another blog about Gone with the Wind

Birth of a Nation has NO OTHER PURPOSE than inspiring hate and feelings of superiority by white Americans, and to say that the USA should give states the right to subjugate black Americans. It wasn’t made primarily to tell a love story, or a survival story, or a horror story, or any kind of story: it was made solely to say horrific things about one race of people, and to claim it was best for the people of that race to be enslaved by another race of people, who the movie says are superior intellectually, emotionally, culturally and spiritually. It promotes a passionate, irrational hatred of black Americans – and it makes the Ku Klux Klan the heroes. That’s its message, first and foremost.

I’m glad I watched it, but I won’t be watching it again. And I know that it pioneered also sorts of film techniques. So did Triumph of the Will. In praising the technique, the horror of the product has to be acknowledged EVERY time for movies like those.

Gone With the Wind was written by a racist. Yes, I know Margaret Mitchell sent money regularly to Morehouse College and her donations enabled perhaps 70 to 80 black men to become physicians. That’s nice. But she did it in secret: it did not become public knowledge until many decades after her death. And I don’t at all take it as a sign that she wasn’t a racist – I know plenty of people back in Kentucky who donate to the college funds of black students, or voted for President Obama, and also have racist beliefs. The book Gone With the Wind itself should be enough to say Margaret Mitchell was a racist – even if you don’t think the portrayals of black characters are racist (I do), you have to admit that the characters are little more than scenery, and in a book about life before, during and after the Civil War, that’s absolutely RACIST, to think those stories can be entirely ignored. But let me go farther in proving the point: according to several sources, when Margaret Mitchell discovered that she was in a history class at Smith College in the 1910s with a black student, the story is that Mitchell demanded to change classes, or have the student change classes. The teacher refused, and Mitchell said she would go to the dean, or even the institution’s president, if necessary, to get it changed. The black student was moved. Mitchell’s mother later argued that professor Dorothy Ware flunked her even though the dean approved the transfer. According to the book Southern Women at the Seven Sister Colleges: Feminist Values and Social Activism, 1875-1915 by Joan Marie Johnson (University of Georgia Press, 2010):

Margaret called Ware a hypocrite, asking if Ware “had ever undressed and nursed a Negro woman or sat on a drunk Negro man’s head to keep him from being shot by the police.” Mitchell’s mother blamed the incident on the fact that Ware’s family had been to the South to teach blacks and had not been well received by white southerners. Margaret grounder her refusal to take a class with an African American – an act that suggested social equality – in her familiarity with blacks, an ease she believed was only possible whiten a white supremacist society. 

Gone With the Wind was part of Mitchell’s determination to repaint the South as lovingly paternalistic to enslaved people, and you just can’t call that anything but racist.

So, how can I love the movie Gone With the Wind? Because while I see the racism and the desperate effort in the movie to reinforce a romantic view of a world where people were enslaved, I also see a movie about a woman who goes from a flighty, vindictive girl with no depth to a fierce woman determined not just to survive war, but to thrive in its aftermath. I’m astounded by the idea of how she uses the only thing she has – her charm and wits – to get what she wants for herself and her family. I also identify with putting all of your energy into something that, you ultimately realize, is a really bad idea. And, yeah, I love the actors and the film techniques. And Butterfly McQueen (read her story, if you haven’t ever).

In short, I am able to “stand” the racism in Gone with the Wind the same way so many, many men I know are able to “stand” the horrific sexism of The Godfather and The Godfather II.

If you don’t want to hear me talk about how strong, resilient and strategic Scarlett is as a heroine, fine – ’cause I sure as hell don’t want to hear you talk about how sexy and virile you find violent rapist Stanley Kowalski is in Streetcar Names Desire, mmmkay?

Do I think HBO Max is right to stop showing Gone With the Wind? I don’t know. It’s a private company and its senior staff made a business decision not to be associated with that movie anymore. I admit that I would love to see what other movies they have chosen not to show. But it’s their decision, they make money, they don’t want to show this movie anymore, okay. 

I would be upset if TCM stopped showing it. I would, in fact, be outraged. That’s what TCM is for – to show old movies, many of them full of painful stereotypes but all of them worth viewing, at least once. TCM shows a number of movies I find deeply disturbing, including Gabriel Over the White House, a 1933 pro-fascist political fantasy. And most Woody Allen movies, which imagine New York City spaces with no black Americans at all and whose women characters are, for the most part, nothing but cringe-worthy. And, of course, Birth of a Nation and The Philadelphia Story. But I want them to keep showing those. I even want them to keep showing Streetcar Named Desire, despite that I cannot watch it anymore. I really enjoy their introductions that put such films in context and make it clear, “Yeah, there are big problems with some portrayals/themes in this movie…” Keep doing that. Even if I don’t aways agree with what’s said – keep doing that.

And as I noted in that earlier blog I referenced: I was on the light rail coming home from Portland in 2013, and was eavesdropping on a group of African women, I think from Tanzania, and a group of Indian women (from India) talking about movies they love, including Gone With the Wind. They went on and on about why. They loved it like I do. No mention of its racism was ever made – I kept listening for it, but it never happened. Sometimes I wonder if people in other countries, even Africans, understand the horrors of slavery in the Americas… but I kind of loved that they loved the film without experiencing any racist subtext. The way women are expected to enjoy so many films without getting upset about the sexism.

Anyway, see you at the movies.