Gone With the Wind

[litechick]

I hear that HBO has dropped Gone With the Wind from its line-up.  Fair enough.  Apparently they are going to bring it back with 'context' and I don't know what that means.  It's an interesting conundrum because of course it is one of the great films of all time, etc.  We don't want to censor art, etc.  It also plays a role (pardon the pun) in creating some of the most debasing stereotypes that black people have had to endure.  It endorses the idea that slaves weren't all that bad off, etc.  With regard to race relations, it is a hideous stain on our collective consciousness.

It is also an amazing film in other respects.

It's hard for me to evaluate the film without regard to the book because I know the book well.  Even GRRM referenced it once, "how many children does Scarlet O'Hara have?"  It's easy enough to say that the book creates a more nuanced portrait of race relations but that doesn't do anyone any good if the movie is all that they will ever know.

I love the book and the film for many reasons.  The reason most pertinent for today is that it provides a window into the white mindset of the Civil War era, or rather the romantic notions of the antebellum period cherished in the hearts of many people who do not regard themselves as racist.

It's important to understand other people even if they are wrong. 

The character of Scarlet O'Hara is a pioneer of women's rights.  I would not want to see every movie which shows women in a poor light to be eradicated, what would be left of filmography?

I am curious what are the thoughts of others on this topic. 

 

 

[Ran]

My understanding of the context will be some sort of documentary extras that are options when watching it. It seems a small enough thing to do, although personally I don't see why they need to take it out of circulation while they prepare it. It seems to assume, as well, that most people cannot differentiate the attitudes of the past from the present, which feels a bit condescending. 

I know some call on the film being removed from streaming and never aired or released again, but that would mean future generations would never see Hattie McDaniel's historic performance, which seems tragic to me. 

 

[dog-days]

I've never seen Gone With The Wind. When it was on telly on Christmas day a few years ago, my dad decided to watch it properly. I absented myself from the experience, though did check in with him at hourly intervals - this being Christmas Day, I was in an increasingly prosecco'd state. 

"It's still going?"

"Yes!"

...

"Has it stopped yet?"

"No, it's barely started."

...

"Surely this can't still be the same film."

"It's the same film."

....

He did make it through the whole thing, though he said afterwards it had been a waste of the afternoon. 

I was reading the Wikipedia biography of Hattie McDaniel this morning after seeing that GWTW had been pulled. It wasn't happy reading. The worst thing that stood out to me was that while she allegedly had plenty of friends in Hollywood, for the post-Oscars party the cast inc. claimed friends all headed to a whites-only bar which she was refused access to. What tremendously crap people. 

[DMC]

I thought by "context" it just meant putting a disclaimer on it.  I understand doing that, and even pulling it for the time being, but I don't think anyone's advocating outright censorship.  I mean, context is important, but so is access to these films.  Birth of a Nation, Triumph of the Will, they're all still important things to watch and understand.

As for Gone With the Wind itself, god that movie is a chore.  I never got why it's so revered.  Bored the shit out of me when I had to watch it in film class, and this is coming from a guy who loves old noirs and John Ford westerns.

[Cas Stark]

32 minutes ago, DMC said:

I thought by "context" it just meant putting a disclaimer on it.  I understand doing that, and even pulling it for the time being, but I don't think anyone's advocating outright censorship.  I mean, context is important, but so is access to these films.  Birth of a Nation, Triumph of the Will, they're all still important things to watch and understand.

As for Gone With the Wind itself, god that movie is a chore.  I never got why it's so revered.  Bored the shit out of me when I had to watch it in film class, and this is coming from a guy who loves old noirs and John Ford westerns.

Probably you don't like it because It is nothing like noir or Westerns, it is classic Hollywood MGM style 'epic' 'soap opera.  It is revered for a lot of reasons, some including 1) it was the most profitable film of all time for many decades, 2) beautiful use of technicolor, 3) great acting, star making turn for Vivian L, first and only Oscar to a black actor for many, many decades  4) okay I won't say good story because its very Petyton Place-ish, but a fun and entertaining story, 5) famous set piece of burning of Atlanta/pan of field of bodies considered a cinematic wonder  6) great music.  But this style of film is not for everyone even w/out its racial baggage. 

[DMC]

1 minute ago, Cas Stark said:

But this style of film is not for everyone even w/out its racial baggage.

I'm aware of its importance and place in history.  And yeah, the acting is great for the era.  I'm also open to many styles of film.  Just saying, it's not an especially captivating story to me and is the definition of plodding.

[litechick]

That's fair.  I'm still struggling my way through the Matrix.  It's had great cultural impact but I am so not interested.

It would be nice if someone used GWTW as a teaching tool.  Make a supercut of all the racial bits and outline how these devices were used for whites to convince themselves that they were not doing anything wrong.

[Mladen]

I am sorry, but I am vehemently against this. We can not just pretend these movies don't exist. Even if their narrative is troublesome.

There is a reason why we need documentaries. There is a reason why we need to be informed about the past. Knowing what has happened may teach us to make a better future. We need them as a reminder of the ongoing battle and the progress that has been made. What's next, prohibiting Merilyn Monroe movies because they're sexist? 

Are we becoming THAT sensitive that even "A Gone with the Wind" is a problem to watch? I mean, what the hell are we teaching our kids. That there is no progress? Things are not static. They are moving, progressing. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worst. We have seen that countless times. 

I also heard about British talking about removing "Only Fools for Horses" from streaming services. Confectionery producer in Switzerland is facing the accusations that their cookie is "racist" I feel like the buildup energy from COVID-19 quarantines is totally misplaced. 

We should fight against bigotry, against racism and the violence it causes. We should even teach about how things were and how many obstacles as societies we have overcome. We should open minds, not close them via censorship. That never brought any progress.

[Zorral]

1 hour ago, litechick said:

That's fair.  I'm still struggling my way through the Matrix.  It's had great cultural impact but I am so not interested.

It would be nice if someone used GWTW as a teaching tool.  Make a supercut of all the racial bits and outline how these devices were used for whites to convince themselves that they were not doing anything wrong.

This has been done many times for quite a few decades.  So nobody can say "We didn't know!"  it is known.

It's also a more 'genteel' update to Thomas Dixon's vile The Klansman, from which the vile Birth of A Nation was was made.

As I know personally, there are quite a few syllabi where the humanities and liberal arts are still taught -- and in film schools too -- which lay out both the novels and the films, and match, compare and contrast, their content scene by scene, character by character and event by event.

As far as "have we become that sensitive that we can't see blahblahblah ...." How about this?  Small communities, say, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where many richies buy second homes -- they come to replay a personal fantasy of Gone With the Wind.  When they visit the local Historical Societies, with their many displays and accounts of slavery on the Eastern Shore (from where both Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass hailed), they freak out and try to get them shut down -- "You are ruining MY TARA!"  I am not making this up.  I have even witnessed and been subject to aspects of this by these people, when invited there to do presentations on the history of slavery on the Shore and Chesapeake.

 

[Mladen]

8 minutes ago, Zorral said:

As far as "have we become that sensitive that we can't see blahblahblah ...." How about this?  Small communities, say, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where many richies buy second homes -- they come to replay a personal fantasy of Gone With the Wind.  When they visit the local Historical Societies, with their many displays and accounts of slavery on the Eastern Shore (from where both Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass hailed), they freak out and try to get them shut down -- "You are ruining MY TARA!"  I am not making this up.  I have even witnessed and been subject to aspects of this by these people, when invited there to do presentations on the history of slavery on the Shore and Chesapeake.

That is a good point. I didn't mean to show disrespect or lack of empathy, I am just afraid that this is a dangerous slope for any work of fiction. I mean, look at "Downton Abbey" which was made 70/80 years after GWTW and its notions of 1910/1920s Britain. And that is just tip of the iceberg.

I want to tell "it's just a movie", but I understand that for many, it isn't. Perhaps it is me just being European and not thinking of movies as serious as Americans do. Yeah, I am aware of the racial problems in GWTW and I know that it is a farce. But I feel like people watch TV shows and movies as some sort of history books. They shouldn't be regarded as such. They are a fantasy, a lie basically. That is also why I don't feel so strongly about GWTW, because I never believed it.

Also, this article was very educational as it shows that protest against GWTW is not something new.

[Inkdaub]

I've never seen it completely but I'm comfortable saying it's racist trash.  Many people like it, though, and will tie themselves in knots rationalizing why.  It's a bit like the people who will defend the confederate flag.  I believe GwtW was my mother's favorite movie.

I'm not sure about crying censorship.  HBO can pull any movie it wants for any reason it wants...I mean, am I wrong about that?  A movie being racist trash sounds a good enough reason to be pulled to me.  If I'm honest about it I don't really care if HBO shows it or not.  If I owned a theater I wouldn't show it and I don't have any interest in watching it on my TV at home.

It's likely easy for me to judge the movie as someone who has never seen it in full and honestly has no interest in it.  If it were a film I loved it would be much harder and I would likely be much more forgiving.  

[litechick]

Zorral, if you have links to GWTW being used as an educational tool about race relations, please share.  I would be very interested.  The widespread existence of humanities classes with this information doesn't help the average HBO viewer and the point is to reach the average person and impress upon them the significance.

Inkdaub, "It's likely easy for me to judge the movie as someone who has never seen it in full and honestly has no interest in it.  If it were a film I loved it would be much harder and I would likely be much more forgiving. "  Thank you for including that.  It's nice to see that people can respect that others can have differing opinions without being the enemy.

Aside:  for me, watching the film feels like it's going at a breakneck speed because I know how much is being cut out.

What I'm talking about is the complex relationships that form.  In this clip at the very beginning of the movie, we can see that Mammy has authority over Scarlet but she is a servant.  In the book, Scarlet orders Mammy to 'go fetch my shawl' to throw her off the scent and give Scarlet a few moments to run away from the house.  Mammy has authority but Scarlet is white.  Mammy can tattle on Scarlet to her mother but Mammy has to do what Scarlet says in the moment.

I find it frustrating that people want to distill it down to 'racist trash' or a fantasy of grace and gentility.  There's so much going on.

Not too long ago, I bought the digital version of the book.  It has a forward from a white southern guy who stipulates that the house he grew up in had a Bible and Gone With the Wind.  This is important.  Lots of people get their sense of themselves and their sense of race relations from that book/movie. 

The trick is to preserve the good without giving a pass to the bad.

[DMC]

3 hours ago, Inkdaub said:

I'm not sure about crying censorship.  HBO can pull any movie it wants for any reason it wants...I mean, am I wrong about that?  A movie being racist trash sounds a good enough reason to be pulled to me.  If I'm honest about it I don't really care if HBO shows it or not.  If I owned a theater I wouldn't show it and I don't have any interest in watching it on my TV at home.

Yeah, I think there is an important distinction here because Gone With the Wind is still not in the public domain, and will not be for another 11 years based on a quick google search.  That's different than Birth of a Nation or Triumph of the Will like I mentioned before.  Nobody's making money off those.

2 hours ago, litechick said:

Zorral, if you have links to GWTW being used as an educational tool about race relations, please share.

I don't have a link, but I took a "Politics and Film" class in undergrad and it was a pretty easy credit.  Literally the dude teaching it just showed us movies once a week then gave us a test based on some book from a Syracuse University film scholar, IIRC.  Anyway, Birth of a Nation, Triumph of the Will, Gone With the Wind - all were movies assigned in the syllabus and played during classtime.  I'm pretty sure this is fairly common in such courses.  I've mentioned Birth of a Nation and its impact on the Jim Crow south myself when I cover it in intro to gov't courses.  Probably mentioned Gone With the Wind as well.  Also remember watching The Fountainhead with Gary Cooper in that class.  Exposing 18-21 year olds to Ayn Rand's dribble - now THAT'S an abomination.

[Zorral]

Syllabi are often not available to those not enrolled in the course, much less enrolled in the school.

Here is one, however, put up online:

http://edpapenfuse.com/gwtw/ecp-10-223/00000000.html

In the meantime you can read this just published that runs down the objections the African American communities and NAACP presented regarding the publication of the novel, and to the studio when it was making the film -- and how WHITE people utterly disregarded such objections in favor of their fantasy of Old South Moonlight and Magnolia (which seems to mean that most people only read the first section of GWTW in the first place).  NAACP did the same about Griffith's vile BOAN, and received the same disregard and contempt.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/14/movies/gone-with-the-wind-battle.html?

Anyway, accounts of this are in many books published over the years, about both the novel and the film, particularly to their role in the revisionism of the War of the Rebellion, Jim Crow and US apartheid -- thank you Woodrow Wilson -- and all the rest.  

And surely you all are acquainted with The Wind Done Gone (2001) by Alice Randall?  It sure did get a lot of coverage in the media when it was published.

[litechick]

I tried to read the New Yorker article but it was so clearly written for literature scholars and not for me that I gave up.  I understand that once you learn things it's hard to imagine anyone else not knowing those things but try.  I was unaware of The Wind Done Gone but I read the preview of Ruth's Journey which purports to be an account of Mammy's life even though it is clearly stipulated that Mammy was born and raised from Scarlet's mother's own bedroom.

It's OK, I get it.  People want to latch on to the fame of GWTW to tell alternate stories of people enslaved.  Those stories are important and attaching them to GWTW in order to get greater acknowledgement is fair in my book.

What I want from HBO is a Dick & Jane level examination of the Slavery Apologist Bingo Card:

• we didn't treat them that bad
• they are better off than they would have been in Africa
• we gave them food, clothes, shelter, medical care which they would have otherwise had to provide for themselves
• they are simpletons and like having someone to give them orders
• we raised the cream to positions of trust and authority, if they were field hands it was because they weren't good for any higher position
• etc

All of this can be found in GWTW and it is all bullshit.  What I would like is a feature which points to each entry on the bingo card and explains why it is bullshit but then allows people to go ahead and enjoy the film for the value that is there.

[Vaughn]

The whole concept of 'cannon' is gatekeeping garbage. GwtW was a big important successful movie when it came out. It's available to watch by purchase or rental by anyone who wants to. Claiming it is somehow bad for our society that a private company doesn't want to show it anymore is just being obtuse. It's very much like people who complain about free speech when there are negative repercussions by non-gov't entities for their words. Or that white privilege doesn't exist because they grew up poor and white. Etc... 

There is never a time when any work of popular culture is beyond either reconsideration or simply being lost in the mists of time. When I was a kid, I read Robinson Crusoe. I can't imagine my school aged children reading it now and that's fine. They have access to other books that I never did. They still read Huck Finn in high school but if they don't in 20 years because there's another equally 'important' book being read, that's fine. This isn't science - there are not fixed truths so I am very suspicious of the motives of people who want to treat movies/books as absolutely vital or not. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

On 6/14/2020 at 4:28 AM, litechick said:

I hear that HBO has dropped Gone With the Wind from its line-up.  Fair enough.  Apparently they are going to bring it back with 'context' and I don't know what that means.  It's an interesting conundrum because of course it is one of the great films of all time, etc.  We don't want to censor art, etc.  It also plays a role (pardon the pun) in creating some of the most debasing stereotypes that black people have had to endure.  It endorses the idea that slaves weren't all that bad off, etc.  With regard to race relations, it is a hideous stain on our collective consciousness.

It is also an amazing film in other respects.

It's hard for me to evaluate the film without regard to the book because I know the book well.  Even GRRM referenced it once, "how many children does Scarlet O'Hara have?"  It's easy enough to say that the book creates a more nuanced portrait of race relations but that doesn't do anyone any good if the movie is all that they will ever know.

I love the book and the film for many reasons.  The reason most pertinent for today is that it provides a window into the white mindset of the Civil War era, or rather the romantic notions of the antebellum period cherished in the hearts of many people who do not regard themselves as racist.

It's important to understand other people even if they are wrong. 

The character of Scarlet O'Hara is a pioneer of women's rights.  I would not want to see every movie which shows women in a poor light to be eradicated, what would be left of filmography?

I am curious what are the thoughts of others on this topic. 

 

 

I'm sorry but Gone With the Wind is a horrible film.  I wish I could have the time back I wasted watching it.

[Ran]

8 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I'm sorry but Gone With the Wind is a horrible film.  I wish I could have the time back I wasted watching it.

De gustibus... You're definitely an outlier, per this 2014 poll, which was interesting in capturing views of films. Basically Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz are the only films the vast majority of people know from that year, aside from a few who still remember Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

[Mladen]

5 hours ago, Vaughn said:

There is never a time when any work of popular culture is beyond either reconsideration or simply being lost in the mists of time.

I can't really argue with that. My objection was based that by censoring previous works future generations may not be aware of the past mistakes and sins, thus dooming them to repeat. I feel like GWTW has been slowly fading into oblivion and this literally resurrected it from the natural process of overcoming the terrible notions it represented.

[DanteGabriel]

1 hour ago, Mladen said:

I can't really argue with that. My objection was based that by censoring previous works future generations may not be aware of the past mistakes and sins, thus dooming them to repeat. I feel like GWTW has been slowly fading into oblivion and this literally resurrected it from the natural process of overcoming the terrible notions it represented.

I suspect that you already know this, but it bears repeating because I see this word misused so much: one private entertainment company deciding not to stock it anymore is not censorship. The government has not prevented anyone from watching it.