Tag: Drama

Dear America, it’s Time to Give Up on Gone with the Wind

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 Slave… Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered. A Civilization gone with the wind.

– Gone With the Wind (1939)

— Sara T. S.

Victor Fleming’s epic adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s novel, Gone with the Wind, took the country by storm with its 1939 technicolor wide release. Never in the history of American film had a movie this grand been made. The final cut of was over 20,000 feet long, edited down from half a million feet. Georgia declared the premiere of the film a state holiday. It was the third most expensive movie ever made at the time of its release. It won eight Oscars, including best picture. Arguably, it remains the most famous American film ever made. But I am here to ask you this: why? It is now 2022, over eight decades after the film’s release, and society should not continue to recognize this film as a cornerstone of popular culture when the story undeniably relies on the racist imagery of happy slaves in the false paradise of planation life. Gone with the Wind’s historical portrayal of the antebellum south is a detached dream of a happy confederacy that American culture must not only cease to embrace but recognize as a blatantly dangerous form of cultural attachment. Stated as plainly as I know how, Gone with the Wind is too racist and too long, and it is time to put it the f*** to bed.

“Fiddle-dee-dee. War, war, war. This war talk is spoiling the fun at every party this spring. I get so bored I could scream. Besides, there isn’t going to be any war!” These are the first lines uttered by the lavish Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) in the opening scene. The movie successfully attempts to introduce us to the titular character’s personality of ignorance that largely remains unchanged through her four hours on screen. Gone with the Wind opens on Scarlett sitting on the steps of her home at the sprawling and idyllic Tara Plantation. Scarlett attends a party at a neighboring plantation belonging to Ashley Welks, the man with whom she is in love. He rejects her, announcing that he is to be married to Melanie. After a tantrum that results in her throwing what is most likely a very expensive vase against a wall, she meets and catches the eye of Rhett Butler (Clark Gable). A lot of boring stuff happens, the Civil War starts, and Scarlett is sent to her family’s Atlanta house. The tides of the war turn against the Confederacy (spoiler!) at Gettysburg, and Atlanta is taken by the Union Army. Throughout this entire scene the Yankees are portrayed as villains that violently disrupt a perfect and idyllic way of life. There’s a massive fire, resulting in Atlanta being burned to the ground. Rhett Butler appears and saves Scarlett and Melanie taking them back to Tara, where Scarlett is reunited with Mammy (Hattie McDaniel). Tara is in ruins. A now ragged and dirty Scarlett works in the fields to harvest food because of what the evil Yankees have taken away from the South. Intermission. The war ends and reconstruction begins. Scarlett is now hustling as a lumber mill owner. Her slaves (who are not actually slaves anymore) remain faithful to her and stay at Tara. Some other drama happens, and Rhett and Scarlett finally get married. She says yes because he is rich as f***. They have a daughter. The daughter dies. She gets pregnant again, they fight, she falls down a giant staircase and suffers a miscarriage. They are extremely unhappy and absolutely hate each other, as they have throughout the film. Rhett loves Scarlett (I think? It’s honestly hard to tell). Scarlett still loves Ashley. Ashley loves Melanie but totally leads Scarlett on. Melanie dies. Scarlett realizes Ashley fucking sucks. Rhett realizes that Scarlett fucking sucks. But hark! After the span of ten years in the movie, and what feels like ten years watching the movie, Scarlett realizes that she has been in love with Rhett all along (again, hard to tell). She begs him to stay, which results in the most famous exchange in the history of film: She begs “[w]here shall I go? What shall I do?” He responds, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” (Honestly, Rhett…same). Boom. Exit Rhett Butler. Scarlett throws herself onto the floor, sobbing. She decides that she will win Rhett back by returning to Tara. The movie ends with Scarlett realizing she made approximately seven million mistakes, had no character development, and was generally petty as hell. The movie is over. So is my youth. While this movie has more than enough of Vivien Leigh crying, what it lacks is a realistic depiction of the institution of slavery, and the structure of the southern culture and the southern economy, while also romanticizing the dangerous mythology of the white savior through the movie’s main character, Scarlett O’Hara.

Gone with the Wind is a goddamn problematic f***ing movie, and it is time for the American pop culture to wake up and recognize that because of the film’s flagrant racism, ahistorical depiction of the civil war, and misogynistic and vapid personification of women, it should no longer be considered foundational to the canon of American film.

Scarlett O’Hara is a falsely romanticized personification of the white savior that creates a dangerous pretense for the depiction of women in popular culture. At first glance, Scarlett embodies the typical tropes of the genre’s leading lady: she is not the of ideal beauty standard, except for the fact that she obviously is she is torn between two love interests that represent and appeal to different parts of her own nature; and she faces and overcomes insuperable odds even though she possesses and is ignorant of as many privileges as the antebellum had to offer. Artificially, she is easy to identify with: Scarlett is cunning, witty, selfish, funny, smart, and emotionally turbulent. There is something about her disposition that allows the viewer to pity her, or to identify with her. She has lost everything yet vows to survive. It is easy to respect her undeniable will to trudge forward no matter the cost. However, when viewed with much needed caution, she is absolutely without a false victim. Yes, she lost everything, but what she lost was the institution of slavery. Yes, she was cunning, but she was also selfish, and remained unable to function without the attention of a married man. Only when her own husband, years later, finally decided not to give her the attention she thrived on, did she realize that he was “the one”. The audience is only privy to her unnecessarily dramatic will to survive when she is left alone with no one to take care of her: First, when her dream world of an idyllic plantation life came crashing down, and then again when Rhett, her wealthy husband, decided to rebuff her plea to stay. Is this really the protagonist we want or need? My answer is a resounding no. She was just a rich b***h; nothing more than a sad princess in a ruined kingdom. A kingdom that should have never existed.

It is time to stop giving this movie any recognition as a remotely true depiction of the glory of the antebellum south. Gone with the Wind buys heavily into the notion that the Civil War was a noble lost cause. It casts Yankees as villains out to ruin a perfect way of life. The siege of Atlanta captured this anti-fact perfectly when the picturesque confederate city with a peaceful way life was violently burned to the ground by the evil Union army. The movie goes to great lengths to preserve the myth that Civil War was not fought over slavery – an institution that the film romanticizes. That way of life is practically a religion for the Scarlett and her peers, which explains why it is so difficult to relinquish the fantasy of the confederacy – if they did, they would be admitting that an entire way of life was not only racist, but that the superiority of the southern culture, in which they so unabashedly believed, was just plain horrific. But just because they could not let go of it doesn’t mean we can’t. It is time to stop indulging in the sad fantasy of arbitrary race structure by continuing to idealize this film as an epic and beautiful love story. It was just a story about two people who absolutely hated each other set against a romanticized racist backdrop. This portrayal of the culture surrounding the Civil War era is so flagrantly wrong that to continue to recognize this film is to continue to hold on to some sort of belief that this way of life was a perfect fantasy, and society can no longer afford to buy into this dangerous lie.

While the film does accurately depict, to an extent, the horrors of war, and the self-pity that lingered in the south after the Confederacy’s defeat, it does not accurately depict why the war was fought in the first place, what institution was defeated as a result, and the thoughts, emotions and opinions of the oppressed. In fact, the movie does not even depict slaves as oppressed at all. This concept can no longer be part of our popular culture because it fuels the false belief that a lifestyle like that of the antebellum south is not only something to praise, but something everyone wants (including people of color). Absolutely not. Society should not be passive in allowing this message to remain in our film cannon. We can acknowledge that Gone with the Wind was an epic and amazing feat for achievements in acting, directing, and cinematography, but in 2020 we should not be afraid to call it what it is – a relic of the past that is too long and too racist. Society projects what it was and what it wants to be through art. How we process our cultural zeitgeist is so adaptable through film, which makes it a powerful too in guiding American culture. That is why now, more than ever, Gone with the Wind needs to take its final bow as a great American film. It is exceptionally racist, historically inaccurate, and far from a love story. Let’s face it, no romanticized drama about the antebellum south needs to exist, let alone be four f***ing hours long. The misogynistic depiction of women as either whiney, selfish, and cunning or sweet, submissive, and weak, but always emotionally unstable is a tired trope that needs to be put to bed. This film must cease to be considered a foundational part of our film culture. What does it say about us as a nation if we continue to embrace a movie that, in the final analysis, stands for many of the same things as the Confederate flag? After all, tomorrow is another day. So, let’s make it a day without Gone with the Wind.

Official rating: 3.3/13