Gone With the Wind is Gone With the Wind

Mainly, it’s been a moment for reconsidering the relationship between the American people and its police departments. But there have been a few other changes, and the decision by HBO to put Gone With the Wind on the shelf momentarily is getting a lot of attention. My take on the matter is that this is long overdue. 

There is a background that hasn’t much been discussed, but really ought to be.

Back in 1915, the celebrated director D.W. Griffith was looking for a topic to make into a feature length film. He had made hundreds of short films up to that time, but the Italians scooped him on making a full, feature-length film, and he was not happy about it. He (being the son of a confederate officer) was attracted to a book called The Clansman, and out of that, Birth of a Nation came about. 

The film is divided into two sections. The beginning involves southern and northern families before the Civil War, the beginning of the war, and the continuation of that war. The second half involves the post-war period, where the once-overlord whites are now forced to share public spaces with Black people. 

Sound familiar? It’s pretty much a summary of the later Gone With the Wind, which came out in 1939. GWTW doesn’t end the same way that Birth of a Nation ends. Birth of a Nation plays up all the standard mythology and racism that Griffith could force into the plot – everything from the menace of Black men towards white women, to the birth of the KKK. In Birth of a Nation, the Klan is depicted as a heroic force that rides mightily to rescue a group of whites who are in grave danger from the Black menace. 

As one of my friends said to me after we had both seen it at a European film festival, “I had forgotten just how repulsive the second half is.” Repulsive is the right word. 

The interesting thing about Birth of a Nation is that it makes for compelling drama, and the final scene of the Klan riding to the rescue was set (by Griffith’s decision) to Richard Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries, making for a finale that has you rooting for the men on horseback unless you know better. 

The other interesting thing about Birth of a Nation is that it was, for many years, the most successful film ever made, generating huge profits. One movie house in the south ran it for ten years. 

By the way, Birth of a Nation was controversial from the outset. There were protests and pleas against it. It was no secret that Birth of a Nation was racist to the core, and that it was damaging to American progress. It was even banned in some places. You might consider that the film appeared almost exactly the same number of years after the Civil War as we are now post-Viet Nam. There had been civil rights movements from long before then, but the film continued its successful run. It is credited (if that is the right word) with stimulating the rise of the modern KKK. 

And then, not so many years later, in 1939, there was Gone With the Wind. It’s source is a different book, and the film ends more in terms of the personal conflict between Scarlett and Rhett, but the timeline of the two films is pretty much the same, beginning with southern life before the war, and continuing until after the war has ended. 

And Oh, is it racist. That’s the part that has always caused me to wonder about peoples’ reactions. The depictions of the loyal maid and the silly Black girl make me cringe. There is a line in GWTH in which a white character (now after the war) is complaining that a Black man did not step aside for her on the sidewalk. What’s remarkable about that line is that it is lifted bodily from Birth of a Nation. Maybe the filmmakers got the idea independently from the different novels that birthed the two films, but personally, I find it hard to imagine that the makers of GWTH had not seen Birth of a Nation – probably several times. 

So in this moment of catching up on things, it is well and fitting that Gone With the Wind be reconsidered. Yes, it is well made and has some spectacular scenes (perhaps the shot of hundreds of war-wounded is the most moving, even if the history books dwell on the fire) but it is still, finally and ultimately, the story of people who were the uncrowned nobility who lived on the misery and toil of a slave class, and who continued to carry their authoritarian views about the other race with them after the south had been demolished. 

In a way, it’s like those statues of confederate officers. Some of them may have been truly brave and truly effective leaders, but after 150 years, it’s long since time to start telling all of our children and high school students about the reality. 

It’s really unfortunate that the Selznick studio chose to make GWTW the way it did. I would like to believe that there were some good people making films in the United States from the very beginning, but I also have to recognize that some of our greatest craftsmen inserted racial and ethnic jokes into their films that would be considered way out of line nowadays. Harold Lloyd was one of the two or three greatest comedians of all time in American film, but he dabbled with a bit of anti-Semitic imagery. Buster Keaton put a few cringeworthy shots in his films that depict Blacks as silly, if not in the evil way that Griffith had done only a few years earlier. 

It is also worthy of note that the American film industry was strongly segregated for many years, so much so that a separate Black film industry was created and ran films for Black audiences in separate movie houses. 

So put this one back on the shelf for a while and later, after the explanatory remarks have been written and included, people can go back to watching the doomed love story between two very imperfect people who are sadly too representative of American sentiments before and after the Civil War. 

There have been a few reactions to HBO’s move that seem to be coming from two different directions. One is the concept that we shouldn’t be censoring our movies. There is a point to this, but it is weak at best. HBO is not being instructed by the government, but by its own decision-making process. If HBO decides to take advantage of the moment to rectify a long-standing problem, so be it. The other reaction that seems to be coming mostly from the political right wing is an attempt at sarcasm, as it were: If we are going to make an example out of Gone With the Wind, then how come we haven’t done the same about lots of other films and television shows. This sentiment, if brought with honesty and clean hands, would have some merit. I sometimes cringe a bit when watching old silent films, but try to consider them on their entire merit. I love Harold Lloyd’s work, and at the same time I’m willing to shut one eye during one or two moments out of many hours of wonderful film. It’s not really the same thing when you consider either Birth of a Nation or its bastard offspring Gone With the Wind.

(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])

-cw

Tags: Bob Gelfand, Gelfand’s World, Gone with the Wind, HBO