Retro Rewind: ‘Gone with the Wind’

Welcome to Retro Rewind, the TGJ original feature launched to revisit TV and Film’s entertaining yet occasionally difficult past.

Today, we make our back to 1939, the year in which the movie ‘Gone with the Wind’ was released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

In it, we meet the feisty and vivacious belle Scarlett O’Hara, the daughter of a wealthy Irish man whose wealth depends on African-American chattel slavery.

Much to their dismay, their lives are turned upside down when the Civil War strikes the South and eradicates the lifestyle the enslaving and torture of enslaved Africans afforded them.

This forces young O’Hara to find her way in a world that soon becomes cold, dark and dangerous once the North’s efforts to dismantle slavery shatters the cotton-clad fantasy that is her life.

The critic Lou Lumenick had this to say about the problematic yet iconic release:

If the Confederate flag is finally going to be consigned to museums as an ugly symbol of racism what about the beloved film offering the most iconic glimpse of that flag in American culture? It buys heavily into the idea that the civil war was a noble lost cause and casts Yankees and Yankee sympathisers as the villains.

He added:

It goes to great lengths to enshrine the myth that the civil war wasn’t fought over slavery — an institution the film unabashedly romanticises.

Press play to see it for yourself below…

‘Esquire’ came to this conclusion when discussing ‘Gone’:

The film more or less invented the concept of the sassy black friend, in Hattie McDaniel as Mammy, who was the first African-American to win an Oscar. The film explicitly talks about reparations, the famous 40 acres and a mule, as a vote-buying scam put about by Yankee carpetbaggers. There are good blacks and insolent blacks. There are house blacks and there are field blacks. Whenever African-American characters are articulate, it is always meant as a comic surprise. These are still the prejudices that bedevil representations of African-Americans onscreen.

But what is most fascinating about Gone with the Wind is the capacity for the story not to be about race. One would think that a story about the Civil War, about the liberation of the slaves, would naturally involve the discussion of the nature of enslavement, the nature of rebellion. But there is really almost none of it. Even after the war is lost, Mammy remains Mammy. The good blacks remain the good blacks. The carpetbaggers only appear in a tiny fragment of a scene, and they are not really given enough personhood to count as villains. That honor goes to white trash and the Yankees. The details of the material life of the Southerners is the key, and in that drama the black people amount to furniture. During a nap before the war, white girls sleep while black girls fan them with peacock feather fans. Whether those black girls have any feelings whatsoever is a matter of the strictest irrelevance to this movie.

Do you agree?