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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(just kidding)
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