Hi there, Ben here. You know “those movies?” The classics that you should have already seen but have been putting off for-eeevvveerr? Maybe you've been hiding the fact that you've never actually watched Citizen Kane. Maybe it's Casablanca, or Nosferatu, or The Godfather, or Lawrence of Arabia, or It's a Wonderful Life, or Star Wars. Well mine was Gone with the Wind. But true hearts, I'm here to tell you that I did my duty last week. I saw the shit out of Gone with the Wind. All four hours of it.
Before watching this infamous flick, I wouldn’t have thought it possible to adore and loathe something so much simultaneously. Despite stunning Technicolor cinematography, despite one of the best supporting casts ever assembled for any movie, despite editing and direction that seem at times to be taking stylistic cues from the silent era and pushing them bravely into the cinematic future, despite the outrageous scope and scale, Gone with the Wind is, at its core, the story of a selfish bitch and an amoral asshole. What’s more, though they seem to go through some periods of self-reflection and change, they are still just a selfish bitch and an amoral asshole at the end of the movie…and its FOUR HOURS LONG. Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) is at least charming. The same can’t be said for the infamous Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh). I’ve had a bad toothache this week. Scarlett O’Hara feels a lot like that. Is it Roger Ebert who's fond of saying that no great movie is too long and no terrible movie is too short? So what do we make of the expansive Gone with the Wind, always watchable, often captivating, but just as often unendurable, by which I mean that Scarlett O'Hara makes me want to claw my eyeballs out?
The trouble with Scarlett is that after all her obnoxious selfish teenager behavior at the beginning of the movie, she comes dangerously close to becoming an emancipated woman before the script nosedives back into antiquated ideals of womanhood that I find hard to relate to and Scarlett doesn't stand a chance of living up to. She is our protagonist, after all, not pretty wallpaper. She weilds her sexuality like a weapon, marrying for social and financial gain rather than for love. When the South crumbles against the approaching armies of the North, Scarlett finds inner strength, emerging as a leader to the women around her and rebuilding Tara, the O'Hara family plantation. In the famous pre-intermission swell, Scarlett, her body shaking with rage and power, exclaims to the sky, "As God is my witness, I will never go hungry again!"
But then here comes ol' Rhett Butler. He knows that despite all her strength and potential, Scarlett just needs to be "kissed and often, and by someone who knows how." Because, naturally, the only reason Scarlett uses her sexuality for power is that she's never been laid by the right guy. If you're rolling your eyes right now, just you wait til the scene late in the movie when Rhett forces her into the bedroom to, um, "kiss her." That's right, marital rape. And sure enough, she's all smiles the next morning. The audience is encouraged to identify Scarlett's budding individualism as being another harmful manifestation of her bratty self-centeredness as a child.
We observe that Scarlett would do much better to behave like Olivia de Havilland's Melanie. De Havilland was always typecast as virginal, pure, and righteous characters in the Flynn/Curtiz adventure flicks like The Sea Hawk and The Adventures of Robin Hood. Here she is more virginal, pure, and righteous than ever before as the impossibly kind Melanie. She is so Christlike, it’ll make you puke. Impossibly, it works; Melanie may be my favorite character in the movie, even though I’m fully aware that I’m being manipulated by the script, acting, and direction precisely so that Melanie must be my favorite character. When Melanie sticks by Scarlett’s side after everyone else has turned their backs on her, when she shows kindness to the local whore on multiple occasions, when she willfully ignores the evidence that Scarlett is actively pursuing her husband Ashley (Leslie Howard), I should bristle at being so obviously coerced into liking this pathetically kindhearted woman, but I can’t help it. My pathos for Melanie is so great that I actually begin to loathe spending time with Scarlett, which I don't think was producer David O. Selznick and director Victor Fleming's intention.
Even at the end of everything when Scarlett realizes how selfish and wrongheaded she’s been, she picks the worst possible time to clear her conscience. Melanie is on her deathbed and Ashley sits in the other room, distraught, with his head in his arms. Scarlett inexplicably decides that this would be the perfect time to pour her heart out in repentance for meddling in their marriage. Even at Melanie’s death, it’s all about Scarlett. The weird part is – and correct me if I’m wrong – I don’t think I’m supposed to be feeling this way. Most of the movie’s characters just seem to accept that the world revolves around Miss Scarlett O’Hara. We’re encouraged to think that she’s selfish and immature, but I think I hate her a lot more than I’m supposed to. What's more, I resent being forced to hate one of the most forward thinking female characters of the 1930s.
What’s so frustrating about my consistent distaste for Gone with the Wind’s protagonists is that the rest of the movie is almost uniformly brilliant. The cinematography and optical tricks at play are years, perhaps decades ahead of their time. Fleming* pushes the envelope with ambitious tracks and pans, while also keeping his feet planted firmly in the aesthetics and compositions of classic Hollywood, even silent era Hollywood. The mileage this production got out of massive sound stages with wildly painted skies is astounding. Consider the famous scene where Rhett embraces Scarlett against the backdrop of Atlanta burning. The almost neon red sky is far from realistic, but compellingly expressionistic. The color is the meaning. Rapture, change, passion, a world gone wild. All of this is conveyed wordlessly by dark silhouettes against a blood red sky.
The elephant in the room is, of course, Gone with the Wind’s complicated but ultimately sympathetic portrayal of Southern slave owners and the institution of slavery. On the one hand, I could argue that Gone with the Wind deserves praise for portraying slaves as more than just scenery. Hattie McDaniel’s Mammy was so perfectly iconic that the actress received the first Oscar ever awarded to an African American. On the other hand, the Mammy character, sympathetic as she is, is still more a stereotype than a full fledged human being. The other slave characters fare much worse. Scarlett's Atlanta handmaid, the unfocused, skittish Prissy (Butterfly McQueen), is embarrassingly crude and offensive, perhaps the pinnacle of Gone with the Wind's poor taste. In one scene, an O’Hara family slave chases a chicken around the yard trying to catch it for the “white folks.” Part of this makes me want to give director Victor Fleming and crew the benefit of the doubt, shining the light directly as they do on the absurd inequities in the division of labor, especially considering that the character is oblivious to the war currently being fought to decide his freedom. However, the sequence is scored with a goofy, comic cue, so I guess I’m just supposed to think this is hilarious. Gone with the Wind's Disney-fied, fantasy-land depiction of the prewar South is wistful and charming as fiction, not so much in the face of reality. Perhaps it's unfair to dwell on the race issue in a movie that's over 70 years old, but to my defense, Gone with the Wind brought it up. Ashley and the other Southern aristocrats grandstand about their roles as Aristotelian stewards of the South, both the land and the free and slave people the populate it. If they're going to make the argument, I can't help but disagree.
Gone with the Wind is an impossibly handsome production, but it's all in the service of telling the story of two of the most insufferable brats in motion picture history. Tell me Mammy's story. Tell me Ashley and Melanie's story. Tell me anybody's story from this rich, suggestive universe, but dear god, never make me sit through 4 hours of Scarlett and Rhett again. Okay, that's an overstatement. Of course I will watch Gone with the Wind again. It is a masterpiece of direction and cinematography. The width and breadth of this production is astounding. It's an oasis of great character actors. But in this lush apple's rotten core you will find two domineering, miserable people pursuing their miserable desires at the expense of everyone around them, and especially at the expense of the viewer. But it's also, like, great, you know? Perhaps the best thing I can say about Gone with the Wind is that I've just written 1500 words about it, and I don't even feel as if I've scratched the surface.
-Ben
*I haven't forgotten that Victor Fleming was only one of three directors to helm the project at various points of production, the other two being Sam Wood and the great George Cukor.