Disclaimers:

1. “ Gone With the Wind” has some deep problems in terms of its portrayal of African-Americans and slavery that I’m not going to get into in detail here. If you see the film and aren’t frustrated with this element, examine your soul
2. I’m going to be making some generalizations in regards to men and women in the following text. I well aware that not all women love “Gone With the Wind” anymore than all men love “The Godfather”. In both cases, however, the scales are significantly tipped toward one gender rather than the other.
3. SPOILERS for “Gone With the Wind”.

What does Han Solo have to do with Gone With the Wind? I’ll get to that.

I was a teenager the first time I saw the most popular film of all time. I rented it as a present on my mom’s birthday and promised to sit through the almost 4 hours of the rise and fall of the antebellum southern utopia. It was everything I expected from the cover. Inexplicable and terribly whiny women obsessing over inexplicable and terribly facile men. I remember Ashley as this corpse-ish waif of a man that I couldn’t reconcile with Scarlett’s freakish adoration. Pregnancy, poofy dresses, marriage, romance. By the end of the film I couldn’t have agreed with Rhett Butlers final farewell more. Frankly mother my dear, I don’t give a damn.

Fast forward to last night. (Never you mind how many years later.)

I knew I’d have to see the film again. I’m older now. I teach Film History. I’ve been in a very long and doomed relationship. But more importantly it just got re-released on Blu-ray and DVD in a swanky new box set, which is difficult for an obsessive film buff to ignore.

So I swiped the school’s copy and began to watch. Gradually, minute by minute, I was irrevocably sucked in and captivated.

I wasn’t wrong when I was a teenage boy, about what I felt about the characters or the content. At that point in my life I had as much context as a teenager for understanding the film as Scarlett at the beginning of the film had for understanding love. All I could see, at that time, were the broad strokes. Scarlett was bratty and petty, Rhett was cool but smitten, Ashley was weak and , Melanie was either sick or pregnant, and everyone else was a set piece. What I missed was how each character in the film was finely tuned and was executed perfectly.

Much has rightly been made about Vivien Leigh’s performance as Scarlett O’Hara. There are moments in the film of such subtle skill where the tiniest flicker of her cheek muscle speaks volumes. The camera drinks in her beauty, which I had previously found off-putting (like watching a 3 hour JC Penny catalog), but now understand it to capture an essential facet of her character. Everything that I hated about Scarlett as a teen, in fact, is everything that I love about her character now.

It isn’t that I find her character more sympathetic now, in fact quite the opposite. She is a monster. A monster created by privilege and circumstance. But this is no caricature. How does she turn into a monster? Gradually and then suddenly. The “gradually” is why the film is almost 4 hours. The “suddenly” are the moments that everyone remembers. Combined these two forces create one of the greatest characters to grace the silver screen.

I should say here that her monstrousness is seen through the prism of a very male perspective. There are few women, outside of coastal film schools, who find Travis Bickle (Taxi Driver), Alex (A Clockwork Orange), or Michael Corleone (The Godfather) to be desirable characters. Men, however, are mollified by them; living their indiscretions, fornications, mad sprees of violence and mayhem, and flagrant disregard for law and order vicariously through the films they inhabit. These male characters are also monsters in their own right. Monsters whose traits mirror and magnify men’s baser monstrous desires. I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this.

The reason I believe that the film is popular (by popular I don’t mean good, just popular) is that it not only plays to women’s baser desires, it articulates them flawlessly and, more importantly, compellingly through the character of Scarlett O’Hara. She is the woman that many women (not all) wish they were but don’t dare to be. Sin is fun when it is “gotten away with” and can be easily justified by circumstance. She is worshipped for being that idol and getting away with it.

So why do I love this film now? Why do I love its monstrous portrayals of femininity?

First of all Scarlett is an interesting nay fascinating female character. Guess what? There aren’t that many of them out there with this level of depth. Hollywood roles are dominated by leading male protagonists and the women who support them. The old adage in the film industry is that women only play mothers, wives, and whores. No I’m not advocating some kind of affirmative action in terms of gender in motion pictures but a little variety would be nice.

What is so great about Scarlett’s character is (as well as the way she is portrayed by Vivien Leigh) is that her growth in the film is infinitesimal and yet fully observable. You can see the marks that each scene and interaction make on her so that by the end of the film she is a virtual palimpsest (look it up) of every moment before.

There is nothing trivial or over the top or pandering in the film. There is melodrama but it is finely crafted and meticulously calculated melodrama. Beyond this, there are countless moments that are subtle and gloriously minimalistic in their style and execution; subtleties I was not attuned to as a teenager when subtlety was not in my repertoire.

I haven’t really mentioned Rhett yet. This is mainly because, as a guy, through most of the film, he’s easy to like. He’s Han Solo in the old south. The Rogue who cuts through the princesses preconceived notions of love and entitlement.

Sidenote: If you don’t think this was intentional on the part of Lucas and Co. check out the two main posters for

Gone With the Wind (http://jcreviews.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/1500-1251gone-with-the-wind-posters.jpg),

and

The Empire Strikes Back (http://thenationalevil.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/empire-strikes-back.jpg

He jumps to the rescue when needed (unfortunately aiding the KKK but for that see my first disclaimer), and is a ladies man when not a hero on the battlefield. A man’s man. He treats Scarlett like the brat when she’s a brat instead of falling all over himself to get her a custard pie, praises her when she’s doing good (though this doesn’t happen often), and, of course doesn’t give a damn.

Actually he does give a damn in a good chunk of the film, which is when he loses most of his male audience. He gives up his life of ribaldry to become the marrying kind, hoping desperately that Scarlett will love him in return. It’s a bummer after over two hours of him saying that he loves her but is going to make her work for it. But hey, this isn’t a man’s fantasy.

Again, however, I was struck by what I didn’t see when I was younger. A man who knows inside that he’s going to lose and yet gives his love to the woman freely anyway. He is the only one who sees Scarlett for who she truly is and loves her anyway. I’m reminded by a similar sentiment in La Strada by Frederico Fellini when Gelsemina in speaking with The Fool about her abusive husband says “If I don’t love him, who will?” None of Scarlett’s suitors or husbands love her. The want her. They covet her. They lust for her but do not love her. Rhett loves her. To make his character at this point even more extraordinary, he isn’t altruistic or unconditional in his love. He screws up. He is in turns lustful, abusive, neglectful, and ultimately gives up. But the point is that underneath that is the one person that truly loves Scarlett no matter what she does.

I won’t go into the other characters if only to say that while not equally fleshed out and complicated, they all play roles that help to define the complex subtleties of the two leads which, in the end, is what supporting characters are for.

I finished the film and found that I was more than satisfied. I was engaged throughout the 3 plus hours and could have watched more with this cast of characters but alas, like many great stories, Mitchell and Selznick both leave us hanging; wondering and desiring to know what happens next.

I’d like to think that Rhett was encased in Carbonite.