Gone with the Wind (Movie)

"As we talk in 2020, it’s been in the news because HBO chose to pull Gone with the Wind from its line-up until it could supply a context for it. It’s really interesting, because the African American scholar they asked to provide a context really said the bare minimum, that slavery was bad and that Gone with the Wind is bad mythology, if you will, that many people still hold to and cling to. I’m a child of the American South, although I was born in Oklahoma, which doesn’t fit anywhere in our North-South dichotomy; it was originally Indian Territory. But I grew up in Texas and Georgia and North Carolina and I now live in Austin, Texas. The university where I’ve taught for 30 years is a southern institution, and Waco, Texas, where it’s located, is one of the farthest western outposts of the antebellum South. There are mansions of cotton plantations on the banks of the river and Baylor is one of the few antebellum colleges and universities west of the Mississippi. I’m in this strange space where most of my adult life and my growing up years I’ve been swimming in the waters of Southern nostalgia. The official designation for this is ‘the Lost Cause.’ It comes from a number of historians and writers working right after the Reconstruction period that followed the American Civil War. Black people had made some advances and been given the opportunity not just to be freed from slavery, but to participate in American life. And as we see in Gone with the Wind , and as we see in Birth of a Nation —another film I write about at some length in my book—during the Reconstruction period there was an attempt to roll back those advances. Part of the mythology behind that was trying to create this myth of the great, noble Lost Cause. Early on in Gone with the Wind, there’s talk about this romantic, idyllic life that was tragically lost. It’s almost identical to the words used early on in Birth of a Nation. I pair those films together, even though they’re 25 years apart, because the same ideology is operating in both of them. You’ve got this nostalgia for the noble South, for the chivalric soldiers, for the lady-like feminine ideal. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The other piece of mythology that has to go along with that is you have to find a way to justify keeping people in bondage. I’m going to pull a book off the shelf behind me, but there’s a classic book on racism in American film by Donald Bogle. The title is tremendously offensive but necessary: Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretative History of Blacks in Films . Basically, what he’s doing in this book is tracing all of the different stereotypes of Blackness that have appeared in American film. Almost every one of those stereotypes gets represented in Gone with the Wind . We’ve got coons and pickaninnies—people who are childlike and really need a master to keep them safe and fed and warm. We’ve got an Uncle Tom character, who’s called Uncle Peter in the film. It’s really important to identify these two duelling mythologies that Gone with the Wind presents, so that we can have a conversation about this powerful and, honestly, really beautiful film. The cinematography is amazing, that sweeping musical theme just catches your heart. But we have to identify that this film is one of the great mythmakers about the Lost Cause of the South and one of the great perpetuators of the idea that Black people are not fully human. I write in my book, A Long, Long Way , that we want to celebrate what goes well as well as acknowledge the harmful things, and one of the great achievements of the film is that Hattie McDaniel brings a dignity and a humanity to her role as Mammy. This is a stereotypical role that we see all the way through American film—from Birth of a Nation to Get Out —it’s the character that James Baldwin called ‘the faithful retainer.’ Like Sam in Casablanca, Mammy in Gone with the Wind is a minor role, but she is a character who pushes back against the lead characters in the film and in some ways makes their growth possible. It’s not Hattie McDaniel’s character’s story. It’s not Dooley Wilson’s character’s story in Casablanca , but they both have a humanity and a dignity to them. And, as you know, Hattie McDaniel was the first African American to win an Academy Award. The story behind that is bracing. The awards were given out in a segregated hotel and she had to sit at the back of the room and then came forward to accept her award. We do want to celebrate every movement forward. There’s a great book on racism, Ibram Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America . One of the things that I admire about the book is that it points out that instead of this idea of racial progress that people like me—and possibly you—have held, that we are on this ascending climb towards justice, it’s more ‘one step forward, one step back’ because it’s an action/reaction. We elect a Black president and then a bunch of white people freak out and we get the most racist president of my lifetime. One of the really startling things is that when you look at Birth of a Nation from 1915 and Gone with the Wind from 1939, adjusted for inflation these are two of the top-grossing films. You have Titanic , but then trailing in the asterisks are these films that had this incredible cultural currency and were seen by millions and millions of people. That is a really important thing to note, because we’re not just talking about a critical success. We’re talking about a blockbuster film before we had that category for films. Everybody had seen Gone with the Wind , everybody was talking about Gone With the Wind . The simple act of casting Scarlett O’Hara was a one-year news bonanza and the fact that Vivien Leigh was cast was a scandal, because she was British, not a homegrown southern belle. Then there were Olivia de Havilland and Leslie Howard, because David O Selznick also just wanted Hollywood royalty in the film and many of those happened to be British. There’s this very strong sense that—like Get Out, which we’ll talk about in a minute—this is one of those films that dominated cultural discourse at the time it was out. “Most of my adult life and my growing up years I’ve been swimming in the waters of Southern nostalgia. The official designation for this is ‘the Lost Cause’” So, when we talk about ways that films can reinforce harmful mythology or establish more progressive mythology, this is a film that does both. It’s about 90 per cent of one and 10 per cent of the other. People who watched Gone with the Wind were confirmed in a lot of their beliefs, particularly people in the South. One of my early mothers-in-law—I’ve had a couple—her entire life was devoted to Gone with the Wind . She had been shaped by it as a girl and she was Scarlett O’Hara for good and ill, the strength of character and the petulance. It’s not a movie from our past. It’s still a movie that we’re debating and wrestling with. I put Gone with the Wind in the same category as the Confederate monuments and statues that we are talking about and sometimes dismantling in the United States right now. I was on National Public Radio a few weeks ago and they asked me, ‘Should we continue to watch this film?’ And I said, ‘Yes, absolutely. We should continue to watch it, but with the content warnings. Be aware that this is what is happening in the background, so that you’re not sucked into the harmful myths that this film so dramatically and powerfully portrays.’ Almost nobody shows or schedules it. It appears occasionally on American cable television, on one of the classic channels, but there are protests every time that it does. As I write in the introduction to my book, it’s a film that I show regularly in class. It’s partly because it’s a really successful cinematic experience, and partly because, in most of my film classes these days, we are going to emphasize race throughout the semester. It’s like, ‘Here is our lowest point. Let’s start with this.’ Henry Louis Gates , the great African American historian at Harvard University, has talked about how Birth of a Nation is the epitome of what he calls the ‘Redemption narrative’ in the American South, which was that pushback against every advance that had happened for former slaves. It embodies all of those attitudes of white supremacy . In the book, I write about how people marching in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 were basically carrying the racial ideology of Birth of a Nation into the public sphere 100 years later. That is a huge problem with Birth of a Nation . Most of the advance publicity for that film talked about its authenticity. One of the famous anecdotes is that it was the first film ever shown in the White House. Woodrow Wilson was a racist (as were most white people in America in the Teens and 20s), and the writer of the novel upon which Birth of a Nation was based, Thomas Dixon, was a classmate of his. From my research, it’s not actually true—it is, again, a myth—but Dixon later advanced the idea that Wilson had said of the film, “It’s like writing history with lightning. My only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” Wilson was himself a historian. He had written an acclaimed history of the United States and some of the title cards in the silent film Birth of a Nation are drawn from Woodrow Wilson’s A History of the American People . So there is this very powerful sense, when we watch this film and see its incredible production value, that this must have been what it was like. And it is all made up! Birth of a Nation goes to great lengths to try and make you think that it’s history. Gone with the Wind does the same thing, that amazing crane shot pulling up from all the wounded in the railyard in Atlanta. It’s like, ‘it must be exactly what it was like, because why else would they have gone to all this trouble?’ All of those elements make us wrestle with history. “ I put Gone with the Wind in the same category as the Confederate monuments and statues that we are talking about and sometimes dismantling in the United States right now” So providing the context for a film like Gone with the Wind or Birth of a Nation —or frankly most of the films that I talk about in the book prior to the Civil Rights era—is essential. We have to we know that these are our fictions. These are mythologies that are successful, dramatic stories. James Baldwin talked about Birth of a Nation as a cinematic masterpiece, which it absolutely is. If it weren’t a cinematic masterpiece, it wouldn’t matter so much. It’s the same with Gone with the Wind . I watched Gone with the Wind again last week, while we were on vacation, to prepare for our talk today, and I just sat there and said, ‘This is beautiful. Look at that shot! Look at the colours of the sunset. And here comes Tara’s theme again.’ That’s why film has to be watched consciously. We have to come in with an awareness of the stories and mythologies that people are trying to promote in them so that we can reflect on them and not be simply carried away by the emotion of the storyteller."