Ah yes, Gone with the Wind, the all-time box office champion. A beloved film for many, it’s probably the film many Americans think of if they think of a “classic” without any other criteria. This is old Hollywood at its best, a full color feature film when that sort of thing didn’t really happen all that often, the classic story of Scarlet O’Hara and Rhett Butler and their tempestuous love story, ending with one of if not the first instance of profanity in a Hollywood film when Rhett just doesn’t give a damn anymore. It’s got scores of extras in so many scenes, and it paints the picture many have for what life in the Antebellum South looked like.
Honestly, if I didn’t do challenges like this one, I would never watch this film again. I don’t hate it or anything. It just doesn’t do a whole lot for me.
So, before I go too far, let’s get a couple things out of the way: there are many things to Gone with the Wind that are actually worth making note of. There are a lot of gorgeous composite shots of figures silhouetted against matte paintings, and the colorization process looks great even now over eighty years later. Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable both basically own their respective roles. I’m actually rather impressed by some of the scenes with scores of extras, all milling about to create depth to crowds and the like. In many ways, Gone with the Wind is the prime example of what Hollywood can do with a large budget, the sort of thing that no real indie film can pull off, to say nothing of many foreign filmmakers with more limited budgets. It’s the sort of thing that reminds the viewer why films can be magical.
Plus, Scarlet is in many ways ahead of her time: a headstrong woman that can run her own business and take care of herself without the help of any man, or at least able to get what she wants out of a man with just a simple thing like putting her hand in his pocket for warmth.
That said, let’s also set aside the various factors that show Gone with the Wind hasn’t aged well. Most blatantly, its depiction of African Americans is racist, though nowhere near as bad as the depiction of those same characters in the source material, Margaret Mitchell’s only novel, the bestselling novel of the 20th century. My understanding is a studio executive ordered the more racist parts of the book removed from the film adaptation, so even though this is hardly a film showing the black characters in a completely positive light, it’s much better than the novel. I’ve read that book. Trust me on that one. I can somewhat chalk up the depiction of these characters to being typical of the way filmmakers depict black characters in the 1930s and for many decades beyond that, but that will only excuse the film but so far, and it is noteworthy that MAX has an African American woman pop up before the start of the film to explain that parts of the film haven’t aged well.
And then there’s how Rhett sometimes treats Scarlet, including a case of marital rape when he famously scoops her off her feet and carries her up the stairs to do something between scenes. However, I am a child of the 80s, and Revenge of the Nerds, something that came out in my lifetime, likewise suggested sexual assault was A-OK as long as the victim enjoys it. That doesn’t excuse older films for doing that sort of thing–I’m also looking at you, The Quiet Man–but it does put things in context a bit. Something that I recognize as wrong in 2023 was maybe not seen as such even within my lifetime.
Now, the last time I wrote up this film, my big take-away was the film tries to make believers in the Lost Cause narrative out to be victims of history, figures we should feel bad for despite the fact they were all slaveowners. Heck, the film’s opening credits actually shows slaves working the fields. The Lost Cause narrative is a historic theory, discredited by most if not all serious historians, that states that the Civil War was fought over States Rights, not slavery. But as many a meme says, “A state’s right to do what?” But I need to find a new thing to say, so I figured, after this viewing, why not take a look at why this film doesn’t appeal to me all that much?
So, setting aside the slavery and the Lost Cause, why can’t I find Scarlet O’Hara to be a compelling protagonist? A friend of mine refers to Gone with the Wind as the story of two awful people who deserve each other. I largely agree, but I tend to find Rhett more tolerable because he openly and routinely acknowledges that he is an awful human being. Why not Scarlet?
I think part of my reasoning comes from the fact that Scarlet is rich, spoiled, and not all that bright. Not being all that bright is more noteworthy in Mitchell’s novel, but it shows here in certain ways as well. Scarlet’s more positive traits–such as her headstrong nature that keeps her and her family alive post-war–are drowned out by her more terrible traits like her general selfishness. Sometimes that’s for the betterment of the family, but when she’s stealing her sister Suellen’s intended, it isn’t done for anything but pure greed. Likewise her business dealings are seen as shady–though Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard) is quick to say convict labor is worse than slave labor because he treated his slaves well, one of those lines that brings in whole new contexts in 2023–and she marries more for money or spite than for love. And it takes her a long time to realize that Ashley Wilkes isn’t really all that impressive a man. I will never understand what she sees in that guy.
But is that enough to be more or less unimpressed by her as a character? I think part of it is my general antipathy towards romantic films. I’ve seen a couple I really liked, but the rom-com and various similar works don’t always work for me. Now, Gone with the Wind is no rom-com, and what humor is present are moments few and far between. Instead, the film is trying to set up the loss of the Old South, as exemplified with Scarlet and Tara, as some sort of tragedy.
Setting aside that the idea that the Antebellum South was some sort of fairy tale realm of chivalric gallantry as the film’s opening crawl suggests is pure fantasy at best, is Scarlet the sort of the character that a viewer in 2023 can really sympathize with? For a tragedy to work, the fall of the protagonist should provoke some kind of sympathy in the viewer. It’s not a requirement, but it helps. So, is Scarlet sympathetic? I would say not really. For one thing, her suffering doesn’t seem as harsh as, say, the scores of men dead or dying in various scenes or people that lost everything. Scarlet has some problems holding onto Tara, but not for very long considering the runtime of the film. But aside from some social embarrassment and not getting the guy she thinks she wants for most of the film’s 3 and a half hour or so runtime, she doesn’t suffer all that much. She mostly seems miserable at her lowest moments, but her life and health are never much in danger. Heck, given her general resourcefulness, she might even be able to win Rhett back at some point in the future.
But since this is 2023, what sorts of fictional billionaires do modern audiences seem to like? Superheroes like Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark come to mind first, ones who have lots of money and use it, in part, to try and make the lives of others better. Outside her immediate circle, that doesn’t describe Scarlet at all. Then I could look to the Roy family from the HBO series Succession. The Roys are all, to a person, despicable people with few if any redeemable qualities, but the series managed to make them all characters the audience could care about because they all had varying degrees of self-awareness on how empty their miserable lives were, where money clearly doesn’t buy happiness. They’re also, to a person, a lot more complex than most characters in film or television even today, ones that make the contradiction of being awful and sympathetic somehow feasible. Scarlet helps a very small group of people–the Wilkeses, her sisters, and a handful of loyal former slaves–and she isn’t an overly complex character. It’s really hard to feel much of anything for her unless you agree with the film’s initial premise: that there was something tragic in the fall of the Antebellum South’s society and way of life, despite the fact that it really only benefited a handful of people.
I’m sure there are many folks who can find that sympathy for that society. I’m just not one of them. Scarlet is a shallow woman who doesn’t seem capable of truly deep thought for the majority of the film, one who acts on whims that are often incredibly self-centered and who cares more for her large estate in the end than most people. There’s really not much tragic to her downfall since, by the end of the film in many ways, she got right back up again.
NEXT: Gone with the Wind covers a number of years where hardly any of the characters seem to age. Up next is another film that shows aging by design, 2014’s Boyhood.
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