Why Gone With The Wind Fell Out of Romance

Most of us would have grown up dreaming of a romance like the one between Scarlett ‘O Hara and Rhett Butler in the epic drama Gone With The Wind. In the 1939 movie, adapted from Margaret Mitchell’s novel of the same name, actors Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable stirred up many adolescent dreams.

However, there was one aspect of the American civil war, highlighted in the movie that doesn’t quite fit well into the modern conscience--the depiction of slavery. It features slave characters who stay in service of their owners and remain loyal to them even after abolition of slavery. Hattie McDaniel, who played the faithful servant of ‘O Hara household, Mammy, was the first black actress to be nominated for, and win, an Academy Award.   

What happened?

John Ridley, the screenwriter of 12 Years A Slave, published an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times urging the streaming platform HBO Max to remove Gone With The Wind temporarily. Ridley wrote in his piece: “after a respectful amount of time has passed, that the film be reintroduced to the HBO Max platform along with other films that give a more broad-based and complete picture of what slavery and the Confederacy truly were.” HBO Max responded by pulling it off air on Tuesday night (June 9th) amidst racial injustice protests in the US following the death of George Floyd. His death that led to the “Black Lives Matter” revolution has questioned all longstanding wrongs meted out to people of colour over the years.

HBO Max in a statement issued to the media, said: “Gone With The Wind is a product of its time and depicts some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that have, unfortunately, been commonplace in American society. These racist depictions were wrong then and are wrong today, and we felt that to keep this title up without an explanation and a denouncement of those depictions would be irresponsible. These depictions are certainly counter to WarnerMedia’s values.”

What now?

The film will return at a later date  with new material discussing the historical context of the movie. t But it will be presented "as it was originally created", HBO Max said, "to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed".