Talk about strange bedfellows: Both Scarlet O’Hara and Elmer Fudd are in the crosshairs of current culture wars.
For “fiddle-dee-dee” Scarlet, protagonist of “Gone With the Wind,” it’s that movie’s romanticization of Southern life that has become problematic. HBO Max pulled the film from its streaming service last week, with promises that the big-screen adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s antebellum classic will return with additional context, likely a disclaimer or a scholarly introduction. It came back within a week.
The film’s removal by HBO ignited some online kerfuffles, especially when former Fox News and NBC personality Megyn Kelly, she of the Santa-is-white and blackface-is-sometimes-OK sentiments, weighed in.
And here’s something you won’t hear me say often: I agree with Kelly’s assessment. She tweeted, in part, that “you can loathe bad cops, racism, sexism, bias against the LGBTQ community, and not censor historical movies, books, music and art that don’t portray those groups perfectly. Ppl understand art reflects life ... as we evolve, so do our cultural touchstones.” (The ellipses are Kelly’s.)
Suddenly, GWTW is hot again, shooting to the top of Amazon’s sales lists, maybe on the mistaken belief that it is going away forever. (For the record, I regularly see the movie in those ubiquitous $5 bins at Walmart, leading me to believe there are probably 1.27 copies of GWTW for each American who might want to own one.)
HBO Max is within its rights to reissue the movie with some sort of disclaimer or discussion of the movie’s racist undertones. After all, the film spotlights the struggles of one wealthy Euro-American woman over the anguish of all Southern enslaved peoples, and the entire film is a flowery love letter to a way of life that should be repugnant to all.
What would be wrong would be suppressing it completely and denying audiences opportunities to see and debate it.
Similar arguments could be made for the retention of the Confederate flag or statues of Southern generals in public venues, I suppose, but a key difference is that both statues and flags can be moved to museums, where the same level of critical context attached to problematic old films can be provided.
In a museum, the flag can be studied for its design or the statues for their craftsmanship, without having to subscribe to racist perspectives, often disguised as “legacy,″ attached to arguments for display in public parks and thoroughfares.
A disclaimer is no different, really, than the introductions added to books like “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” that explain Mark Twain’s use of the n-word. With GWTW, any pre-film explanation is similar in intent to the oft-mocked title scrolls across many classic cartoon collections, noting that they are “intended for the adult collector and may not be suitable for children,” as though the viewer were about to embark on a perusal of “Debbie Does Dallas” and not endless retreads of Bugs Bunny one upping Daffy Duck or the Coyote trying in vain to capture Road Runner.
And speaking of Warner Bros. cartoons, what about hapless Elmer Fudd, who fell into his own Acme vat of controversy recently, also related to HBO Max?
Word eked out that a new series of Looney Toons on the streaming service featured Fudd and Yosemite Sam without their deadly accoutrements.
At least one modern day Looney Toons writer noted that there weren’t many gags associated with Fudd’s rifle or Yosemite’s six-shooters that a) hadn’t already been done and b) would be appropriate in a society where gun violence has reached epidemic proportions.
That hasn’t stopped Elmer from suddenly appearing across social media sites, a modern-day, Second Amendment-supporting version of hapless Pepe the Frog, another character co-opted by conservatives to bemoan what they see as a loss of “traditional” values.
But new cartoons featuring classic characters behaving in different ways in no way invalidates the old versions. It’s not like those old cartoons vanished from collections; they’re still there, with the characters behaving in familiar ways.
It is a dangerous proposition to begin censoring art, and I’m willing to go to the mat in my insistence that commercial films like GWTW and vintage cartoons are just as worthy of protection and preservation as more high-falutin forms.
Sometimes, though, the venue and the presentation have to be tweaked, as is the case with older films and new presentations of old characters. It is up to the audiences, then, to debate the merits and shortcomings of each.
Censorship, no. Context, yes.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
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