Still, With The Racism?

. . . or how my rewatch of a well crafted racist fairy tale solidified my hatred for America's favorite film

I am a cinephile.

That means that I am such a film snob, I am forced to describe my cinematic elitism by using a portmanteau that combines both French and Latin. In turn, that means that I have made a rather genuine effort to tell you that I am an asshole about movies. This has been so since my teens.

Film is one of the rare arenas where my self doubt withers away and allows my confidence to soar; sometimes a bit too close to the sun. There are very few people that I know personally that have seen as much cinema as I have. I am by no means an expert. It has however, been a lifelong passion that I have pursued both to amuse and entertain, and to educate and enlighten myself.

It will you surprise you little to know that I was a weird kid as well as being an eccentric adult. To truly carry that reputation forth with gusto, I helmed our high school quiz bowl team, starred in a handful of high school theater productions, pursued history and museum trips of my own accord, and mostly watched a shitload of movies. Weird and old movies.

Yes, I watched all of the usual stuff. The John Hughes metaverse, Spielberg, Star Wars, and the standard 70’s and 80’s fare that was all plentiful by the time HBO made its way to our house in 1983 or so. In that respect, my movie viewing menu falls right in line with almost everyone within my generation.

The advantage that we had over at the Carlson house was that my Dad was an early adopter of the VCR in the thumb region of Michigan’s lower peninsula. I’m not sure what year it was exactly, but we were the first people I knew for at least a few months that had one of these things. In fact, early on, it seemed as if my Dad had backed the wrong horse as Betamax and Laserdiscs began to get popular.

In the first year or so after we bought it, we couldn’t even rent any tapes for it. This must be so many levels away from reality or anyone under 20 reading this shit. There was however, a store in our town where we could rent a laserdisc player and they had a very small inventory of discs for rent as well.

Almost immediately, I figured out that we could get a cable from Radio Shack and play the discs in the rented player and the feed the signal to the VCR and record the films on to our own tapes.

This seems obvious now. At 11 or 12 in the early 80’s when I discovered this canal of electronic awesomeness without YouTube, a chat room, or the ease of an app, I was floored. I may as well have been summoning that demonic clown in the bedroom scene from Poltergeist, it was so cosmic.

This Magnavox is a dead ringer for the model we had in our house in the late 70s and early 80s.

Quickly, we burned through the discs that our local shop had to offer and we began recording everything from HBO and PBS that we wanted to watch. Despite the sizable costs of tapes in those early days, we had managed to build a pretty solid inventory. To be economical, we would often record films in lower qualities to make room on the tape for another film. Regardless of fidelity, many of those films became part of my foundational cinematic library.

Because the options were so limited, I watched things that may have had little or no appeal to me at the time, but they were better than watching the same old thing again. That strange confluence of technology, timing, and my family love for film sparked a lifelong obsession that remains as bright and brilliant as ever.

This led to me falling in love with old Hollywood, the new American cinema and foreign film at a very young age. I devoured Hitchcock, Lean, Sayles, and Kubrick. I jumped from screwball comedies to film noir, to my adolescent favorite; war films.

The one film we could never seem to find despite our repeated, and vigorous efforts in those days was Gone With The Wind. It had been re-screened on and off again regularly in theaters since its initial release in 1939. At that moment in time, and even until relatively recently, it was the largest grossing film of all time by any measure. Its claim to that title would last for nearly 60 years, until it was unseated by Titanic in the late 1990’s.

While it’s impossible to prove definitively, Gone With The Wind is exceedingly likely the most seen film in the history of cinema, or at the very least the history of American cinema. Just based on gross ticket sales, adjusted for inflation it is still the highest grossing film of all time. Additionally, for nearly eight decades it’s been held aloft as a jewel in the crown of American culture.

In the intervening decades it has accrued massive home video sales and repeated theatrical exhibitions, both nationwide and at some of America’s premier movie houses. My parents and my sister went to go see the film at the luxurious old movie palace, The Fox Theater in Detroit.

They all remembered that experience fondly and vividly for years. The three of them, and my sister’s friend all got quite dressed up, and even went to a fancy dinner before the show. As the lights dimmed in that ornate, and brilliantly beautiful showplace, they leaned back in the encroaching darkness, and were dazzled by what came up on the screen.

Those factors, and the opportunity for convenient, repeated viewings in the age of digital streaming make it almost a shoe-in for the most viewed movie that our country, or more likely the world, has ever produced. Yet, in the early 1980’s it was incredibly difficult to find a way to watch it, at least at home.

I can even remember it being something of an event when MGM announced that it would be coming to VHS in 1985. I don’t recall the moment with great specificity, but I do know that it was acquired and installed into the collection in fairly short order.

When Ted Turner announced his new classic movie cable outlet, Turner Classic Movies in 1994, he chose Gone With the Wind as its first film. That night, we invited my grandparents over for dinner and watched it together as a family. The simple act of showing it on television was an event around which to design a Saturday night with family.

Fathom Events screened the film at thousands of theaters across the country for the 75th (2015) and 80th anniversaries of the original release.

When I finally saw the film in its entirety, I was probably 13 or 14 years old. I hated it. It was long, and filled with seemingly unending stretches of kissing, or talking about boys, or dancing or some other dumb shit. The scenes I was drawn to displayed the ravages the south suffered during the Civil War.

I remember getting goosebumps the first time I watched the scene where Scarlett searches for Doc Meade amongst the sea of wounded men as sweet Atlanta burned in all its orange beauty. Even in middle school I knew who had won that war, and why. I had rooted for the winners and lacked any empathy towards the O’Haras, the Wilkses or any of other traitors who had been found alongside them.

Those scenes looked great, and I was smart enough to know that it was a beautiful looking film. It was maybe the most impressive visual film I had seen up to that point. And I was only watching it on TV.

As I matured, and my knowledge of film expanded, I evolved on my stance on the film. Essentially, I accepted that it was impossible to deny the beauty, craft, and talent involved in the making of that film. Maybe the plot line wasn’t my thing, but it was certainly one of the greatest films of all time. This was a work of cinematic genius. Case closed.

I watched the entirety of ‘Gone With The Wind’ a few weeks ago for a family movie club. It was the first time I had seen the film in full, for well over twenty years. By the time the it had ended, any esteem or respect I might have had for the film was burned to the ground like Scarlett’s beloved Atlanta.

You are probably asking, “Did you not know the movie was kinda racist”?

Fair question, and yeah, smart ass. I’m aware. However, I had fooled myself into believing that it was just a beautiful piece of cinema made in a less refined time. Sure, they had softened the realities of slavery, but it’s really just a love story, so what is the big deal?

Besides, Hattie McDaniel is amazing and she was the first African American to win the Oscar and she is amazing and that character is noble and fierce. In other words, I knew there would be troubling moments to endure. It just seemed that maybe I had made too much of them?

Sitting there as the end credits played and as Max Steiner’s epic score blared through the monitors in the sheddio my heart raced, my hands trembled. I felt as though I might vomit.

This supposed great work of art had forever been a part of my family’s cinematic hall of fame. It was a movie that was integral to moments I could remember vividly from time with the people that I love most and feel safest with in the entire world.

It was all a lie. It wasn’t a love story. It wasn’t a war movie. It wasn’t a work of cinematic genius. It was trash.

It was nothing more than a 225 minute chunk of vile, racist propaganda.

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Oddly enough, I had subjected myself to this rewatch. I’m lucky enough to have a family movie club that meets twice a month. It’s a great way to stay connected with some very important people in my life. If nothing else, it’s a wonderful excuse to watch and discuss movies with people that I love. We choose a genre or theme, and each of the five of us presents a film and we discuss it.

Our most recent theme was based on the concept of misunderstood masterpieces. Each person was charged with bringing a film for discussion that was hailed as a masterwork, but that we, for whatever reason, never connected with.

The concept seemed especially intriguing to me because I was certain that it was going to force all of us to more deeply investigate how our tastes and feelings with art are formed. I pounced on Gone With The Wind as my selection immediately within my mind.

My mother had always surmised that I didn’t enjoy the film because Scarlett is the heroine, and therefore I just struggled to identify with a girl. As I aged and we discussed it further, the argument became largely about my inherent misogyny of the film.

It was incredibly hard for me to just dismiss this out of hand. If, after the #MeToo movement you have not had to acknowledge some version of your male privilege and inherent misogyny, you need to stop reading now and do some serious introspection.

While I considered myself progressive, open and fiercely in support of women, I was quickly learning that many of the things that I had long believed to be benign, were in fact forms of soft oppression.

I’d always seen Scarlett as an anti-hero, but was frustrated that people loved her and rooted for her despite her being an abjectly terrible person. Was there an argument that Scarlett O’Hara could be an icon for feminine self-reliance and not just as a bratty debutante?

Over the last several years, I have begun to wrap my head around the built-in viewpoints and behaviors I’d absorbed along the way growing up that helped to hold women down a rung below men.

I couldn’t be the problem. I was kind to women. I supported and voted for women. I raised my daughters to be strong young women. If a dude could be a feminist, I was one.

After #MeToo, I learned in great detail, many of the things that it seemed every woman walked around knowing, absorbing and navigating everyday that I had never been fully aware of. There was so much I didn’t know, and it just kept coming.

Now, I had put myself into the position of having to watch this film with a full heart and an open mind. While I was pretty sure I had not misinterpreted it, I hit play with a tangible sense of anxiety about the possibility of having my chauvinism shoved right back in my face. I was learning quickly that what I thought I knew, was not always directly in line with the truth.

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In the opening minutes of Gone With The Wind, a group of slaves stops to rest. The sun is setting, and the lovely golden fields run behind them. They wipe the sweat from their exhausted, sun-beaten brows. It’s quittin’ time. One of the field hands, a slave himself, announces that he gets to decide when it’s quittin’ time.

The scene is utter and complete nonsense, a whitewashing of the horrors of slavery. No slave decided when the workday was done, and the day didn't end until the last ounce of light was drained from it. No slave is getting off of work before dark. Not even at blessed Tara.

While the film is a work fiction, it paints the old south as a land of gentry, polite society and hard work. In truth it was a brutal way of life that relied almost exclusively on the forced labor of enslaved peoples.

These are not just slaves, they are people. People who had been dragged from their homes an ocean away and who were savaged, raped and worked to death because of the color of their skin.

There is nothing of that reality in this Klan indoctrinated fairytale. Instead, Scarlett paints a picture of her plantation home as a playground of goodness and decency. Slavery is sold as a noble endeavor by the film.

While the Union army are certainly villains in the film, it is the carpet baggers who come after the war that are portrayed as the most vile and villainous of combatants with the O’Hara clan. One scene shortly after Atlanta burns depicts a carpet bagger arriving by wagon.

The clumsy opening shot of his arrival to the south features an actual carpet bag on the floor of the wagon. The camera then pulls back to reveal he is a black man to boot. He is a northerner, a carpet bagger and a black man; he is not to be trusted on any account. It is blunt direction like this that not only feeds into its racist reality, but also degrades its inherent value as a picture.

Freed black slaves are portrayed as imbecilic and unable to care for themselves. Scarlett returns to O’Hara to play savior because the slaves could never get on without the knowledge of a benevolent white woman. Nevermind that they have been doing the heavy lifting for her entire life.

As if lies about slavery and the realities of the Civil War were not enough, Gone With The Wind tosses misogyny into the pot fairly regularly as well. Rhett Butler tells the much younger Scarlett that she should be “kissed, and often”.

This scene is a foreshadowing when in the final act of the film, Rhett takes his wife Scarlett upstairs and rapes her. It’s all portrayed with chivalry and pomp. The message is that he is just giving her what she wants. He tosses her over his shoulder and carries her up to bed.

The scene then fades to the following morning and Scarlett arises rested, refreshed and happy as can be. Apparently, she needed to be sexually assaulted to change her attitude. Who knew?

Scarlet, in full glee after having been raped by her husband the night before.

In my reappraisal I have discovered nothing that dozens of film scholars have not already explored. From the propaganda to the racism and the open endorsement of rape, it’s a difficult film to defend. But it is, just a film.

Why does it matter that Scarlett is awful, or that slavery wasn't like that really? It matters because these are the soft lessons that we teach ourselves with culture. We soften our acceptance of racist language, myths and tropes. To know the persuasive power of the silver screen, one need only to look at this film and my family.

My mother and aunt grew up loving this film, and as a result, lack the objectivity to discuss Gone With The Wind as just a film. It is an integral part of the culture in which they grew up and a deep part of their connection to the act of movie-going.

Because of this deep connection, they are softened to the sexual predation of Rhett Butler, the insipid whims of Scarlett, or the outright lies told about the realities of slavery, and slave-holding.

In fact, it had never occurred to anyone else in our film group, that the name of the neighboring family to Tara belongs to the Wilkes clan. The patriarch’s name is John Wilkes. Like, as in John Wilkes Booth, the man who assassinated Abraham Lincoln. The racism is right there on the page, y’all. They are shouting it out.

It gives me severe pause to think that we’ve just watched a woman get raped by her husband and the outcome was happy. Generations of young women fell in love with this film and with Scarlett. Then they watched her react to her own rape with glee.

I am not hoping to see the film banned or removed. In fact, I think more people should watch it. It’s incredibly important and a genuine part of our cultural history. It is also, as I have explained here, terribly troubling.

The version currently streaming on MAX features an introduction by the film scholar Jacqueline Stewart who describes the film in her intro as, “a major document of Hollywood’s racist practices of the past.”

Films like Gone With The Wind will always be a part of our cultural heritage, so there is no upside in banning or refusing to show the film. To the contrary, any number of troubling films can, and should still be viewed but with proper context.

Stewart’s introduction to Gone With The Wind was my favorite part of the screening. It was informative, fascinating and reinforced why the film is still so fundamentally important. Placing this film in the proper historical context is critical to it being better understood by future audiences.

It is nearly impossible for us to unlearn our cultural lessons. The films, music and books we have devoured in our lives play a significant role in shaping our world views and the way we interact with humanity and ourselves.

While they cannot and should not be taken away, they should be viewed with context and clarity. Even if we cannot do that for our own experience with a troublesome film like Gone With The Wind, we can offer it to others experiencing it anew.

Cheers,
Matty C