I’ve understood, intellectually, the concept of the Lost Cause for some time. What was enlightening for me about the experience of watching Gone with the Wind was its embracing of the equally odious idea of the Lost Cause understanding of the Civil War. The offhanded way in which Rhett Butler, Scarlett’s on-again-off-again love interest, refers to Prissy as a “simple-minded darky” is odious, but not surprising. The character Prissy, the house slave of Scarlett O’Hara, the movie’s hero, becomes a stand-in for all black people as mentally inferior and buffoonish. The ways in which the 80-year-old film depicts its black characters – speaking in heavily stereotyped, broken English, for example – while disturbing, wasn’t anything I wasn’t expecting. Gone with the Wind is vile and insidious in how it depicts race, the Civil War, and slavery in the Old South. That’s what I want to do now, in the form of my reaction to watching Gone with the Wind for the first time, as part of my 100 Essential Films series. “I believe Hollywood’s history of racism should be openly discussed,” Longworth tweeted. Canceling the film completely would, as film critic Karina Longworth said about Disney’s racist out-of-circulation-for-decades film Song of the South, turn it into a fetish object. This will allow the film to remain accessible, but not irresponsibly so. The forthcoming introduction by Professor Stewart will, I’m sure, add rigorous critical and historical analysis – most importantly from a person of color.
#SCRAWL NOVEL MOVIE#
They haven’t announced yet when the movie will return to the service, but Jacqueline Stewart, an African American cinema and media studies professor and Turner Classic Movies host, will provide the introduction to place the film “in its multiple historical contexts.”
HBO Max, the service that holds the streaming rights to the 1939 winner of ten Academy Awards, announced just a few weeks ago that it would be taking Gone with the Wind off of its service temporarily, so it can find a way to add context to the picture’s outdated and ugly depictions of race. I’m wrestling with Gone with the Wind as our culture wrestles with it.
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