First published in THE GAMBIER JOURNAL, Volume 4, No. 5, May 1985.
It moves sour critics to cries of ‘film classic!’ It makes otherwise mature adults dream, with respect, of the old Hollywood. Four and a half decades after its first showing, it still attracts millions of viewers, none of whom is heard to emit event the politest complaint.
Has no one noticed the elaborate silliness of Gone With the Wind?
The silliness goes beyond the main characters—although, to be sure, they partake of it. It goes beyond Melanie’s idiotic benevolence, somehow confused with Christianity. It goes beyond Ashley’s despairing gentility—despite which, we are expected to believe, he commanded soldiers during four years of war. It goes beyond Rhett Butler’s heart-of-gold cynicism, with which he would seduce his beloved the better to redeem her. It even goes beyond the silliness of Scarlett O’Hara, whose name might be considered a pun on the Biblical Scarlet Whore of Babylon, were we to credit Miss Mitchell with acerb wit she displays nowhere else.
While still in a relatively generous mood, let us credit Miss Mitchell and/or the scriptwriters with giving the title a dual meaning. “Wind” means the war, of course, particularly General Sherman’s incendiary expedition therein. It must mean rhetoric, too; if nothing else, the film exposes the silliness of Confederate orotundities. Judging from the antics at “Tara,” the old South had “gone with the wind” years before the rebels brought their case to Fort Sumter. Regrettably, the film wants us to admire not only admirable courage in a “lost cause” but the sham elegance of a “civilization”—so Miss Mitchell calls it—apparently compounded of little more than chattel slavery and the novels of Sir Walter Scott. Worse, this anti-rhetorical film has an rhetorical afflatus of its own.
For Hollywood substituted visual for verbal inflation, offering rather too much of something for everyone. We get, at first, grand photography of trivial persons—the O’Hara’s and the Wilkes’s—minor Dickens characters with Southern accents. We then see these persons impelled into a brutal context, also grandly photographed—which may distract us from their continued triviality. Spectacular improbabilities ensue. Finally, we see them during Reconstruction, repelling trashy whites and uppity blacks with the short sword of Scarlett’s petty Machiavellianism. (“If I have to lie, cheat, steal, or kill, I’ll never go hungry again!” she explains to God, Who has seen far more engaging purposes served by similarly dubious means). The photography remains grand.
We are, I suspect, intended to learn something from this epic melodrama. The film’s makers conceive of illusion as a verbal phenomenon. Each character loves someone who doesn’t return that love, or who cannot return it openly, because words obscure passions, not only for the hearer but for the speaker. Even the self-styled realists, Rhett and Scarlett, manage to confuse each other in the end, with nothing but words.
Done well, this might illuminate something. But Hollywood merely replaced deceptive words with deceptive images. The film is a big truck, a vehicle for carrying ‘scenes’; the ‘scenes’ are receptacles for ‘drama,’ that is, an effort to arouse sentiments. The film-makers load their truck with more and more drama, more and more scenes, and keep the tank filled with theatrical gas. Disasters multiply with each reel, and the last thirty minutes veritably teem with deaths, delusions, and broken hearts.
I once watched the film with a woman of sense who endured it all until the Butler daughter died in a riding accident. “Everything happens to these people,” the lady murmured. One might say the same of Job and his family, but that plot had God, not Miss Mitchell, for its author, which tends to enhance its significance. With Miss Mitchell and the film-makers taking turns at the wheel, the rip only ends when their overloaded rig breaks down—prefigured by the horse that drops dead under Scarlett’s lash and symbolized perfectly by Scarlett herself, microcosm within the macrocosm, collapsed on the stairs, sobbing for the lost Rhett but truly in love only with her real estate. Love of land, of a thing that seems real and lasting, replaces love of unstable humans; love for something photographable overrides love of man, that verbal animal who cannot be captured whole in a picture. It is a Hollywood morality play, that is to say a contradiction in terms insofar as one can say that such a thing has terms.
When Scarlett gets up to declaim, “Tomorrow is another day,” one may take it as a threat to film a sequel. And indeed, as the European philosophical tradition may consist of a series of footnotes to Plato, the Hollywood cinematic tradition may consist of a series of sequels to Gone With the Wind. André Malraux called the techniques of mass ‘culture’ “the arts of satiation”; a photograph, a representation of the surface of things, more nearly satiates us than words do because it shows the appetites what they want instead of trying to tell them about it. Words have a tendency to evoke reason (the Greek word for ‘word,’ logos, also means reason), or faith (“the Word”). Hollywood will not have them. At best, it can only celebrate the earth, beautiful but dumb.
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