Not Yet Gone

In 1935 a brilliant filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, made a movie about the 1934 Nazi Party Congress: Triumph of the Will.  Eight decades later it is one of the most controversial works in the history of cinema. One the one hand, it is from beginning to end a propaganda film celebrating Nazis. On the other, it is a work of great artistry with pioneering techniques that influence directors today.  Not having seen it, I won’t weigh in. Better critics have already offered their informed say.  But it is the purest example of an enduring question: does the work’s morality trump its artistry, or vice versa?  This is a personal question which I answer “it depends.”  If I feel that either the moral issues posed by a work’s existence are minor (politically incorrect terms used in very old books or movies, say), or the artistry is great, art (for me) wins, and I will recommend a work despite its flaws.  If the artistry is lacking, and the offensiveness is significant, I won’t.

The brief for the prosecution of Gone With The Wind might be stated as follows.  That it is a celebration of an abhorrent regime, that of the antebellum South, a system built upon the enslavement of millions of human beings.  The opening title card says as much, that the Old South was a glorious place, like the chivalrous courts of yore; its men brave cavaliers, its ladies decorous and charming beauties. Then came the war, and it was swept away, “gone with the wind.”  At no point does the movie condemn slavery; it portrays the plantation owners and their families as kindly figures, surrogate parents to their charges, the slaves. The Yankees bringing down the South are consistently shown as corrupt and brutal. There is no hint that idealism, specifically abolitionism, should be included as a motive for the war.  The Klan appears briefly in act two, and is shown to be a heroic organization devoted to protecting Southern womanhood from Black rapists.  The Blacks themselves are portrayed negatively. Two of the men are shown to have limited intellect: Big Sam; and also a nameless ex-slave who, when assured that if he votes Republican he will receive forty acres and a mule, echoes “and a mule!?” The prominent characters Mammy and Prissy have come to exemplify the ills of the movie; their images are seared into our memory as evil stereotypes.

I can’t defend any of that. Instead I will argue that the movie has very great artistry, and that perhaps a few of the items on the charge sheet are not quite as they seem.

Readers under age forty need first to clear a few hurdles standing between them and appreciation of the film. They take for granted the sort of effects employed in the making of Star Wars; indeed, the original seems dated.  Movies and television shows are edited with hundreds of cuts; a protracted take feels unnatural and is outside of their comfort zone.  Even the acting has changed since the thirties.  Performances before World War Two seem mannered and artificial. (Though an honest look at James Dean reveals that Method actors could be as mannered as any of the old guard; only the mannerisms differed.)

GWTW was the apotheosis of Hollywood’s Golden Age.  In the days before television and home video technology certain movies were released to the theaters more than once. Disney’s features were; I saw Snow White in a theater when I was five. And GWTW was.  It debuted in 1939, and was in its fifth release when I saw it for the first time in 1967; it played theaters eight more times.  In 1976 it ran on a new station, HBO, and then was sold to the networks, as a one-time showing, for five million dollars. When it debuted in 1939 veterans of the Civil War were in attendance, people who had lived through the events of the movie.  When it first was shown on NBC members of Generation X watched with their parents. More Americans by far paid to see it in a theater than any movie before or since.  The size of an audience is no guarantee of quality, but so many people seeing it over so many years is a powerful indicator.

GWTW is an epic spectacle.  Today we take from granted Death Stars exploding and ocean liners standing on end and sinking.  Audiences look at the burning of Atlanta, or the scene outside the railroad station and wonder: “Is this what we are supposed to think is spectacular?”  We need to talk about sets.

A set, loosely, is the space an audience sees in a given scene.  Today if the screenplay calls for a set in the Grand Canyon, or the exterior of the Burj Khalifah, with sufficient budget, these are possible choices. Sets on a planet of giant, blue-skinned beings are not real, but with modern CGI (and sufficient budget) those too are possible.  In 1939 these were not possible.

The introduction of sound added to constraints already facing studios in that era.  It was difficult or impossible to film on location, so sets had to be built on sound stages.  Take a look at the interior of 12 Oaks, the Wilkes planation, during the barbeque.  Each of those rooms had to be constructed.  When Scarlett sneaks out of the bedroom to find Ashley, we see an enormous second story with a balcony running around the perimeter. Scarlett descends the giant staircase, and eavesdrops on the argument in the library, visible through its arch, before ducking into a drawing room.  The grounds of the plantation are visible through the mansion’s windows whenever shown in the frame.  There are more than one hundred guests and slaves in the party scenes, and all of them are wearing costumes.  Armies of people had to build those sets and sew those costumes. The artistry in conceiving them, and the craft realizing them was incredible. And those are merely early scenes.  Later Scarlett goes to Atlanta. We see the residential streets and the area near the makeshift hospital downtown, and the street outside Belle Watling’s parlor house. In every instance the illusion that we are looking at a city, one with real people who might turn the corner or emerge from a house, has to be created and maintained. Later, we see those streets aflame, with buildings burning as Scarlett’s household tries to escape. And still later we see those streets all mud, dust, and hastily thrown together wooden buildings as Atlanta rebuilds. The sheer number of sets built dwarfed others movies of the era.  Audiences didn’t know, and didn’t need to know, the technical challenges, but they sensed them. They were seeing something they hadn’t seen before, and forty years later audiences still sensed it.

This was in service of the greater illusion, that they were seeing an entire world swept away, utterly destroyed, and then rebuilt into something new.  The antebellum world was immoral, certainly, but that does not make what happened to the Southerners any less compelling.  Gone With The Wind opens in 1861; for the protagonists (if not their slaves, nor perhaps for most Southerners without great wealth) it is a tranquil paradise.  Then in the war the younger men are killed or maimed, the cities and plantations looted and burned. The women and children on the home front starve or take sick and die. Many never recover.  The story ends in 1873, as Reconstruction enters its final stages. Whatever we think of the people this happens to in the movie, it did happen to people like them and it is an incredible tale.

The central figure, Scarlett O’Hara, is our guide through the maelstrom.  Scarlett, surely inspired by Becky Sharp, is a great proto-feminist heroine.  Vivien Leigh isn’t entirely convincing as the young Scarlett in the opening scenes; she is too old. But she does convey the character’s selfishness, her mean streak, and her manipulative approach to others.  By the movie’s end she has lost three husbands, both parents, and her only child.  One of her sisters is mad, and the other hates her. She has gone from pampered belle to early widow to starving farm laborer to successful businesswoman to millionairess. She has delivered a baby, lived through the siege and burning of a city, and even killed a man. But she has saved the family land, and provided for people she really does not like. At the very end she has lost (in different ways) the only three people who matter to her, all on the same night.  And yet she remains undefeated and hopeful. Vivien Leigh more than earned her Oscar in one of the screen’s iconic performances.

Hattie McDaniel received the Academy Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role, the first African-American to win the Oscar. But the best performance in the category was actually given by her fellow actress, Olivia de Havilland. Melanie Hamilton Wilkes seems too good to be true. It turns out she is even better than she seems.  De Havilland is a luminous wraith, with large, trusting eyes, perfect for Melanie. Seen through Scarlett’s eyes Melanie seems weak, naïve, and foolish.  By the end of the story Scarlett (and we) have come to realize that while Melanie is physically weak she is otherwise none of those things. She is one of the great heroines in fiction.

What of Hattie McDaniel, and Butterfly McQueen?  Mammy is remembered, by those who haven’t seen the movie, and even by many who have, as the female counterpart of an “Uncle Tom,” a fawning, servile creature whose implied acceptance of the antebellum status quo, and postwar loyalty, provides cover for the evil system. I disagree.

My argument requires conceding two premises. First, that people in terrible circumstances make the best of it. Second, that those in unequal power relationships find ways to subvert the status quo and empower themselves in ways that are not always heroic. An analog for the slave is the prisoner.  Whether the imprisonment is just does not matter to the argument.  Cool Hand Luke aside, most prisoners never escape, nor do they attempt it. Nor do they spend every waking moment dwelling upon the horror of their situation. Instead, they cope. They decorate their cells, they do the assigned work, they chat with friends, etc.  Mammy and the other slaves are prisoners, with no prospect of escape.  They are lifers, and they cope.

Some things we can say about Mammy with confidence.  She is nobody’s fool.  Scarlett, the most devious character in the movie, tries to manipulate her at every turn, and as Mammy’s mistress, often prevails. But she never fools her.  Consider Mammy’s plight. She is a dignified, intelligent, competent woman at the beck and call of a willful, capricious teenager. In one of the early scenes with Scarlett she wants her charge to eat, and Scarlett wants to starve herself to fit into a tight corset.  Mammy manipulates the manipulator, in the process showing that she knows a great deal about Scarlett, including things Scarlett thinks are her secrets.  At various points in the story Mammy does not hesitate to deliver moral judgments to her mistress, also at odds with a simple reading of the master-slave relationship.  And in the end, when she tells Scarlett that she is leaving, she reminds Scarlett that she is free. She makes it clear that after the war she chose to remain with someone she had devoted most of her adult life to raising, the one tangible proof of her life’s work.  But she could have left at any time, because she “was free.” 

Poor Butterfly McQueen! Mammy was formidable, Prissy was something else. What a part to be remembered for.  Prissy is foolish and annoying and unsympathetic. Like Scarlett we have the urge to slap her. She is the embodiment of the slave who should never be left to fend for herself.  And yet …

Prissy now strikes me as a classic passive-aggressive personality, a likely choice for someone who feels powerless.  She is boastful when she thinks she can get away with boasting, insisting she knows everything about delivering a baby.  But when she is called upon to perform, she is full of excuses and foot-dragging.  She has all sorts of reasons for not looking for the doctor, or later, not going to seek Rhett Butler at Belle Watling’s. (“I can’t go in there. My mama would skin me!”)  Consider the scene after she speaks with the doctor. She literally drags her feet returning to deliver the bad news, deliberately dawdling.  Chronic lateness is a prime weapon in the arsenal of the passive-aggressive; others are under the control of the late arrival, forced to wait for her.

The ploys of Mammy and Prissy aren’t satisfying; satisfying is Django shooting Calvin Candie.  But they can’t be dismissed out of hand as unreal, or as emblematic of a simplistic acceptance of their world.  Clearly both characters are more complex than the facile dismissal they are commonly given.

His contemporaries included Gary Grant, John Wayne, Errol Flynn, Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart, and Gary Cooper.  The called him “The King.” He embodied the Ideal Man of his era in a way no actor has matched.  Margaret Mitchell wrote Rhett Butler with him in mind. Everyone knew it, and everyone knew he would play Rhett Butler. Everyone but the man himself, who was afraid he could never meet their expectations.  In the end, Clark Gable gave them what they wanted.  Robert Donat won the Oscar for Goodbye Mister Chips. No one remembers Mister Chips. No one forgets Rhett Butler.

Rhett Butler was suave, dashing, and dangerous.  The black sheep son of an old Charleston family he had made a bit too much money in what, it was whispered, might have been unsavory ways.  During the war he ran the blockade, and later served as a soldier. Heroically, of course, though he himself never spoke of it. He was a multimillionaire, equally at home in the parlors of Southern aristocracy, or in Belle Watling’s Parlor House.  He could ride a horse, deal the cards, hold his liquor, and in a duel he was “a crack shot.”

Of course he was.  But other than his rescue of Scarlett’s household during the burning of Atlanta, we see little or none of that. One of the most adult, masculine characters in film history devotes himself to sexual politics, to chasing a girl half his age.

The proverbial elephant is in the room, unnoticed because in truth it belongs there.  At the beginning of the story Rhett is thirty-five; Scarlett is sixteen.  No one remarks on this because it used to be unremarkable.  Thirty-five year old men - or even older - routinely married sixteen year old girls - or even younger.  There is bedrock to morality: Thou shalt not kill; Thou shalt not steal, etc. The rest is current fashion.  Still, fashion matters.  A suitor like Rhett might pay court to a Scarlett, but to a great extent marriage was an affair for the grownups, the lucky bride given the good news after the groom went down on one knee to her father.  And a fellow of circumstances similar to Rhett’s would not waste much time: either having her hand, or seeking a mate elsewhere.

Hearing the object of your affection confess her undying love to another is not the best start to a relationship, but Rhett lets Scarlett know that he has heard, and then laughs at her.  While circumstance intervenes – two marriages to other men, a war, etc. – his wooing of her over six years shows remarkable patience, as does his devotion to her through six years of marriage, during which she remains selfish, mercurial, and in love with another man.

Rhett plays the game like a master, better than most today, and certainly better than his contemporaries, who don’t even know there is a game to be played.  In the end, he is outplayed. One of the controversial scenes is the marital rape. In the morning Scarlett’s smile signifies that he has won a victory. But for him it is a loss. He has lost his cool, after eleven years of keeping it, and guilt for what he has done drives him from the house. 

At the movie’s end Rhett is forty-seven. Not old yet, but feeling the weight of age beginning its inexorable downward press.  The sadder but wiser hero deciding at movie’s end he will reconnect with his family – think Tom Cruise (“Now that I’ve fought Martians, I appreciate my kids”) – is a trope.  But Rhett’s decision to return to Charleston, to his family, to his roots, is recognition of the passage of time, and of loss.  It comes at the moment when his victory should be complete. Scarlett has finally realized who and what he is, and that he loved her completely. Most ironically, she has learned along the way that despite Ashley’s ideals, it is her body he wants. (“You want me the way Rhett wants that Watling creature.”) Whereas Rhett, even though “he looks like he knows what I look like under my dress,” has always loved her for her mind. But it is too late.  When she tries one more manipulation, “what will become of me?” His famous answer, “frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn” is that much harsher because it is true.  This isn’t some plot twist, a “you lied to me and I will hate you forever,” until the final reel, when the happy reconciliation comes.  He no longer loves her, nor hates her; all that remains is indifference.

Finally, there is Ashley.  His age is never given.  He is older than Scarlett, but surely no more than twenty-five when the story begins. Leslie Howard was forty-six. His age hadn’t stopped them from casting him as Romeo, opposite an also superannuated Norma Shearer. It didn’t stop David Selznick from casting him as Ashley.  His performance was the weakest of the leads. Yet his very wrongness for the part worked. Because Ashley is wrong for Scarlett, and he is nothing like what she imagines him to be.

When Melanie dies Scarlett sees for the first time all of Melanie’s virtues, and all of Ashley’s flaws.  And what she sees is the real death of the Old South, as its tragic nature is revealed to her.  That old world wasted it children.  Its young women, Melanie and Scarlett, were trained to play the role of decorative but helpless parasites, but events showed them to be strong, brave, flexible, resilient, and entrepreneurial: qualities that could never have come to light without the war.  Meanwhile its young chevaliers were raised to be utterly useless.  They were trained to be valorous in war, fitting them for little else. When war came they were either killed, or sent home broken.

That is a harsh indictment of the Old South, though well deserved.  We’d like there to be an even harsher indictment of slavery.  But this wasn’t a story about slaves; it was about people who happened to be slave owners. If this were the story of George Washington, say, we would tolerate his never coming to terms with his slave ownership.  Scarlett is no George Washington, and she isn’t admirable, but she is interesting.  The depiction of the African-Americans is worse than we would like, it is more complex than the critics acknowledge. The idealized portrait of the Old South turns out to be an illusion of the main characters, which is erased by the end. Meanwhile Scarlett’s story, and the monumental events framing it, has resonated for generations.  It is artistry enough for me,