The New York Review of Ideas » Reviews | June 2009
Giving a Damn
Frankly, My Dear: Gone With the Wind Revisited, by Molly Haskell.
By Anna Bak-Kvapil
Molly Haskell, author of feminist film criticism’s canonical From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (1974) has always been fascinated by females in film. So it is fitting that she would choose to write her first book in over ten years on Gone With the Wind, a film that boasts one of the most magnetic female characters in the history of cinema, Scarlett O’Hara.
Haskell removes Gone With the Wind from that ossifying curio cabinet reserved for American icons in Frankly My Dear: Gone With the Wind Revisited. She invites the indelible characters of Scarlett and Rhett, Mammy and Melanie off their wax museum pedestals, reflecting on the endurance of a myth that still contains a deceptive amount of power. Adopting a mix of stylistic stances, the book is at various points a memoir, a three-part biography of star Vivien Leigh, author Margaret Mitchell, and producer David O. Selznick, a cultural history, and a piece of extended film criticism.
As a teenage girl growing up in the South, Haskell witnessed firsthand the moment Gone With the Wind lit the American imagination on fire, selling more tickets than any film in history. Just as Titanic exemplified adventure and desire for teens of the 1990s, GWTW (fan shorthand) defined the romantic ideals of hormonal Depression-era girls, and Haskell and her friends were swept up in the cultural mania. She is careful to stipulate that she’s had a complicated relationship with GWTW over the years, grappling with the racism and sexism that it contains. But traces of her endearing, fan-girlish admiration remain, as when she breathlessly describes Clark Gable playing Rhett Butler as “a man, who, for all his strength, his power and sophistication, is rendered utterly helpless by love.”
Haskell takes well-informed guesses at the psychological motivations of Rhett and Scarlett, interpreting Rhett as a “surrogate mother” to Scarlett, and defining the relationship between Scarlett and Melanie as “a love story every bit as intense in its own way as Scarlett and Rhett’s.” She also unearths some amusing factoids, such as the first draft of Margaret Mitchell’s novel featuring a spunky heroine named “Pansy O’Hara,” a name that was later changed to “Scarlett” at the insistence of her editor. More disturbing is the “curse” that followed the creators of GWTW—Margaret Mitchell became reclusive after achieving fame, never wrote another novel, and was killed by a taxi in 1949. Vivien Leigh suffered from mental illness and failed to have the great movie career that the success of GWTW promised, and David O. Selznick eventually lost his production company.
In the final chapter, Haskell strains to place GWTW in the current zeitgeist, as she inserts obligatory contemporary references to the Obama campaign, Apatow comedies and Sarah Palin (a modern day Scarlett!). The most evocative description of GWTW’s enduring hold on the cultural imagination appears a chapter before this:
Only movie stars at their most otherworldly and magnetic in a darkened movie theater could provide such direct conduits to those adolescent passions too confused and forbidden to be disclosed to the light of day. And only on a Hollywood back lot could a producer achieve the idealized mythical South that Selznick wanted, the Confederacy that colonized our dreams, and gave a nation its enchanted past.
Haskell’s enthusiasm for Gone With the Wind, and her infectious adoration for the quixotic Scarlett, affirms that the film deserves to be taken just as seriously as those other AFI Top 100 behemoths, Citizen Kane and The Godfather. With the passion of a true devotee, she convinces us, in the end, to give a damn. ♦