As the Black Lives Matter movement galvanizes the nation, there are renewed calls to remove the names and statues of prominent Confederate leaders from the Capital (and the Capitol) as well as from Army bases throughout the South. As I have written in these pages— and as one young African-American woman put it recently on TV — this isn’t even primarily a case of black and white, even though the issue is pretty much black and white. The Confederacy lost, and the losers don’t get to dictate either the terms of their surrender or the trophies of their defeat. There are no statues of Adolf Hitler in Berlin.
Still, as President Abraham Lincoln said, “Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history.” The monuments and names of the Confederacy should belong to schools and museums — or at least photographs of them should be. We can’t preserve every one. There they can be curated and studied, so that present and future generations can understand how they came to be erected in the post-Reconstruction and civil rights eras as a way to reassert white supremacy.
The issue of works of arts and entertainment is a more complex matter, however. No one makes a movie, generally speaking, with the idea of offending a minority group that could potentially count as box office. And yet, when we look back at Hollywood, we see a pattern of insidious stereotyping of all minorities and a perpetuation of the notion that women are either madonnas or whores, with the whores just begging for abuse. The only full-blooded people are the white, male characters — stand-ins for the white men who made the movies.
Which brings us to HBO Max’s decision to pull “Gone With the Wind” (1939) from its playlist until such time as it can give the film some historical context. Based on Margaret Mitchell’s wildly popular, romantic 1936 novel, “Gone With the Wind” tells the tale of selfish Southern belle Katie Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) and her endlessly machinations to preserve Tara, her familial plantation, after the Civil War and win the heart of the noble but weak-willed Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard), who loves only his tender-hearted cousin and wife, Melanie (Olivia de Havilland).
Scarlett’s deathless scheming continually throws her into the path of rakish soldier of fortune Rhett Butler (Clark Gable), a man of equal self-centeredness but with a clearer-eyed, thicker-skin view of himself. The reader/audience immediately sees what it takes Scarlett some 1,000 pages and four hours to figure out — that Ashley will never love her the way he loves Melanie and that Rhett is the man for her. By the time she realizes this, Rhett (and just about everybody else) is gone from her life. All that is left is the one thing her father predicted would last — Tara — to which she returns to scheme yet again, this time to win Rhett back.
The story abounds in such ironies and horrific clichés that include the Ku Klux Klan defending the honor of white women and those women enjoying marital rape, both of which perpetuate the white patriarchy. All of the slaves are attached to their masters and are either docile, empathetic house servants, hearty field hands rescuing “Miss Scarlett” or hysterical, childlike creatures to be ridiculed and disciplined. Fewer stereotypes are more blatant than the comic relief figure of Prissy (Butterfly McQueen), who lies to Scarlett about her expertise in midwifery as Melanie’s confinement approaches during the burning of Atlanta and earns patronizing laughter from Rhett and a slap from Scarlett in the process.
But even here irony asserts itself in the presence of Mammy (Hattie McDaniel), who has raised Scarlett and her sisters , loves them and accepts Scarlett for the schemer that she is — while telling it like it is. Mammy — who combines Melanie’s compassion with Scarlett’s courage — is easily the most well-rounded character in the story, with McDaniel winning one of the films 10 Oscars as best supporting actress.
Despite its stereotypes and all the turmoil that went into making the movie — which would make a film in itself — “Gone With the Wind” remains an enduring, exquisitely crafted entertainment whose final irony is that Scarlett’s selfishness is what saves her family, Tara and her former slaves from extinction. As the African-American filmmaker Ava DuVernay said after learning of her own slave master ancestors on PBS’ “Finding Your Roots,” “The truth of us is complicated.” What is missing from our society in the age of the quick fix internet are the educational skills to parse that truth.