I was perusing Cracked.com a couple of days ago, and in an article entitled “6 Evil Things that Prove Hollywood has No Soul” or something like that. Anyway, one of the things listed as evil was Disney re-releasing Song of the South as late as 1986. I guess the author’s definition of evil differs from mine since I would have no problem if that movie was re-released by Disney today. In fact, I’ll go further, I would be overjoyed.
But putting aside the question of whether children seeing Song of the South would turn them all into little KKK Konverts, another thought occurs to me. Why is Gone With the Wind still accessible to all, if Song of the South is so objectionable?
Or is it simply a matter of time? Will Turner Classic Movies someday drop GWTW from its lineup? Will it be next to impossible to find DVD’s or on Netflix or whatever?
Or will that scene of Scarlett slapping Prissy save the movie from ignominious oblivion by demonstrating that slavery is not hunky dory (which is what is the main complaint made against Song of the South, as I understand it. Uncle Remus and the rest of the former slaves are shown as being too happy with their lot.)
How long before before Gone With the Wind is gone with the political winds?
Well, Song of the South was aimed at kids, but GWTW is a grown-up’s film, so there’s less reason (if there is every any at all) to want to make it go away. It’s a little like “Birth of a Nation.” It needs to be celebrated and admired for the brilliant pioneering bit of movie-making it was…even as we are a bit appalled by some of the things that are depicted.
(I’m mad at TCM for censoring James Caan’s doofus “Me Chinee” scene from El Dorado. Yeah, it’s a dumb scene, and offensive by today’s standards. But it’s part of the movie.)
(I’m also mad at Disney for taking the cigarette-rolling scene out of Pecos Bill. What next? Are we going to pretend that George Washington owned no slaves?)
History is reality. Even God is denied the power to change the past (Aristotle.)
When GWTW was in pre-production in the 1930s it was decided early on that the word ‘nigger’ would not be said on screen. They do use the word ‘darkie’, but I find that word more anachronistically funny than offensive (Monty Python has used it in a few sketches).
This sort of reminds me of a review I read of Tarantino’s Django Unchained. The reviewer was absolutely dumbfounded at why Samuel L. Jackson’s character was so consistently and unwaveringly loyal to DiCaprio’s (he was an old slave and DiCaprio his owner). Because that’s the way it was. Political correctness, besides being ignorant and evil, is an incredibly recent invention.
Sure, but entertainment isn’t history, even though a lot of entertainment uses history as a framework. If a movie distributor censors a scene because they want to make the movie more appealing or less potentially controversial for modern audiences, they’re not attacking history or attacking reality. They’re issuing the movie to make money, after all, not to participate in an archival preservation initiative.
:dubious: Nothing recent about it. People have always protested or denounced or censored aspects of entertainment that they found offensive or immoral, from blanking out epithets in books to protesting nudity or blasphemy in movies. The name “political correctness” is a recent invention, but the behavior that people who complain about political correctness are referring to is as old as society itself.
Protesting against something that is offensive is one thing. Protesting against something that is factual, but real, is another.
While it is one thing to protest against GWTW, I fear that we are headed down the route of society eventually protesting movies depicting slavery because they find slavery objectionable - which is, the whole point of depicting it - because it’s a BAD thing.
In all fairness, Song of the South is supposed to take place AFTER the Civil War, so these are free workers we’re seeing. (Although the Nostalgia Chick’s review points out that this doesn’t make all that much of a difference.)
I read that in an earlier draft, when Uncle Remus is leaving the plantation towards the end after Johnny’s mother has ordered him to stop telling Johnny stories, he says something along the lines of “I’m a free man now, I don’t have to take this.” I wish they’d left that line in.
And I actually saw that re-release of SotS when I was fourteen–my dad and I took the neighbor’s little girl. I myself liked classic Disney just as much then as I do now. It’s a shame they couldn’t at least do a special DVD release with a disclaimer along the lines of what the Warner Brothers cartoons had: “To deny specific areas of history is the same as claiming these prejudices never existed.” Though it hasn’t prevented them from still keeping Coal Black And De Sebben Dwarves under lock and key.
(The other neat part about seeing SotS in the theater was the Star Trek IV preview before it.)
I saw Song of the South as part of a double feature re-release with Dumbo in 1983. If you count the crows in Dumbo, I apparently got a racist twofer at the tender age of five.
I just find it a bit sad that this film–which is a part of western cultural history–has been buried by the copyright owners. Disney rightly fears some sort of backlash, were they to re-release it, though I imagine a pricey “academic” release aimed at film historians and enthusiasts, available only through a special website, would mitigate most of the backlash.
The other thing about Song of the South is the reason why little Johnny and his mother are staying at the plantation: his father, a journalist, has run some articles critical of a group (implied to be the KKK), and so he send them to the plantation for their own safety.
I think this does make a difference in how you should view the film.
I can understand the studio’s mindset, which is avoiding controversy and maximizing profit, but I think these sorts of films and movies should be preserved in some fashion even if they are never widely re-released again, because it is a part of history and it amounts to whitewashing the past when you take large chunks of offensive material out. When you get to the point where you censor everything that is offensive, eventually there is no point even bothering to watch or listen to whatever the media is in my opinion.
Makes me think of the first episode of Netflix’s Mr. Show reboot W/ Bob and Tom where David Cross plays a film director who is remaking the movie Roots and the slaves are now called “helpers” and they get paid, and the slave master gives them lemonade breaks while they’re picking cotton.
Brilliant filmmaking is brilliant, and I would hate to lose any of it to prevailing political emotions of the time. I’m entranced by Triumph of the Will, The Battleship Potemkin, Birth of a Nation, and any number of other movies who’s politics I find questionable or offensive.
Oddly enough, I find GWTW to be 2+ hours of utter boredom.
The concept of removing offensive material from classic works has been around for literally centuries. Of course we laugh at the people who removed stuff for what we consider silly reasons like sexual situations, blasphemy, and violence, but we sometimes don’t think to laugh at ourselves.
In any case, what makes “Gone With the Wind” and “Song of the South” problematic is not that they depict slavery, or white supremacy, or Jim Crow. It’s that they depict those things favorably. Does that mean we’re supposed to burn or edit the films? No, but that doesn’t mean we have to defend them either.
And making a new work that presents a bowdlerized version of a previous work doesn’t destroy the previous work. Just because we’ve got an all-female Ghostbusters released in 2016 that doesn’t erase the previous movie from existence.
I admit it’s been a long time since I’ve seen it, but in what way does Song of the South depict any of those things favorably? (As has been mentioned, the story is post-Civil War and Uncle Remus is a former slave.) The worst knock about it seems to be that Remus is cheerful. But Disney movies are full of cheerful servants.
The Uncle Remus stories in general get a bit of a bad rap. They’re a genuine piece of post-diaspora African culture, and if they hadn’t been recorded by Joel Chandler Harris, they might very well have been lost altogether. But Harris’ books proved to be wildly popular with white Southern audiences, who took these stories geared for children as evidence that black people in general were child-like, and who took stories told to find a few minutes of solace in an inhumane situation as evidence that slaves were largely happy with their lot before the war. They effectively became Lost Cause propaganda.
Considering that two years ago 12 Years a Slave won the Best Picture Oscar and that the upcoming movie, The Birth of a Nation , about the Nat Turner Rebellion, has received multiple awards on the festival circuit and received the largest deal ever at Sundance, I find your fear unfounded.
I recently read the complete book, which contains additional material besides the stories that is much more problematical. In it Remus says he was happier as a slave. There’s also the chapter A Story of the War, in which Remus tells a northern visitor about how, near the end of the war, he shot a Yankee sniper who was about to shoot his young master. He say he knew the Yankee was fighting for his freedom but he couldn’t bear to see him kill his master. He and the family end up nursing the soldier back to health but the soldier loses an arm.
Well, how is one supposed to make a film about the American Civil War without showing instances of slavery?
It’s our history, warts and all. I don’t think slavery is glorified in either the book or the movie, it’s just the way wealthy plantation owners lived.
See, the thing is, Prissy had that coming, and it wouldn’t have mattered if she’d been a white paid domestic or a male cousin, lying about your ability to deliver a baby and then folding up at crunch time deserves a pop in the mouth.
There’s plenty wrong with GWTW, but the problem isn’t with the movie, it’s that its Lost Cause themes still have such currency.