to vote for smarmy Northern carpetbaggers, the movie very carefully puts its disapproval on the face of the conservative Mammy, while Scarlett walks by with a very cultivated nonjudgmental detachment. Likewise, when Scarlett is accosted in the shantytown, it’s by a mixed-race pair, one white, one black. There is no thrilling threat to the virtue of Southern White women without some racial animus, but the movie again deliberately and specifically demonstrates that the homeless white man is the ringleader and the more aggressive villain; the black guy is just his sidekick. See? Nothing racial about it! And hey, she’s saved from one bad black man by another, good black man! No negative stereotyping here!
And that, of course, brings us inevitably to Hattie McDaniel and “Mammy,” perhaps the quintessential paradigm of old-Hollywood racial depictions. And it also, in a way, brings us to the heart of what is so loathsome –and yet instructive, from a scholarly perspective-- about the film’s racial depictions. See, GONE WITH THE WIND likes Mammy; it likes her a lot more than it likes most of its white characters, in fact. Rhett, who rarely has anything nice to say about anyone, calls her “a smart old soul, and one of the few people I know whose respect I’d like to have.” And the movie wholeheartedly agrees; that he manages to win her respect is an integral part of the movie’s case that we’re allowed to respect him too, despite his disreputable rakishness. Consequently, the movie positions Mammy as the voice of folksy, grounded sensibility. It imagines her as an island of stability in a chaotic world, a generous presence who will tolerate no nonsense but is ultimately a source of great comfort and warmth.
What is cannot imagine, alas, is that she has any interior life whatsoever. And that’s the problem; the movie takes great care to avoid being hateful, but it simply lacks any concept of actual black personhood. Mammy –the only African-American character the movie has even a little bit of interest in; the less said about Butterfly McQueen’s** mortifying clownish “Prissy” the better – is, in fact, essentially a “magical negro,” existing wholly as a reflection of the white characters’ lives, never independent of them. That she has any thoughts or opinions whatsoever about any topic other than lives of the white people she is serving is completely outside the film’s ability to comprehend. And that laces the movie’s affection for her with a corrosive implication that her enormously likeable sensibility and warmth arise intrinsically from the very fact which today identifies her as oppressed and exploited: she “knows her place.”
It is this underlying assumption that makes GONE WITH THE WIND so pernicious. The movie is not, perhaps, willing to mount a full-throated defense of slavery: very noticeably, the one single time the subject comes up for debate, the pro-slavery argument is put into the mouth of Ashley Wilkes, making a characteristically pathetic attempt to justify his discomfort with white slave labor*** after Scarlett mocks the former slaveowner’s sudden squeamishness. “Well, that was different. We didn’t treat them [poorly],” he sputters, a defense so transparently ridiculous and self-serving that Scarlett doesn’t even bother to acknowledge it (he reluctantly agrees to go along with white slavery anyway after being told paid labor is too expensive. A true paragon of Gentlemanly virtue). As near as I can tell, that’s the only explicit commentary on the subject of slavery as an institution in the whole movie; the word appears ten times in the 256 pages of script, but only six times in actual dialogue, and most of those aren’t in reference to chattel slavery (Scarlett whines, “I slave all day…” for example, a choice of words that would today be described as “unfortunate”). Discounting the opening narration which bemoans the loss of an Old South with its “Slaves and Masters,” the only other direct mention of slavery comes from a pre-war argument between Rhett and a roomful of Southern aristocrats spoiling for war. Scarlett’s own adorable Irish father makes plain what the war is about: “''We've borne enough insults from the meddlin' Yankees. It's time we made them understand we'll keep our slaves with or without their approval.''**** Yikes. But Rhett responds less bullishly: “I’m saying very plainly that the Yankees are better equipped than we [are]… All we have is cotton…and slaves… and arrogance.” Hardly a full-throated condemnation, but in context certainly difficult to read in a positive light.
It is, in fact, the absence of direct discussion of slavery that speaks the loudest. It is a subject the movie seems eager to avoid, which, given the context, becomes conspicuous very quickly. And the reason for that reticence is pretty clear: GONE WITH THE WIND may be a little uncomfortable with “slavery” as an institution, but it lacks even the vaguest interrogation of white supremacy. Consequently, once you begin pulling on threads, you quickly discover here's not much difference at all between outright slavery and a very slightly more ambiguous arrangement of racial hierarchy which the movie is enthusiastically comfortable with. So, better to leave that whole subject as unexplored as possible. That Mammy and “Pork” (Oscar Polk, UNDERWORLD [not the vampires vs werewolves ones]) were enslaved is not something the movie wants to discuss, because that would mean it had to address why, even after they’re technically “free,” their station in life does not appear to change at all. They remain on the plantation, working the same jobs, and if they’re getting paid now there’s no evidence of it. Slavery might have been something of a misstep, but the basic hierarchical arrangement of the races, with blacks solidly at the bottom of the caste system, is something the movie accepts as so natural and inherent that it does not even warrant a comment. It’s not just that these black characters seem completely comfortable with slavery as an institution; it’s that the movie doesn’t even seem to consider that they might not. That is what white supremacy looks like; that even with slavery gone, Scarlett –and the white movie producers 66 years later—can’t conceive of a world where black people don’t naturally respond to white orders.
And this is still deeply relevant, because in many ways GONE WITH THE WIND set a tone in the popular culture which is only now being seriously challenged on a large scale. While it obviously wasn’t the sole factor to define what the better part of a century of cinematic representation would subsequently look like, one can’t help but imagine that becoming the top-grossing film of all time (a title it holds to this day; adjusted for inflation, it made ~3.7-3.8 billion, with a “B,” dollars) had to be a pretty big hint to future directors and producers that this was a pretty good template for success. And what followed, to the dismay of many but to widespread public acceptance, was a continuation and extension of its basic guiding philosophy on racial depictions: the explicit avoidance of racial animus. No rapacious, bestial BIRTH OF A NATION characters, or, if that can’t be avoided, at least a nice minority supporting character on “our side” to balance things out, and maybe even an explicit condemnation of violence white racism if we’re really in the mood to feel saintly (and all else failing, a pity Oscar to a black actor to prove there are no hard feelings. McDaniel is fine in the part, but come on, there's barely a character here). These rules have been bent and broken at times, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not, sometimes for provocative artistic purposes, sometimes not. But the exceptions are of less interest than the remarkable stability and duration they’ve shown. There have always been activists and critics who deftly pointed out the limitation of these "rules" (as, indeed, there was plenty of contemporary criticism of GONE WITH THE WIND even upon its release) but these arguments seldom made any large-scale impact or got much cultural purchase outside academic and activist circles. And so it was that these rules –and the complete absence of almost any meaningful cinematic nonwhite perspective-- broadly served as a cultural template for the remainder of the 20th century, remaining robust, if not longer quite hegemonic, even to the present.
Indeed, it feels appropriate that GONE WITH THE WIND would have such an outsized cultural impact on the past century: is almost a perfectly representative movie for 20th century America, and in ways which go even beyond is frustrating racial ignorance. It is, after all, ultimately a movie about wanting the wrong things, for the wrong reasons, and being willing to destroy oneself and everything else in single-minded pursuit of those empty dreams. And within that tale of tragic miscalculation are nested a seemingly endless series of contradictions: an ostensible love story about a miserable, mutually corrosive pair of lovers, an earnest paean to a departed culture which gives every impression of being a miserable, soul-crushing dystopia, a work of historical fiction which misses everything important about that history, and all that the product of opportunistic hustlers calculating the best way to sell America a love letter rhapsodizing the time it almost destroyed itself. No wonder 20th-century America loved it; it is, I suppose, the movie 20th-century America deserved: a beautiful, charming shell wrapped about something utterly empty and meaningless. (And also, if I may offer one actual bit of legitimate cinematic criticism in these 4,000+ words, one which suffers from serious momentum problems in, like, the seventh act or whatever, when Scarlett and Rhett actually get together and end up stagnating for far too long before a series of clumsy duex ex machinas can come along and finally break them apart for good). Americans have always had a curious capacity to believe in any fantasy sold with enough confidence, and here is perhaps the ultimate expression of that tendecy, because to all available evidence, audiences throughout the decades have simply accepted what the movie tells them, and have rarely seemed interested in the disconnect with what it actually shows them.
Its enduring popularity simply proves that all these years later, the audience, like Scarlett herself, has still managed to stay delusional, is still desperately pursuing the wrong things for the wrong reasons, still clings furiously to a fictional past even while a genuinely promising future tenuously pulls at its sleeves. That the movie (if not necessarily the audience) so clearly sees this in its lead character, but not in itself, can make for a frustrating, even infuriating watch. But not, it turns out, an uninteresting one. Twenty years after my initial, dismissive viewing, I found the experience of revisiting GONE WITH THE WIND to be absolutely engrossing. Again like its central character, the movie is a contradiction: compelling, repulsive, pitiable, at once startlingly prescient and profoundly ignorant, part feckless brat, part steely visionary. But it’s definitely not boring. Right-wing fantasies about banning it aside, I hope its repellent politics don’t discourage future generations of filmgoers from revisiting it. It’s a movie which has a lot to teach America about itself, even if we don’t much like what it has to say about us.
****************************Fin
*Or anyway, to any modern viewer I can imagine having anything in common with; it retained the top spot in a list of America’s “favorite movies” as recently as a 2014 Harris Poll, for reasons I’m genuinely scared to delve into. (It didn’t do as well in readers’ polls conducted by Entertainment Weekly, Time Out, and others, although it still cracked the top twenty in each one.)
** Worth noting: McQueen herself seems to have been quite a fascinating, thoughtful person worthy of learning more about.
*** Crucial but widely unknown historical detail: the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution abolished slavery except as punishment for a crime. In a totally unrelated coincidence, more than century of mass incarceration of African-Americans followed.
**** Weird, I could have sworn all these modern-day neo-Confederates thought the war was about “States rights,” but not the right to do anything specific, just sort of the general principle. I guess they must not have seen GONE WITH THE WIND.
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