George Orwell did not foresee in “The Prevention of Literature” that we’d have to defend intellectual liberty against actual curators of art.
HBO Max has pulled Gone with the Wind from its platform, saying that it is a “product of its time and depicts some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that have, unfortunately, been commonplace in American society.”
Alas, how can anything created in a moment of time avoid being a product of its time?
The decision seems to be a direct response to John Ridley’s recent op-ed for the Los Angeles Times. Ridley is an African American screenwriter and director who wrote, among other things, the screenplay for 12 Years a Slave.
In the op-ed, Ridley requests that HBO Max remove the movie for several reasons. Among them: “It is a film that, as part of the narrative of the ‘Lost Cause,’ romanticizes the Confederacy in a way that continues to give legitimacy to the notion that the secessionist movement was something more, or better, or more noble than what it was — a bloody insurrection to maintain the ‘right’ to own, sell and buy human beings.”
Avoiding a highbrow, though meritorious, conversation about art criticism, both of these statements strike me as derivative of an extremely malformed theory of art. It’s how you might discuss a documentary about the Civil War, not a work of fiction, which undoubtedly have different functions.
The film and the novel out of which it was born are imaginative. They offer opportunities to explore how it might have felt to be Scarlett O’Hara, having all she’d known uprooted from the ground. Moreover, the work offers an occasion to encounter jaded and revisionist assumptions about how it was to be someone like Dilcey or Mammy.
All of this demonstrates a fear of imagination — or perhaps a misguided notion of how imagination can serve us, accompanied by a lack of trust in people’s interpretive faculties. We don’t need actors to break the fourth wall and tell us, “What’s represented here does not fully express the complexities of our racial history.” Those things are obvious to most people.
HBO plans to bring the movie back to its platform at some point. When it returns, it will come “with a discussion of its historical context and a denouncement of those very depictions but will be presented as it was originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed.”
Offering some kind of discussion about the film’s history and shortcomings isn’t inherently unreasonable, though those things can be better dealt with in art criticism. Most viewers, I suspect, aren’t into reading film critiques, so fine — offer some context. But to accept the premise that the film shouldn’t be viewed until something like that comes because people can’t understand it is properly condescending.
