Essay: 'Gone With the Wind' explains a lot about America

Watch it before the Second Civil War

Photo: MGM

Gone With The Wind is one of my absolute favorite movies. If you haven't seen this iconic adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s melodramatic 1936 novel about the Antebellum South, I suggest you do so as soon as possible. You cannot understand America until you've seen this sprawling Civil War classic about the fall of the Confederacy.

I recommend it to anyone who thinks a new civil war is inevitable. It's easy to dream of violence from a barcalounger when you're confident your friends and family won't be part of the slaughter. But that's what the Civil War was: a savage bloodbath that laid waste to hundreds of thousands of Americans—millions, in today's numbers. Wishing for a new war between the states does the dead a dishonor by suggesting the great cause was anything but pain and sorrow.

Conservatives who oppose the tearing down of Confederate monuments should definitely watch Gone With The Wind, a movie that will affirm their racist MAGA fantasies while reinforcing the truth: the South thoroughly lost the war. Liberals should also sit through all three hours and fifty-eight minutes of visionary producer David O. Selznick’s (with the help of director Victor Fleming, among others) lush work of political propaganda, a masterful rewrite of history that asked the question, Was slavery really that bad?

History repeats itself because history forgets. History is mean and paranoid and tells the same stories over and over again.

Here's that history in a nutshell: Americans will always fight for their God-given right to be cruel, self-pitying assholes to their neighbors. We have murdered each other since the birth of the Nation, and in 1861, we did it on an unprecedented scale. Yes, the slaves were freed. But it took another 100 years of struggle until they were full citizens. And now, there's a whole new generation of American mediocrities who believe they're born to rule.

I'd like to, in addition, recommend this movie to a new generation of film aesthetes who write takedowns of old movies because hate is the steam that powers the internet.

I love old movies because they're the closest I can get to time travel.

***

In 1939, when Selznick's epic saga premiered, there were veterans of the Civil War in the audience—veterans of a war that had ended 74 years prior. In a way, Gone With The Wind was America welcoming the rebels home after a long exile, a sentimental apology for Lincoln's unpleasantness. No harm, no foul, all is forgiven—never mind that white supremacists ran entire Southern states at the time.

It was Golden Age Hollywood brainwashing at its most effective, a robust new cultural industry cynically sucking up to ticket buyers whose kin took up arms against the good ol' U.S. of A.

Gone With The Wind was an acknowledgment that Sherman destroyed something beautiful. This, of course, is wholly dishonest revisionist history. But there were still people who remembered granddad's mournful stories of Dixie's downfall. Finally, his story was being told—the sad tale of a civilization brought to its knees by a cruel, unfeeling enemy. The pitch: "What if the rebels lost in Star Wars and, also, the rebels treated other humans like cattle?"

It has become a modern fact of life that Neo-Nazism is on the rise in America. Hitler has become a brand name. The rich and the young are desperate to shock and will sell out the sacrifices made by their grandparents in order to scare strangers online. Those videos and photos of young white men throwing up the Nazi salute before inciting violence from years ago is part of American history now. That's our history, yours and mine, whether anyone likes that or not.

The Nazis, of course, were one of the great enemies of the Second World War, which ended 74 years ago. My point is, wars leave wounds that can take generations to heal. Longer, too, if the great-great-grandchildren insist on stealing their forebears' valor with military dress-up games. Virgil Caine cosplay is, really, the worst.

The fall of the Confederacy was a melancholy event, but not because, as Gone With The Wind suggests, it was the last stand of a gallant and courtly, and generally benevolent aristocracy. It was melancholy because the rebels had a chance to do the right thing, but refused to do so.

Did all Southerners own slaves? No. The majority didn't. But sometimes history, that psycho, insists you pick sides. The North wasn't any more morally evolved than its sibling; the North just happened to make the right choice at the right time, albeit not for long. The North, it should be noted, patted itself on the back and spent the rest of the century merrily bringing immigrants and other marginalized people to heel.

Gone With The Wind is, of course, much more than just a maudlin portrait of a cataclysm. It's also a sweeping, and weepy, romance—a soap opera literally the color of a white bar of soap. There is a lot of passionate closed-mouth kissing. I'm also a fan of costume dramas, and Gone With The Wind has it all: hoop skirts, parasols, and thousands of brass buttons. And, of course, it is a love letter to America, back when it was great.

The rest of the movie is gorgeous, too. It was a pioneer of Technicolor technology and the colors—bloody reds, radioactive greens—burst off the screen. The whole movie looks like a platter of overripe fruit weeping in the sun.

And that soaring, heartbreaking score! Its stunning tracking shots were very cutting-edge at the time. That famous shot of the Confederate flag, limply fluttering as the camera retreats to reveal hundreds of dead and injured, is a jaw-dropper.

When I first saw that scene as a kid, I saw the roof of the car in the popular, if silly, TV series The Dukes of Hazzard. Later, I noticed the "stars and bars" on bumper stickers and tucked away in the corners of a store window. My mom, a Mexican-American woman, always told me to watch out for that flag because it usually means "whites only." I am, as she reminded me, only half, and therefore ineligible for membership in my local white power club.

I grew up in the South and, consequently, was forced to consume Civil War history, especially the kind of history that celebrated Confederates on horses riding to their noble dooms. The slave masters called themselves "rebels" because they were overly sentimental men.

It was hard to escape the myths of the Confederacy. For instance, my dad loved an inexpensive weekend day trip, so I spent a lot of time touring Civil War battlefields. They're mostly lovely haunted parks. I remember learning that during the First Battle of Bull Run, ladies and gentlemen from the nearby nation's capital picnicked at a distance, eager to watch a Union rout of Johnny Reb. That didn’t happen. Eventually, the fancy spectators fled in terror. I suppose watching young men explode into bloody mist isn't appetizing.

As a child of the '80s, I watched the Baby Boomers try to make sense of the recent Vietnam War in movies like Platoon or Full Metal Jacket. It was, I learned, the first war America ever lost. I was also simultaneously taught that the Civil War was the first war America ever lost. Both statements are true.

My dad once showed me yellowed discharge papers, in plastic bags, of distant relatives who fought on both sides. Truly, the conflict was "brother against brother." I want to think my ancestors were enlightened, but seeing as I still have family who resist open-mindedness, I assume my kin, blue or grey, probably had low opinions of those who weren't 100% white.

***

There is a scene—a brief moment, really—I noticed when I recently re-watched Gone With The Wind. I don't know why I watched it for the 100th time. I think I was in the mood for an old-school blockbuster, the kind of movie where if they needed to set fire to Atlanta, they borrowed the set from the movie King Kong (another problematic must-see) and lit it up. The South deserved to burn, and in Gone With The Wind, it burns spectacularly.

Even today, white Americans fear a successful person of color because surely his or her success must come at their expense.

There were other details that I hadn't noticed before: Ashley, the wilting flower of a man who is Scarlett's great unrequited love, is injured in a secret—and heroic—vigilante raid on local undesirables by Union soldiers. Those vigilante mobs would soon transform into the terroristic Ku Klux Klan.

The 'n-word,' that racial slur used like a sizzling brand by whites against blacks for decades, is never used in Gone With The Wind (it is used semi-liberally in the beloved book). That doesn't mean the movie isn't racist from the first reel to last. It just means Gone With The Wind is far too gentlemanly to announce its hate.

There's an oddly touching exchange between the cynical Confederate gunrunner Rhett Butler and Scarlett's nanny, Mammy, where she shows him a bit of the petticoat he bought her as a sign of appreciation. I mean, how bad could these Confederates have been, right? That's a rhetorical question.

The movie, however, is certain about the horrors of war: The screams of a Confederate soldier getting his leg sawed off are as affecting now as I imagine it was then.

But this one scene—a handful of frames, really—resonated with me. It spoke to me, all the way from 1939 to 2025.

Scarlett O'Hara, a toxic narcissist who would flourish on social media, plans to waltz into a Yankee prison where she hopes to sweet-talk money from Butler, who is spending his post-war incarceration playing cards with his captors. (Economic anxiety is a theme throughout the movie.) Scarlett needs to save her plantation from a recent rise in taxes and wants to look her best when pleading for cash. So she makes a dress from expensive curtains in her family's mansion, a remaining extravagance the Yanks had failed to steal.

Later, she shoots a Union soldier who attacks her and, to her relief, discovers his fat wallet.

Rhett can't save Scarlett's plantation, however. His money is trapped in a bank in England, a nation of nobles who sympathized with their cousins in the American South. She is angered—remember that she has pledged never to go hungry again. To, more importantly, never suffer indignities to her monumental pride.

After realizing Rhett can't help her, Scarlett stomps through the skeleton of Atlanta, a city being picked clean of meat by "carpetbaggers," despised Northern vulture capitalists, a humiliation heaped upon a humiliation.

We meet a pair earlier: a couple of fat cats blind to the misery of the white Southerners but hungry for opportunity. One of the two is, surprisingly, an African-American man dressed to the nines.

Here's the moment: as she crosses the street with her Mammy in tow—a scene-stealing Hattie McDaniel playing a stereotype so well she became the first African-American to win an Oscar—she passes by another pair of "carpetbaggers." These two are both African Americans. They are both wearing fancy suits and smoking cigars. They are laughing, enjoying themselves.

She is a white woman wearing rags who just begged for cash, and they're having the time of their lives.

The other African-Americans in the movie are childlike, dim, happy to help Miss Scarlett. Lovable dependents who benefit from the generosity of the refined white elite who ruled the economically backward agrarian economy of the Old South. But not these two. She sneers at them—these free non-white men.

Even today, white Americans fear a successful person of color because surely his or her success must come at their expense.

I'd be hard-pressed to find a better cultural nano-second that explains America today.

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