HBO’s decision to remove Gone With the Wind from its new HBO Max streaming service is yet another troubling step toward erasing American cultural heritage. It is essential to preserve the film, not in spite of the fact that it runs counter to our current attitudes, but precisely because it does.
From a sheer film making perspective, the Civil War epic has a lot to commend it. The storytelling, iconic performances, ability to set an absorbing narrative seamlessly against a historical event, and incredible scope all make it a monumental achievement for any time, let alone for 1939.
The film marked many milestones, including earning Hattie McDaniel the first Oscar win by a black actress. It is the highest-grossing film of all time adjusted for inflation. Even today, having a four-hour movie whose action is driven by a strong female protagonist would be rare and notable.
Yet there is no doubt that viewed by today’s standards (and in some cases, even at the time) it can be jarring.
In one of the most infamous and difficult scenes for modern audiences, Rhett Butler commits marital rape against Scarlett O’Hara, who wakes up smiling the next morning — perpetuating the idea that if an assertive man overpowers a woman, she’ll ultimately enjoy it.
Even more troubling, however, is the portrayal of race and slavery.
The film not only sanitizes the brutality of the institution of slavery, but it also romanticizes the Antebellum period, sadly lamenting from the opening credits the bygone era of plantation life. “There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South …” the story begins. “Here in this pretty world Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and Slave … Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered. A Civilization gone with the wind …”
The film plays into racial stereotypes, and slaves are depicted as if they are just members of the family happy to serve their white masters, even after they’re let free.
The portrayal of the Confederacy and of Reconstruction in Gone With the Wind fits neatly in with the pernicious “Dunning School” narrative that saw white southerners as victims of aggression by northerners trying to exploit and ruthlessly rule over them after the Civil War.
The reality, of course, was that southerners refused to accept freed blacks as equals and instead instigated a campaign of terrorism to keep them from voting and participating in public life, and then imposed a system of state-sponsored discrimination for a century.
Wiping away Gone With the Wind does not change the reality that people once had such perceptions. Instead, it makes it harder for people to understand how American perceptions of race in general, and the period surrounding the Civil War era in particular, changed over time.
The Dunning School dominated American perceptions of Reconstruction for the first half of the 20th century and played a crucial role in preserving Jim Crow laws and squashing civil rights efforts. As a cultural landmark, Gone With the Wind is important to understanding how southerners viewed the war and its aftermath and how they mythologized the Confederacy.
In a follow-up statement, HBO Max said the film would eventually return “with a discussion of its historical context and a denouncement of those very depictions, but will be presented as it was originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed. If we are to create a more just, equitable and inclusive future, we must first acknowledge and understand our history.”
That statement at least acknowledges that trying to erase the movie altogether would be counterproductive.
As I’ve written in the past, Charles Dickens created one of the most anti-Semitic characters in literature in Fagin, the greedy leader of a gang that deploys children as pickpockets. Dickens derisively refers to the villain in second reference as “the Jew” throughout Oliver Twist. When the 1948 film version was made, Alec Guinness portrayed Fagin with a stereotypical nasal voice and piled on makeup to create a cartoonishly large nose. However, there are still reasons to read Dickens, and even the more cringeworthy parts of Oliver Twist provide perspective on the history of casual anti-Semitism in Britain.
If Gone With the Wind were wiped away, and other iconic films were to follow, then it would become impossible to have any enduring American culture. People’s standards of right and wrong evolve over time, and to cancel works that don’t fit in with today’s times would mean constantly purging old works of literature, music, and movies every few years — or whenever they no longer match modern sensibilities.
