Film no different than a Confederate statue
Last week, HBO Max, HBO’s streaming service, removed the 1939 film “Gone With the Wind” from its library of movie offerings. That decision came in the wake of mass protests against racial injustice across the country after the brutal death of George Floyd in police custody.
It also follows the publication of a Los Angeles Times op-ed by black screenwriter John Ridley, who called explicitly for HBO Max to drop the film, just as Confederate monuments are being taken down across the country. According to HBO, “Gone With the Wind,” still the highest-grossing film of all time, has been removed from its platform temporarily but will return, perhaps as soon as next week, with a more probing discussion of its historical context. The movie, explained an HBO spokesperson, is “a product of its time and depicts some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that have, unfortunately, been commonplace in American society.”
Like any historical artifact, “Gone With the Wind” is, indeed, a “product of its time,” but it would be misguided to imagine that David Selznick’s blockbuster did not, in its own time, provoke considerable controversy. More than a Hollywood spectacle, the film amplified a racist political message that intertwined ideas about the antebellum South into the New Deal politics of its day, making its message even more potent, dangerous and enduring.
The story of the “Gone With the Wind” movie begins, of course, with the novel that inspired it. Published in 1936, Margaret Mitchell’s best-selling book offered a classic “Lost Cause” tale of crushed but resilient white Southerners, devoted black slaves and evil-minded Yankees.
The publicity campaign, as well as eye-popping sets and lush costuming, contributed to the film’s huge popularity, not to mention its big box-office revenue.
But it was the story of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara’s romance, central to both book and film, that likely held the key to captivating readers and moviegoers.
It also offered an empathetic message that appealed to white Americans suffering through the worst economic downturn in U.S. history. Women readers and viewers, especially, felt a kinship with Scarlett, whose dramatic personal and economic losses resonated with their own circumstances.
Yet black Americans and also some sympathetic whites felt differently. They recognized how much the movie, and the book before it, buttressed a racist history that romanticized slavery and demonized black political participation.
Watching the movie as a teenager, Malcolm X grasped the intense ridicule black people were being subjected to, especially in the scene when Scarlett’s slave Prissy has been caught for lying about her skills as a midwife. When the actress playing Prissy “went into her act,” he wrote, “I felt like crawling under a rug.”
Both the film and the book celebrated Southern white slaveholder superiority in a way that provided fodder for contemporary political debates and was used to reinforce a conservative, anti-New Deal message: to celebrate the right of white Southerners to challenge federal authority, both historically and in the present, and especially to defy any federal agenda that even hinted at racial justice.
When, in January 1940, Rep. Knute Hill, D-Wash., spoke in opposition to the federal anti-lynching bill being debated in Congress, he referenced “Gone With the Wind.” Although Hill spoke specifically of Mitchell’s novel, he surely knew this would be a timely message, since the movie had just opened with massive publicity to popular acclaim. Hill praised the depiction of good Southern (white) men, men who had been unfairly punished by federal Reconstruction measures, just as good Southern white men in 1940 were being unfairly targeted by legislation that defined the lynching of African Americans as a federal crime.
Looking back on the lost opportunities of this moment, NAACP leader Walter White is said to have summed up the problem like this: “Whatever sentiment there was in the
South for a federal anti-lynch law evaporated during the ‘Gone With the Wind’ vogue.”
“Gone With the Wind” reveals how a romanticization of slavery in the past translated into concrete actions to perpetuate its legacy in the present. Today, in 2020, when hundreds of thousands of Americans have taken to the streets to demand racial justice, and when the U.S. Senate is on the verge of finally passing a federal anti-lynching law, and when dozens of Confederate monuments have come down, maybe it is time to treat the film as the Confederate monument that it is, and take it down, too.