another blog about Gone with the Wind

Do I love the movie Gone With the Wind? Yes.
Do I think it's racist and can really be upsetting? ABSOLUTELY!

I love old movies. I watch at least a snippet of a movie on TCM on almost every day. I have watched old movies since I discovered them on what was then something oh-so-new - cable TV - back in 1975 or so. As a child, then a teen, then an adult, I watched the same movies over and over. I wrote an essay on Clark Gable when I was in the 10th grade.

I love old movies. I love the stories they tell, the pictures they present, the time capsules they present, the places they take me, and the history they present - and misrepresent.

I also admit that there are some classic movies I don't love. In fact, there are a few I hate. I can't watch anything where animals are portrayed as being harmed - or are actually harmed. I have a lot of problems with certain portrayals of violence that are just too real to me. And while I can get through most classic movies despite their racism and sexism, I loathe The Philadelphia Story, with its message to women: men fool around, put up with it, shut up, let them come home when their "finished." For whatever reason, it's my limit. And I've had friends get mad at me for not liking The Philadelphia Story - they see it as a personal indictment. Look, if you like it, that's your thing. But please respect that it makes my blood boil.

I blogged a while back about watching Birth of a Nation. Yup, the whole, long thing. And in that blog, I noted:

Birth of a Nation has NO OTHER PURPOSE than inspiring hate and feelings of superiority by white Americans, and to say that the USA should give states the right to subjugate black Americans. It wasn't made primarily to tell a love story, or a survival story, or a horror story, or any kind of story: it was made solely to say horrific things about one race of people, and to claim it was best for the people of that race to be enslaved by another race of people, who the movie says are superior intellectually, emotionally, culturally and spiritually. It promotes a passionate, irrational hatred of black Americans - and it makes the Ku Klux Klan the heroes. That's its message, first and foremost.

I'm glad I watched it, but I won't be watching it again. And I know that it pioneered also sorts of film techniques. So did Triumph of the Will. In praising the technique, the horror of the product has to be acknowledged EVERY time for movies like those.

Gone With the Wind was written by a racist. Yes, I know Margaret Mitchell sent money regularly to Morehouse College and her donations enabled perhaps 70 to 80 black men to become physicians. That's nice. But she did it in secret: it did not become public knowledge until many decades after her death. And I don't at all take it as a sign that she wasn't a racist - I know plenty of people back in Kentucky who donate to the college funds of black students, or voted for President Obama, and also have racist beliefs. The book Gone With the Wind itself should be enough to say Margaret Mitchell was a racist - even if you don't think the portrayals of black characters are racist (I do), you have to admit that the characters are little more than scenery, and in a book about life before, during and after the Civil War, that's absolutely RACIST, to think those stories can be entirely ignored. But let me go farther in proving the point: according to several sources, when Margaret Mitchell discovered that she was in a history class at Smith College in the 1910s with a black student, the story is that Mitchell demanded to change classes, or have the student change classes. The teacher refused, and Mitchell said she would go to the dean, or even the institution's president, if necessary, to get it changed. The black student was moved. Mitchell's mother later argued that professor Dorothy Ware flunked her even though the dean approved the transfer. According to the book Southern Women at the Seven Sister Colleges: Feminist Values and Social Activism, 1875-1915 by Joan Marie Johnson (University of Georgia Press, 2010):

Margaret called Ware a hypocrite, asking if Ware "had ever undressed and nursed a Negro woman or sat on a drunk Negro man's head to keep him from being shot by the police." Mitchell's mother blamed the incident on the fact that Ware's family had been to the South to teach blacks and had not been well received by white southerners. Margaret grounder her refusal to take a class with an African American - an act that suggested social equality - in her familiarity with blacks, an ease she believed was only possible whiten a white supremacist society. 

Gone With the Wind was part of Mitchell's determination to repaint the South as lovingly paternalistic to enslaved people, and you just can't call that anything but racist.

So, how can I love the movie Gone With the Wind? Because while I see the racism and the desperate effort in the movie to reinforce a romantic view of a world where people were enslaved, I also see a movie about a woman who goes from a flighty, vindictive girl with no depth to a fierce woman determined not just to survive war, but to thrive in its aftermath. I'm astounded by the idea of how she uses the only thing she has - her charm and wits - to get what she wants for herself and her family. I also identify with putting all of your energy into something that, you ultimately realize, is a really bad idea. And, yeah, I love the actors and the film techniques. And Butterfly McQueen (read her story, if you haven't ever).

In short, I am able to "stand" the racism in Gone with the Wind the same way so many, many men I know are able to "stand" the horrific sexism of The Godfather and The Godfather II.

If you don't want to hear me talk about how strong, resilient and strategic Scarlett is as a heroine, fine - 'cause I sure as hell don't want to hear you talk about how sexy and virile you find violent rapist Stanley Kowalski is in Streetcar Names Desire, mmmkay?

Do I think HBO Max is right to stop showing Gone With the Wind? I don't know. It's a private company and its senior staff made a business decision not to be associated with that movie anymore. I admit that I would love to see what other movies they have chosen not to show. But it's their decision, they make money, they don't want to show this movie anymore, okay. 

I would be upset if TCM stopped showing it. I would, in fact, be outraged. That's what TCM is for - to show old movies, many of them full of painful stereotypes but all of them worth viewing, at least once. TCM shows a number of movies I find deeply disturbing, including Gabriel Over the White House, a 1933 pro-fascist political fantasy. And most Woody Allen movies, which imagine New York City spaces with no black Americans at all and whose women characters are, for the most part, nothing but cringe-worthy. And, of course, Birth of a Nation and The Philadelphia Story. But I want them to keep showing those. I even want them to keep showing Streetcar Named Desire, despite that I cannot watch it anymore. I really enjoy their introductions that put such films in context and make it clear, "Yeah, there are big problems with some portrayals/themes in this movie..." Keep doing that. Even if I don't aways agree with what's said - keep doing that.

And as I noted in that earlier blog I referenced: I was on the light rail coming home from Portland in 2013, and was eavesdropping on a group of African women, I think from Tanzania, and a group of Indian women (from India) talking about movies they love, including Gone With the Wind. They went on and on about why. They loved it like I do. No mention of its racism was ever made - I kept listening for it, but it never happened. Sometimes I wonder if people in other countries, even Africans, understand the horrors of slavery in the Americas... but I kind of loved that they loved the film without experiencing any racist subtext. The way women are expected to enjoy so many films without getting upset about the sexism.

Anyway, see you at the movies. 

Let's talk about Burt Reynolds instead of politics

I cried when Burt Reynolds died. I did. Movies and TV shows were my safe place growing up, and watching Reynolds host The Tonight Show was a happy time in my dysfunctional family. Going to the Starlight Drive-in in Henderson, Kentucky to see a Burt Reynolds movie was always a great time. I couldn't say that about Christmas with my family, but I could say that about any time a get together with my family and Burt Reynolds was involved.

Unless you were alive in the 1970s, you have NO IDEA how huge of a star he was in that decade. No idea. There is no celebrity I can compare his popularity to, before or since.

When I saw on Facebook soon after Reynolds died that a movie theater in Portland, Oregon was going to show Smokey and the Bandit, I immediately bought tickets for the showing, more than a month away. When am I ever going to get to see Smokey and the Bandit again on a big screen?! The showing was almost sold out and the audience laughed at all the right moments - except one, the one in which mocks Sheriff Buford T. Justice of Portague County for being a racist. I always appreciate that scene - the movie would have been disingenuous about the South without it. Regardless, I was in heaven watching that movie in a real theater, on the big screen. I could feel tears in my eyes when "Eastbound and Down" played the first time. A friend of mine tweeted after Burt died, "I was eight years old and my bike was, alternately, the Millennium Falcon and the Bandit’s black Trans-Am." And rewatching the movie reminded me of why that was.

Ever since that night in Portland, I've been hungry for more Burt Reynolds movies.

I'm thrilled to learn today that Turner Classic Movies will show six of his movies on December 26, including Smokey and the Bandit and The Longest Yard. But in October, TCM showed White Lightning, and I recorded it to watch when I had time. And I just watched it. Heaven.

White Lightning was a critical bomb, but an audience smash. If you are thinking of watching it, be forewarned: this is not the romantic, genteel South or the fun-loving good ole boy hick flick you may be expecting. This is not Smokey and the Bandit, though car chases abound. There are some beautiful, atmospheric moments and some hilariously-witty one-liners from Burt and, yes, he takes his shirt off a lot - which is FINE - but this a dark, gritty, at times brutal look at the rural South. If you can ignore the painfully stupid instrumental background music at times, and if you experienced any of the South in the 1970s, or if you wanted to, you'll dig this movie. I wore the clothes in this movie, women in my family had the hair of oh-so-many of the women in this movie... I swear, I could smell the grass, the cars, the food, the gasoline, the pigs, the sweat, the water - even the moonshine. I loved how all the women in this movie had normal, real bodies - no boob jobs, no botox, real hips. And when Burt says "The Poe-lease," I melt... that's how we talked growing up. I've been saying "The Poe-lease" frequently these days, much to the confusion of my German husband.

But White Lightning is more than just a movie that looks so nostalgic and atmospheric and has great car chases: I heard so many of the things said by the sheriff and some others in this movie when I was growing up by family members, neighbors, even teachers - about "hippies" and young college students daring to challenge the status quo, asking questions and asking, "Why?" I feel like the movie has a subversive, subtle message: the old ways are going away, and young people everywhere, all over the USA, including the South, are going to demand something much better: racial justice, women's equality, education for all. And you can't just kill them all or dismiss them as communists - they are going to just keep coming, and really, are they any better or worse than anyone else? The scene with Reynolds walking around the students in the diner, listening to them as they talk about justice, him obviously thinking of his brother and his ideals, really got me. I believe there are a lot of people like that in rural America, who may not be eloquent, who may be more focused on having a good time than trying to help the oppressed, but who admire those people we mock now as "social justice warriors."

I do wonder how modern audiences who don't know the VERY restrictive laws regarding alcohol in the USA once upon a time will understand the secondary plot of the movie, centering around the illegal production and transportation of whiskey, the massive amounts of money people made off such and the dogged attempts of the federal government to collect taxes on it.

It's not a movie for everyone. But if you have the right mindset, this is a good, thoughtful flick.

And on a side note, I found this interesting note from another reviewer:

Every character in this film hates the system! Sheriff Connors hates the Commies infiltrating Washington, the moonshiners hate the IRS, and those damn long-haired, pot smoking hippies are always protesting. This is because screenwriter William W. Norton was a rebel in his own right; a card-carrying member of the Communist Party since the paranoid 50’s, Norton’s life is as interesting as the story. After a career in Hollywood, penning THE SCALPHUNTERS, I DISMEMBER MAMA, BIG BAD MAMA, and this film’s sequel GATOR, he moved to Ireland in the 1980’s and became a gunrunner for the INLA (Irish National Liberation Army), until he and his wife Eleanor were busted in France, and sentenced to prison. After doing his time, and learning a warrant was issued in America, he sought asylum in Nicaragua, where he killed a man who broke into his house. Then he moved to Cuba, but found living under a Communist regime was a lot different from just carrying a card, so he fled to Mexico, eventually being smuggled back into the USA by friends, where he lived out his life.  

And checking IMDB, I found out Norton's son directed an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, one of my all-time favorite shows, and FreakyLinks, a show created by a friend of mine...

Mind. Blown.

Finally watched Birth of a Nation. Yuck.

According to the dictionary on my computer, the term racism means "the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races." There are a lot of people that would read that definition, without the word racism, and happily, even unashamedly, identify with the phrase. I am not one of those people. But they are all around me. That belief about different races is not limited to only people descended from European tribes, I've learned as I've traveled the world. And when people tout any race - their own or someone else's - as smarter, kinder, more family-oriented, sneakier, more violent, more passionate, more creative, better with money, or WHATEVER - than other races, I get a really ugly pain in my stomach. Racism is real.

In our vernacular use, most people, when they say something is racist, mean something much stronger: they use the word for something that has a message that is demeaning at best, and hateful at worst, regarding all people of a particular race. When someone says some book or movie or play or whatever is racist, that's usually what they mean: that the piece is demeaning to an entire race.

When someone says, "Hey, that's racist" about a movie or book or play or whatever, if I haven't seen it or read it or whatever, I'll give it a look. And sometimes, I don't find it truly racist - I don't always think the author or screenwriter or whatever is trying to say something specfici about all members of a race, good or bad. Maybe I do think it's racist, but I think it's more a relic of a time - presentation of stereotypes and sweeping generalizations we all, surely, know now aren't true, right? Often, I think, yes, it's racist - but it's far, far more sexist, so why aren't we talking about that?!

In short, I'm not quick to jump on the oh-my-goodness-that's-racist! bandwagon. So knowing that's my MO, please take this for what it is worth:

I finally watched Birth of a Nation, all three plus hours of it, and it's the most hateful, racist-filled crap of a movie I've ever seen in my life. By far. It's absolutely reprehensible. It's so much worse than I ever imagined. To call it racist doesn't even begin to describe its horribleness. It is hideous.

Tons of old American movies are racist. Maybe all of them. Maybe all of the new ones as well. I love old movies, but loving old movies, like Gone With the Wind, is like loving my grandparents (one of whom I'm relatively certain was in the White Citizens League back in the 1950s): racist, painfully so at times, but there are so many, many other wonderful things about them that are worth loving, worth loving deeply, and I do so, even if, at times, they make me cringe - or even make me angry and ashamed. I look at the entire picture, and see what the heart of the message is, and what might be a product of the time, and see if I can reconcile, if the heart is good and greater than the unpleasantness around it. Sometimes I can, sometimes I can't.

There's a racist joke and a couple of racist scenes in my beloved Duck Soup.  There's oh-so-much racism in Red Dust, yet another film I adore. There's a couple of cringe-worthy comments in His Girl Friday, a comedy we all claim to love. Often, in a quest to not address racism, movies simply ignore that black Americans or Asians exist at all - not exactly racism, but most definitely not anything to applaud. I am fully conscious of the racism every time I watch these films, but it doesn't keep me from enjoying them, because there is so much more there, so many wonderful portrayals of the human spirit and of human values. If I avoided movies that could be considered racist, I wouldn't watch any movies.

And I'm always amazed at how the people so quick to tell me what is and isn't racist will roll their eyes when I start to talk about sexism in movies - especially when I go off on The Philadelphia Story, a movie I LOATHE for its horrible sexist message: men cheat on their wives, but as long as they go back to their wives eventually, or don't entirely leave them, they are just being normal and women should accept it. BITE ME.

But the obvious, hateful agenda of Birth of a Nation... its entire story, its characters, its presentation - EVEN THE TITLE... it is all beyond anything I can get my head around. It has no other purpose than to say that African Americans are sex-crazed buffoons naturally prone to violence, that their subjugation was (and is) for the good of everyone in the USA, and that the only way to have world peace is for white people to be united in their subjugation of Africans everywhere. It also promotes a twisted view of history, saying explicitly that, before the Civil War, there was no one nation, there was no union - just happy independent states doing entirely as they pleased (which makes it perfectly in-line with the modern-day GOP, but I digress...). Birth of a Nation has NO OTHER PURPOSE than inspiring hate and feelings of superiority by white Americans, and to say that the USA should give states the right to subjugate black Americans. It wasn't made primarily to tell a love story, or a survival story, or a horror story, or any kind of story: it was made solely to say horrific things about one race of people, and to claim it was best for the people of that race to be enslaved by another race of people, who the movie says are superior intellectually, emotionally, culturally and spiritually. It promotes a passionate, irrational hatred of black Americans - and it makes the Ku Klux Klan the heroes. That's its message, first and foremost.

Geesh, the movie is so freakin' racist that many of the black characters are played by white actors with make-up, when those characters were required to come in contact with a white actress. This film is widely credited for reviving the long-dead Ku Klux Klan - and I completely see why.

I have always hoped, having not seen it, that maybe it was just really outdated, that it would turn out, once I saw it, to be just to be just archaic and misguided. At worst, insidious. Nope, there's no stealth here - it's infused with angry, intense, unashamed arrogance regarding the film-maker's supremacist beliefs. No subtlety at all.

I can't admire the film-making techniques of Birth of a Nation any more than I can in Triumph of the Will. I don't give a rat's ass that this movie pioneered panoramic long shots, iris effects, still shots, night photography, panning shots, the staging of battle scenes, color tinting and having its own musical score. I DON'T CARE. It's like saying, "Sad about the stabbing of that family, but look how well the knives worked! What technique!"

D.W. Griffith didn't make Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages as a follow-up in order to apologize for Birth of a Nation - isn't it OBVIOUS that he made that follow-up because he was so upset at people disgust at B of a N, that he felt the criticism was, itself, intolerance and that such was unfair? Well, DW, yes, the criticism, the disgust, were - and are - intolerance. And humans have a right to express such, to reject your pathetic world view. No, I don't think this movie should be banned. But I also think it needs to be presented honestly and openly for what it is - no sugar-coating, no oh-but-the-film-techniques! justifications. Let's present it as the love letter to white supremicists that it is. That is what it is. Period.

I'm really glad Turner Classic Movies (TCM) showed it. I'm glad I've seen it. But I'm disappointed to learn it's even more horrible than I ever expected. Wow.

On a side note: I was on the light rail coming home from Portland in 2013, and was eavesdropping on a group of African women, I think from Tanzania, and a group of Indian women talking about movies they love. And they all love Gone With the Wind, and went on and on about why. They loved it like I do. No mention of its racism was ever made - I kept listening for it, but it never happened. Sometimes I wonder if people in other countries, even Africans, understand the horrors of slavery in the Americas... but I kind of loved that they loved the film without experiencing any racist subtext. The way women are expected to enjoy so many films without getting upset about the sexism.

Lovin' the Bard

It was 1981 or 1982. I was in the 9th grade, in a public school in Henderson County, Kentucky. I was in an English class. It wasn't an advanced English class, nor an honors English class. Just the normal, regular 9th grade English class. And our ordinary, normal, not-advanced public school teacher had us read and study Romeo and Juliet.

There we were, reading aloud in our thick Kentucky accents, sometimes struggling over words, sometimes laughing over phrases (especially the sexual ones). We read the play aloud, we read the play on our own, and we watched a slide show, an abbreviated version of the Zeffirelli masterpiece, accompanied by portions of audio from the film (I guess our school couldn't afford the rights to show the movie). The teacher asked us what was meant by this or that paragraph, why a character did this or that, what another character was feeling, and how we felt about what was happening.

And we got it. We understood the play, every bit of it. We understood that these were young people every bit as thoughtless and passionate as us. We understood that these were adults every bit as stubborn and closed-minded as many adults we knew. We understood that it was a tragedy, not something to aspire to. We understood the intensity, we understood the sorrow. The play was completely accessible. The teacher fully expected us to get it, and we got it.

Around the same time, I saw Twelfth Night at the University of Evansville. I admit that I didn't understand everything: I didn't get all of what was going on among Viola, Olivia, the Duke and Sebastian, but I most certainly got the set up and fall of Malvolio - and, oh, how I laughed. And laughed. And walked around for weeks saying, "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them." (emphasis from the actor from that production, complete with rolling "R"s).

In the 10th grade, my English class - still not an honors class, and also in public school - read and studied Julius Caesar. And, again, we go it. We understood what was going on. We understood the conniving and the politics and the egos. Same for in the 11th grade, when we read and studied Macbeth.

I went on to read Hamlet in college, and to see, and thoroughly enjoy, probably a dozen productions of various Shakespeare plays over the years. Most productions were great. Some were mediocre. But all were completely accessible to me and everyone else watching.

I bring this up because Ralph Fiennes is running around the talk show circuit (and he can feel free to run around here any time) talking about his latest movie, Coriolanus, and the interviewers keep saying things like, "Wow, it's so accessible. I didn't think I would understand Shakespeare. Most people don't get Shakespeare."

Most people do get Shakespeare. It's why his plays have lasted this long. It's why they keep getting performed on stage and keep getting filmed. The real issue: most people don't ever see a Shakespeare production. More and more schools have to teach kids to take tests, more and more English classes aren't talking about Shakespeare anymore, except in passing. Most people don't go see a Shakespeare production because they have heard, again and again, Shakespeare is so hard to understand - from people who have never seen Shakespeare.

And THAT is a tragedy, every bit as anything Shakespeare wrote.

I not only enjoyed those early readings and study of Shakespeare; reading and studying the Bard also taught me quite a lot. In addition to greatly enhancing my vocabulary, reading and listening to Shakespeare has taught me how to concentrate on phrasing, how to read subtext, how word choice can affect understanding, how complicated humans are (just like all humans now), and how so many human activities and feelings are universal. All of those lessons have helped me throughout my life, at home and at work. How many times have I had to quickly adapt to the language and phrasing of some new industry I'm finding myself working in? And I didn't see or experience anything in Afghanistan I couldn't also find in Shakespeare, and that's probably why I was able to find a way to process the tragedies all around me there - and everywhere else.

Last week, I read A Midsummer Night's Dream. Now, I'm reading Twelfth Night. I read every word, and often re-read sentences. Is it an easy read? What is an easy read? No, I don't get a passage at a glance - I have to actually read everything. But do I get it? Do I understand what's happening? Do the jokes make me laugh? Sure! This public-school-educated, public university-educated, non-English major gets it just fine.

What's next? I'm not sure. Maybe something I've never seen a production of but always wanted to, like King Lear. Maybe something I've seen many productions of, like Tempest.

But I'm lovin' the Bard. I wish more people would give him a chance.