Here we are.
“Qualified by historians as a revisionist, Victor Fleming’s film released in 1939 has been removed from the HBO Max streaming platform, in the midst of a protest against racism and police violence in the United States“ we learn from an AFP dispatch.
Useless to make here the panegyric of the film to the ten Oscars, the blazing sky of Atlanta and the impossible loves of Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh. None of this is involved. It’s here “Romantic version of the South and [la] very watered-down vision of slavery “ of the problematic film, in a context of very violent racial tensions in the United States. Already in 2017, in Memphis, a cinema had interrupted the annual screening of the film “Considering that this work […] was insensitive to the African American public. “
Should this film be removed, even temporarily, from a streaming platform?
No, obviously not.
First, because nobody is going to stop demonstrating by saying “Okay, guys, it’s ok, everything is fine, Gone with Wind no longer on HBO Max, we won, we come home calmly ” and that a cop is unlikely to stop beating a black man to death by taking him out: “Oops, excuse me, old man, I saw that HBO had withdrawn Gone with the Wind of its platform, suddenly, I deconstructed my prejudices and it’s over I am more racist at all, thank you HBO. ”
Censorship is ineffective, ugly and stupid. Self-censorship has nothing to envy.
This withdrawal poses many questions. And, like any act of censorship, it invites us to cut short the emotion of the moment (“it sucks!” Versus “finally!”) To think about what it means.
Hide this South that I cannot see
First, HBO obviously takes people for fools. HBO considers that we are watching a film from 1939 in 2020 by taking it entirely in the first degree. Basically, Gone with the Wind is a kind of well-worn documentary or propaganda document (which is also captured by activists – revisionists – of The Lost Cause) and as we are stupid, we do not realize it. As we have no critical judgment, no distance, and as we eat racism and prejudice without blinking, we might as well withdraw this film since it is problematic. Ordinary tartufferie (hide this South that I cannot see) will give rise to a visceral need to see, to know, to exchange under the cloak the censored work. HBO takes us for fools but creates the desire to see, understand or defend a legendary and almost forgotten work: the film has aged and it lasts 238 minutes too many for today’s youth.
Without “Gone with the Wind”, what would “Get Out” be?
Then, Gone with the Wind is to the romantic film what are, among others, The Covered Wagon (1923) or The Plainsman (1937) western. Films where the Indians are violent, aggressive and cruel and deserve nothing more than a good splash of manly lead. But now, there has been The Broken Arrow, The Last Hunt, Soldier Blue, Jeremiah Johnson, Little big man, Josey Wales… If our representation of the Indians has changed, it is also because it has been built, sedimented with all these films, including the first.
It is the same in the representation of black characters with, it seems to me, an obvious and tortuous filiation, which leads to Gone with the Wind until Us, Passing by Sergeant Rutledge, Malcolm X, Amistad, Django Unchained or 12 Years a Slave, With its multiple tracks and hidden meanings, the fim of Jordan Peele, Us, is obviously the fruit of this long history. And Get out the squeaky version of Guess who’s coming to dinner …
And it is also what makes the strength and the singularity of American cinema (sorry: American, I’m going to be lynched), which has always known how to renew itself, from its history and its more or less adulterated myths , by accompanying or preceding societal developments. If you remove Gone with the Wind of this line, perhaps you will have the occasional satisfaction of saying to yourself: “Phew! This year, I’m not spending Christmas with my beauf ‘”, but your family would not be quite the same. Without forgetting that we are always someone’s beauf ‘.
Art awakens our intelligence, censorship turns it off
Besides, whether we like it or not, Gone with the wind remains one of the major films in the history of cinema, by what it understands in excess and says of this golden age of pre-war studios. It is obvious that he is racist and rewrites the history of the American Civil War. But, every time I saw it, it seemed obvious to me. In the same way as the racist, paternalistic and colonialist vision of Tintin in the Congo or Five weeks in a Balloon never escaped me, even when I was a kid. When i read Drieu La Rochelle, I don’t become a fascist, any more than opening a book from Aragon will make me a communist. I can also read The Adventures of Babar without taking me for an elephant.
It is likely that the caves of Lascaux were painted by men who raped women and slept with their children. And I know that there have been quite a few deaths in the cathedral works and that slaves were left to die in the Egyptian royal tombs. However, I do not ask for a contextualized warning before these monuments.
When I read, listen, watch, visit … two distinct processes take place in me: identification and distancing. Each censorship denies my free will and my ability to distance myself. Each censorship refers me to the trial grotesque and alas real intended to Madame Bovary in 1857, in the name of morality. A dictionary of stupidity attacking a monument of intelligence.
When I read Drieu La Rochelle, I don’t become a fascist, any more than opening a book from Aragon will make me a Communist.
Paraphrasing Ernest Pinard, imperial prosecutor, one could say of Gone with the Wind: “An admirable film in terms of talent but an execrable film from the point of view of morality!”
Of this trial, the most appalling (or hilarious, it depends) is the choice (or rather the non-choice) of the defense. To save the novel, his lawyer pleads for release and undertakes to “to prove that Flaubert wanted to do the work of a moralist, or that of the less morality emerges from his work ”. And that’s why the raw scenes are barely touched (“Descriptive omnipotence disappears because his thought is chaste”) and that Emma “Is cruelly punished for her faults, too cruelly since she dies in appalling suffering:” The adultery that Flaubert portrays is not charming, he is only a series of torments, regrets of remorse “.”
To play censorship, you had to be as hypocritical as she was. The bows in effect today and HBO’s precautions hardly serve the anti-racist cause. It is even to be feared that this happening of good conscience will contribute to reinforcing hatred and prejudice.
Censorship is the Critical Job Center
Far be it from me to consider Gone with the Wind like an ordinary film and ignore the prejudices it conveys. But I find it hard to believe that we are watching this film in 2020 as our grandparents watched it in 1939, in the same way that I do not imagine for a moment that today’s readership can consider that Madame Bovary is a pornographic work. We grow, we mature, we learn, we learn, we know. To think otherwise, or even to impose it, is infantilizing.
The fact that there are racist groups here and there who erect this film as a symbol of a false and fantasized story must appall us as much as we worry. That the heirs of Margaret Mitchell have succeeded in 2001 in having a black version of the book banned (The Wind Done Gone, ofRandall) claiming copyright should not deceive anyone. But let us not give these stunted cortices the victory of a censorship which would only reinforce them in their hateful delusions by offering them on a plate torrents of arguments fueled by persecution, supposedly hidden truths and other small plots. It is by appealing to the intelligence of fools that they are confused. Not by behaving like fools too.
Believing that keeping the film as it is today would be “irresponsible”, HBO intends to put it back in its catalog, in its original format, “Because to do otherwise would be to pretend that these prejudices never existed“, explained a spokesperson, while matching the dissemination of a “Context discussion”. Maybe a warning banner (cheap version) or a critical interview, we don’t know. If HBO really does have the chocottes, it will be able to precede the film with a warning: “Warning! This film was released in 1939, at a time when your grandparents and great grandparents did not think like you do today and you are thought to be incapable of understanding it for yourself. ” It will be useless.
The fact that there are racist groups that erect this film as a symbol of a false and fantasized story must appall us as much as we worry.
I would prefer by far the critical interview with specialists in history, cinema or sociology who would enrich the debate instead of impoverishing it. And then, why not also offer a “university” version of the film, with critical comments and historical reminders? No doubt it would be instructive and help us to understand this film in what it says about the lies and blindness of an era.
Finally, starting to censor, delete, conceal, make works disappear is totally counterproductive for those who intend to denounce them, analyze, deconstruct, reconstruct, pastiche, teach … If one day Gone with the Wind was no longer visible, here and there, journalists and teachers should delete a few paragraphs, give up part of their course. Some pastiches would lose their raison d’être and militancy would be reduced, no longer having a flagship work to stigmatize. Think of your jobs, comrades!
Of course, you will sometimes say to me, Jean-Marc Proust, this 50 year old white male, speaks about it at his ease because he does not suffer prejudice, abuses his privileges and Gone with the Wind don’t touch it more than that because of its skin color. I can already hear the objection, so agreed and easy. Certainly, discrediting a person whose arguments bother you allows you not to debate, but what will you gain from it?
–
