Hollywood Don’t Hoax Gone With The Wind-RETRACT THE BAN- the 1939 Work Was A Beacon Against Racism And Fascism

“Hey HBO,  12 Years A Slave (12YAS) romanticizes the horrors of slavery. Take it off your platform now.”

Just kidding! Let’s not censor any films, actually.

Because, before we get to the historic significance of the work of 1939 actors, screen writers, producers who made GWTW, we must be equal. If Hollywood Progressives are going to walk down the road to “temporary censorship” like German artists did in 1936 when Hitler also banned Gone With the Wind (GWTW), then 12 Years A Slave (12YAS) must also be banned as it also falsely perpetuates the belief that the plantation era was “a matter of heritage, not hate”. 

Mr. Ridley, in his L.A.Times Op-Ed demands that America ‘temporarily” ban GWTW because it “glorifies the antebellum south”. “When it is not ignoring the horrors of slavery,” GWTW “pauses only to perpetuate some of the most painful stereotypes of people of color,” he argues.  Hollywood used “the very best talents working together to sentimentalize a history that never was,” Ridley criticizes. So ban GWTW immediately and show it later with warning labels or something, he concludes.  But based on his criteria, Ridley’s 12YAS must be banned as well.

12YAS like GWTW is filmed knee deep in idyllic and sentimental cinematography depicting a soft antebellum South. The slave clothing is clean and modest just like the “painful stereotypes” in GWTW.  12YAS presents, in an acceptable light, that the racism of the era was not hate based but a matter of one really crazy guy who hated everyone and economics–the acceptance of Blacks as a property right. 

Indeed, the 12YAS producers enlisted “best talent” Brad Pitt, whose active eyebrows and hunk power rival Clark Gable’s as Rhett Butler in 1939 to play Sam Bass. In doing so, Ridley’s screenplay sentimentalizes the Bass character and makes his relationship with Northrup pretty even though; Bass has no problem borrowing Northrop as a slave to help him build, and then walk away without immediately assisting Northrop or the other slaves.  In the context of current events in Georgia, the conduct of Pitt’s character is the equivalent of William Bryan, who videotaped the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, but only released the tape when he was well away from the danger.  Yet, Bass and his behavior are sentimentalized by Ridley in favor of his bigger message.

In GWTW,  Hollywood and U.K. star power, at least presented protagonists whose opening scenes openly criticized and ridiculed slavery and secession.  The GWTW protagonists openly glorified, as righteous, the abolitionists who decried slavery and secession before the Civil War and the looting of innocent shanty towns, the horrors of slave labor, and the ugliness of racism during Reconstruction.  

Unlike Pitt, Gable and his friend Hattie McDaniel used their talents to create the first popular bi-racial screen scenes between an unrelated man and woman as equals.  In fact,  in segregated America, Margaret Mitchell and the GWTW screenwriters and actors revered the Black woman as an intellectual equal without kneeling.  In 1939 segregated America, Gable gave the scatter-brained Scarlett, the soliloquy of Mammie’s wisdom, common sense and loyalty as characteristics of a person far superior to him or Scarlett.   Gable shatters the mold of the subservient Black with reverence to African American cultural respect for faith to the Lord much as Aretha Franklin and George Floyd presented themselves in their own “red skirts”.

Artists should never advocate for bans or censorship. Instead of relying on some bygone “Lost Cause Theory”  as a basis to go full bore Hitler and ban GWTW, why not apply what Charlemagne ThaGod, Diddy, Kanye are laying down as a new racial marker, we don’t want to hear about racism or Donald Trump, we want to know what you have done with your white privilege to fight racism for my people? In this regard, let’s compare the fight for equality reflected by the respective writers and artists in 12YAS and GWTW.

 12YAS

Hollywood, 2014, uses star power to depict the stealing and whipping of African Americans, by crazy sick White men.  It concludes with the ability of one Black man with musical talent to escape back to the “White world” in the North where everything is safe again

GWTW

Hollywood, 1939, uses top British and US actors to put their careers and money on the line to storm the South and present, for the first time, to virulently segregated America and  rising European Fascism:

1. The stupidity and horrors of the Civil War over slavery  and then the legislated racism of Reconstruction.

2. A white man of Gable’s rugged Americanism, instead of hate embraces, and covets the respect of the Black woman and the abolitionist characters. He touches the Black woman who, at that point the Civil Rights movement, was not even allowed to be in the same theater let alone have physical contact with any Whites.

3. 1936, Jesse Owens, fights Hitler and rampant theories of the “Master race” throughout the world. Mitchell publishes GWTW. Hitler bans it, because like Owens, the book equalized Blacks and individualism.

4. 1939, Hollywood rushes to re-ignite the equality fight, by presenting GWTW with three co-equal female protagonists one a Southern opportunist (Scarlett) who saw no color, one a black maid (Mammie), and one a weak white abolitionist (Melanie);

5. Hollywood awards an Oscar to a woman who was not the stereotype of the perfect visual of the trim hourglass female and was African American.  1939 Hollywood not only nominated a Black Woman V-P, they elected her.

It is not surprising that Progressive Hollywood who responded to looting and the destruction of Black and minority neighborhoods with “Cash for Bail” and “Defund the Police” would incuriously accept full blown Hitler  censorship of a movie that presented interactions between men, women, white and black as equals in 1939. 

But perhaps, HBO could pull back and reject Hollywood Progressive advice in favor of recognizing the efforts of the author, the actors, screen writers and producers of GWTW who shattered the racial and gender norms of 1939 and encouraged integration and acceptance through their art.

As for Mr. Ridley, we think he should re-think his position and stand his 12YAS screenplay on the shoulders of the screenwriters of GWTW in 1939, who risked their careers to produce GWTW and move the equality ball forward.  

Or he can just choose who he wants to stand with? 

@realdonaldtrump who in 2019 called on Hollywood to make more movies like GWTW? or

Adolf Hitler who called for movies like GWTW to be banned?