Some days are Sunny, others are a B*tch

How do you feel about "Gone With the Wind"?

I belong to a Facebook club that addresses reading for women in their sixties. I was surprised that "Gone with the Wind" is still one of the most popular books and movies, ranked in the top ten and many times number one. I loved the book and movie when I was a teenage girl, wanting to be strong like Scarlett and was crazy for Rhett Butler. I haven't read it since I was in my forties (in the 1990's) when I saw the movie on TV and it occurred to me how racist it really was. Where was Mammy's family? Why was she so loyal to these people and waited on them hand and foot? Why are families that owned slaves the heroes of this story? This kind of thing was spoon fed to me in elementary schools in the state of GA. Black slaves were owned, that was the system of things and most were treated well. The Civil War happened and Lincoln freed the slaves. Then all was well. This was in the 1960's when we went from school to home TV sets where we saw firehoses turned on black children and cops beating people who just wanted to vote. I hear people now speaking about Critical Race Theory being taught in schools and how they are against it. Our grandchildren need the facts of history-we were wrong and we are trying to make it right.

The following was written in 2014:

Gone with the Wind turns 75 this year, a long enough period to establish it as an artifact, a museum piece. We like to think 1939 was a different world, a world divided from our own by a supposedly vast span of progressive enlightenment. Unfortunately, while 75 years in American life is enough to constitute several distinct epochs, it's not long enough to kill off the country's enduring prejudices. What is astonishing about Gone with the Wind on its anniversary is how relevant it seems, not necessarily in its story or in its frame, but in its working stereotypes. The movie is, in many ways, a repository of the originals that have shaped American culture's tortured descriptions of race since.

Broadly speaking, the movie falls into the category of racist American classic, a rich and cherished filmography. The movie that invented narrative film as we know it was The Birth of a Nation, an epic about the birth of the Ku Klux Klan, and it remains, beyond any doubt, the single most influential film ever made. The technique and the vocabulary of film shots were defined by it. The way that emotions are captured by the use of the camera in relation to the actors was invented by its director, D.W. Griffith. If he hadn't created such a horrifically racist film, Griffith would be up there with the Wright brothers as one of America's foundational innovators.

Gone with the Wind was the next leap forward, the Technicolor, talkie equivalent of The Birth of a Nation. It cannot be denied its profound beauty, the relentless drive of its story and the fascination of its characters. Gone with the Wind is a deeply lush film, filled with a subterranean eroticism as well as a brilliant historical sweep. The grand epic film has fallen out of favor recently — although Boyhood is a brilliant reimagining of its possibilities — but attempts to imitate Gone with the Wind resulted
in such classics as Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, and even the Godfather movies. The character of Scarlett O'Hara, and her love affair with Rhett Butler, is a study in what time does to people. We see her first as a coquettish girl and in the end as a ravaged woman. The sprawl is wonderful. If the classic movie structure is three acts, Gone with the Wind has thirty. Watching it today is closer to binge-watching a Netflix hit. With its classic antihero at the center, its conjuration of a lost world that is also a morally dubious world, it is easy to see the influence of Gone with the Wind on Breaking Bad, or even more Mad Men. Mad Men is basically Gone with the Wind meets the sixties.

Romance for the world of slavery is the book's setting as well as its philosophy:
"There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South... Here in this pretty world Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave... Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered. A Civilization gone with the wind..."
This is only the worst of the film's politically incorrect sins. Gone with the Wind contains the single most romantic vision of marital rape ever put onscreen:

The film more or less invented the concept of the sassy black friend, in Hattie McDaniel as Mammy, who was the first African-American to win an Oscar. The film explicitly talks about reparations, the famous 40 acres and a mule, as a vote-buying scam put about by Yankee carpetbaggers. There are good blacks and insolent blacks. There are house blacks and there are field blacks. Whenever African-American characters are articulate, it is always meant as a comic surprise. These are still the prejudices that bedevil representations of African-Americans onscreen.
But what is most fascinating about Gone with the Wind is the capacity for the story not to be about race. One would think that a story about the Civil War, about the liberation of the slaves, would naturally involve the discussion of the nature of enslavement, the nature of rebellion. But there is really almost none of it. Even after the war is lost, Mammy remains Mammy. The good blacks remain the good blacks. The carpetbaggers only appear in a tiny fragment of a scene, and they are not really given enough personhood to count as villains. That honor goes to white trash and the Yankees. The details of the material life of the Southerners is the key, and in that drama the black people amount to furniture. During a nap before the war, white girls sleep while black girls fan them with peacock feather fans. Whether those black girls have any feelings whatsoever is a matter of the strictest irrelevance to this movie.
That fundamental indifference is the key to Scarlett O'Hara's character, a heroine who is also a monster, a nearly pure materialist. She is a daring bit of writing — in a film about the sweep of history, the protagonist is remarkable for how little she cares about the workings of history. For her, history is what interrupts the business of life, which is dressing nicely and having sex with hot guys. She stands in for the whole of the South. The white people in Gone with the Wind aren't necessarily good people, but their badness as it is understood in the film has nothing to do with the lives of black people. Their dramas float over the suffering of the slaves and then over the suffering of the free black people indifferently.
This is the underlying reality of the racism in Gone with the Wind: its abstractness. The War is an external force outside of the personal dramas of the players. Slavery, hatred, prejudice — all may well exist but not in any personal way. The crimes of Gone with the Wind all spring from that original sin: the failure to recognize that there's a problem at all. That willful blindness remains the primary source of the stereotypes that still afflict the representation of race on American screens. Unfortunately, Gone with the Wind isn't gone at all. It's still very much with us.