Hattie McDaniel as Mammy, Olivia de Havilland as Melanie and Vivien Leigh as Scarlett in a publicity still from “Gone With the Wind” (1939). Neither Clark Gable (Rhett) nor Leslie Howard (Ashley) initially wanted to participate in what they rightly … — Hattie McDaniel as Mammy, Olivia de Havilland as Melanie and Vivien Leigh as Scarlett in a publicity still from “Gone With the Wind” (1939). Neither Clark Gable (Rhett) nor Leslie Howard (Ashley) initially wanted to participate in what they rightly intuited was a women’s picture in which the ladies would take the lead. Even after George Cukor, famous for directing fine actresses, was fired from the movie and replaced by Gable pal Victor Fleming, the female stars continued to receive secret coaching from Cukor.

'Gone With the Wind' indeed

June 13, 2020

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.

A world lit by fire, part two

May 31, 2020

The great comedian Red Skelton acidly remarked of the well-attended funeral of tyrannical movie boss Harry Cohn, “Well, it just goes to show you: Give the people what they want and they’ll turn out for it.”

President Donald J. Trump has given the people what they didn’t want — American carnage — and they’ve turned out for it anyway. Boy, have they turned out for it. Protesters from sea to shining sea this weekend have made the tiki torches of the white supremacists .who terrorized Charlottesville in 2017 look like candles in the wind. (I wonder if Trumpet is measuring the size of these crowds.)

Faux pas de deux -- Lara Spencer's cultural ignorance

August 28, 2019

The contretemps over “Good Morning America” co-anchor Lara Spencer mocking Prince George for taking ballet lessons is both a tempest in a teapot and the latest salvo in the culture wars that began with the demonization of Western civilization in the 1960s by liberals who could not separate it from its imperialistic, colonial roots and continued with the demonization of the arts in the 1970s and ’80s by conservatives who decried the arts falsely as a louche tax drain.

“We’ll see how long that lasts,” Spencer retorted to the news that the young prince is taking ballet lessons, with his father Prince William’s enthusiastic approval. It was the flippant, stupid remark of someone with no cultural background (remember her short-lived stint on PBS’ “Antiques Roadshow”?) trying to be witty or at least cool, and it was met with swift condemnation, a swift apology and a redemptive moment played out against the backdrop of 300 male dancers in Manhattan’s Times Square.

And that would be the end of it, except that, as one person put it, you can’t unring a bell, particularly in a divisive time in which every statement seems to be a clarion call to partisanship. Perhaps that’s unfair. We all make mistakes. We’re all more than our worst days. Yet Spencer’s ridicule cannot be undone, particularly for those who have been mercilessly bullied or marginalized for their love of the arts.

Whose identity is it anyway?

May 12, 2019

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute’s exhibit, “Camp: Notes on Fashion” (through Sept. 9) was inspired by Susan Sontag’s seminal 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp’,” which she defined broadly as style over substance characterized by theatricality, irony, playfulness, masquerade and unselfconsciousness. It’s a definition and a show that cuts a wide swath, but in the end it turns out to be less about camp and more about identity — its mutability and its ownership.

Art history 101 in the #MeToo era

October 2, 2018

History cannot be read backward. People of earlier times did not have our standards.

It is, however, equally disingenuous to disregard the contemporary lens through which we see and evaluate those earlier times….

#MeToo meets me first: Christine Blasey Ford testifies against Brett Kavanaugh before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Throwback Thursday for the Class of ’82

September 27, 2018

The historical past is always with us to offer encouragement or caution. But the social past – the who said what to whom on Thanksgiving – is dead to us as it must be if we are to move on. The exception to this is the egregious act that we never confront and that therefore continues to fester into a cancer….

No excuses for child detention

July 1, 2018

On Saturday, people took to the streets in more than 700 cities in every state to voice their opposition to separating children of undocumented immigrants indefinitely and perhaps forever from their parents. They carried signs and, in Atlanta, dog crates containing baby dolls to signify the cages in which the children have been held.

Saturday’s protest was the culmination of a week of civil disobedience that has drawn the usual backlash: Oh, these are just abortion-loving feminists protesting in support of illegal children they would never carry to term. Honestly…