Gone with the wind has become the center of political
controversies, exposing the thousand problems that cause them; although none of
them are the racism of which the film is accused, and that it is not even a
fundamental part of their dramaturgy. The cartoonish of black characters is
only a fallacy, based on the little prominence granted to them; which is
nevertheless natural, because the drama it relates is not universal, but
referred exactly to the landowner class that loses the war.
Still, pioneering realism, the character of
the slave Mammy leads all the secondary characters, even over that of Melanie;
and if it is simplified it is by its functionality, because one of the best features
of the script is its sobriety. The greater simplification of the other slaves
is due to their even less prominence; thanks to which they provide the movie the
anticlimax so necessary to any drama, together with a plethora of no less
simplified whites.
The only case of a non-star who’s dramatic
complexity is respected, is Belle, the prostitute; and just in function of the
moral contrast with the protagonist, with its own sense of morals and humanity.
In a couple of scenes, the protagonist shows violence with her slaves, but no
more than with the rest of the characters; including the Havilland’s Melanie, to who if she doesn't beat
is because she has no power to do so and can cost her the love of her life.
Of course, when slaves are caricatured, they
are referred to the grotesque figure of Jimmy Crow; because as a vernacular
figure, Jim Crow was a reality in a slave culture, not a perverse fiction. This
points to the real problem behind the complaints about racism on the film,
which would be understood if they were out of time; as is not the case here,
where it is even referred to a certain ethic for dealing with slaves, albeit in
the proper form of their time.
The problem would be the political resentment,
exacerbated by the social injustices that make so difficult to overcome racism;
but which is even more exacerbated, even to paroxysm, by its manipulation. The
ideological controversy here only perpetuates the contradiction, with its
continues moral allegations; with which it ignores the historical
determinations of the phenomenon criticized, as does the Christian moral standards; the moral model by
the way on which this ideological
controversy is founded, but like the rationalism that permeates modern culture,
synthesized in this of American.
In any case admirable, the film is the
most stark and candid look to the country by itself; as an English romantic heroine,
with its panoramic extracted from Wuthering Heights. The same settings degrade
the elegant bucolism of pre-war, with the sumptuous Victorian of post-war; and
the heroine is not the ideal woman, like the secondary Melanie, nor admirable
in her sins, as the paradoxically honorable Belle.
The character of Scarlet O'Hara is cynical
and petulant, concentrating all the flaws in a woman of her time; together with
the only virtue of her will, not only to survive but to live well, no matter what
she has to do to it. O'Hara has his unknowing consistency in that will, which
is reflected in the attachment to the land,
which is not to the land itself; instead it is related
to the place to where you can return when everything has been lost, because it
is the spirit of the south; surviving in
its defeat by the arrogant incomprehension of the north, with which it should live
forever.
It is then be another white problem, in
which blacks remain as the productive basis for their ideology; to which they
contribute their past, and to which they therefore remain tied, by this
exacerbation that feeds its resentments. Ideological contradiction is the first
determination of politics, as the excellent phenomenon to which Western culture
has evolved; but as a phenomenon to which the black race has not been integrated,
kept on the periphery of these power struggles.
In this sense, the criticism of Gone with
the wind is nothing terrible, responding to the circumstances of American culture;
which at the forefront of modern development, is the one that manages to codify
the cultural elements, in its legalistic tradition. It is not uncommon, it is a
culture in which even shampoo has instructions, and the most common practice is
"liability"; something that other cultures fail to understand, suffering
the unappealable authoritarianism of their own traditions.
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