The Weekend Review: Gone with the Wind

In which I review a selection of last weekend's entertainment.

So December's kicking in at long last, proving to be just as difficult to manage as last year was (which, as some of you may recall, was when the blog went on an extended hiatus).  You don't have to worry about that happening again, thankfully.  Just be aware that I might at times, such as today, have to play catch up around here.

When war breaks out between the United and Confederate States, the men of the Old South couldn't imagine it outlasting the week.  But as the conflict gradually turns against the Confederates, their entire way of life is doomed to extinction, "gone with the wind which has swept through Georgia."  Scarlett O'Hara - a spoiled, coquettish debutante - is forced to run the family plantation, Tara, in the wake of the Yankees' victory over the South.

I have always had a complicated relationship with Gone with the Wind.  After hearing endlessly of its critical esteem and popular appeal, I walked away from my first viewing of it vaguely disappointed.  I wasn't even sure exactly why.  It wasn't just that it failed to live up to the impossible expectations that had been built up for it, nor that its narrative hinged on the worst sort of historical revisionism.  Even the profound racism that seeps into nearly every scene of the film was not specifically why I disliked it.

Gone with the Wind is simultaneously the most epically brilliant, fundamentally flawed and insufferably immoral film I have ever seen.  My most recent viewing of it has put into perspective just masterfully crafted, perfectly cast and gorgeously rendered the film really, despite its repugnant stance on  the institution of slavery as a whole and on black people in particular.  It is a morally reprehensible film about morally reprehensible people doing morally reprehensible things - not the least of which is racial enslavement, marital rape, infidelity and war profiteering.

Despite its myriad of structural issues - including a bloated run time, slavish fidelity to its source material (to the expense of the overall production) and a second half that fluctuates between repetitive and wholly unnecessary - it is heartbreakingly close to being one of my  favorite films for the exact same reason that The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is my actual favorite: its mind-bogglingly epic scope and pristine execution.  Scarlet and  Rhett escaping from a pandemonic Atlanta that has burst into flames is easily one of the most viscerally thrilling sequences ever filmed.

In fact, everything that is wrong with Gone with the Wind is reserved for its second half, set in the post-war South, which betrays the epic promise of its first half.  It is here where the film's pristinely tragic narrative devolves into petty marital squabbling and domestic melodrama.  In a revelation that absolutely nobody should find shocking, Scarlet and Rhett's marriage (Scarlet's third) - based purely off of their mutual attractiveness and wealth - is an unhappy one.  

Scarlett persistently clings to her adolescent love for Ashley, enticing him to cheat on Melanie with her at every opportunity, even on his wife's death bed.  If anything, Rhett's treatment of Scarlet is even more abhorrent.  When he hears rumors of her infidelity, he forces her to attend Ashley's birthday party in a supremely immodest dress.  When he tires of her spurning his affections, he rapes her.  An altercation between the two of them ends with Scarlet collapsed at the bottom of a staircase, resulting in her miscarriage.  The only thing that holds their dysfunctional marriage together - other than the unbearable shame of a divorce - is their daughter: Bonnie.  Her untimely death undoes their failed union.

Despite their initial appearances, the characters - particularly Rhett and Scarlett - ultimately lack the necessary depth needed to carry the weight of the narrative on their own.  This is not a problem with the first half of the film, where spectacle and plot drive the film forward in equal measure, but  increasingly becomes an issue after the war, when the film awkwardly transitions into a meandering, if intimate, character piece.

If Gone with the Wind had ended with its first act - the fall of the Old South and tragic conclusion of the Civil War - it would easily hold its own against The Lord of the Rings and Metropolis as one of my favorite films.  As it stands, however, it is a reverse 2001 - brilliant, with an immeasurably dull second half.  Overall, I give it a 7.5 out of 10.

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