What the wind didn't take

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.