‘Gone With the Wind’ Revisited

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On April 7, I attended an eighty-fifth anniversary theatrical showing of Gone with the Wind. In recent weeks, I’ve been through an earthquake, seen a solar eclipse, and spent hours in church for Easter. Even so, watching GWTW for the fifth time in a theater was a religious experience.

Manohla Dargis, the New York Times chief film critic, interrupts her April 12 review of a new movie to restate her righteous indignation against an unrelated film. Gone with the Wind, she insists, is a “monument to white supremacy and the myth of the Southern Lost Cause.”

Yes, both the book and the film are racist. No, GWTW’s racism is not the works’ alpha and omega. And, no, GWTW is not the only flawed work of art. Have you heard any rap lyrics lately? Rather, GWTW addresses universal themes. Audiences from diverse ethnicities and social classes recognize these themes and even just the film’s soundtrack reduces listeners to tears. GWTW brings the power of myth to a universal experience: growing up, leaving childhood innocence, and entering a world that isn’t invested in your survival, and that can engineer relentless freight trains full of misery and steer them right at you. It’s about who survives the collision, how, and why, and at what cost. “Hardships make or break people,” as Rhett Butler says.

Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel sold more than a million copies in its first six months; it went through multiple printings its first year. It was the top fiction bestseller for 1936 and 37. It won the Pulitzer Prize, it has sold thirty million copies, and it has never been out of print. GWTW has 1,207,952 ratings on Goodreads and many of those have been posted in the past month alone, in several different languages. A Latvian reader proclaims, “This novel is timeless … we have advanced in technology … However, a person remains a person … even after almost 100 years, the depths of human nature are revealed.” And readers still name their kids after the characters. In Bangalore, Melanie P. Kumar writes, “The name Melanie encountered a bit of resistance, being a Christian name in an Indian home, but my father stood his ground. He loved what Melanie stood for and hoped that the daughter named after her would in some way reflect her.”

The movie was released in 1939, Hollywood’s annus mirabilis. The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and many other superlative films premiered that year, but GWTW swept the twelfth Academy Awards, winning ten. Adjusted for inflation, GWTW remains history’s highest grossing film.

A diverse team created it. Producer David O. Selznick, of Eastern European Jewish stock, driven by amphetamines and ancestral ambition, pushed himself and everyone around him to the brink. Vivien Leigh was born in Darjeeling of partial non-European ancestry. Olivia de Havilland was a member of an Anglo-Norman gentry family; she was born in Tokyo. Leslie Howard had Hungarian Jewish ancestry.

Hattie McDaniel became the first African American to take home an Oscar. Both of McDaniel’s parents had been born into slavery. Her father fought for the Tennessee 12th U.S. Colored Infantry Regiment. McDaniel willed her Oscar it to Howard University, where it disappeared. One rumor recounts that a disgruntled student threw it into the Potomac River to protest racism.

The American Film Institute ranks the film’s soundtrack the second greatest film score of all time. They put Star Wars first, which is, of course, a sop for nerds who don’t fully understand the distinction between a movie and a video game.

Composer Max Steiner was, like Selznick, another Hollywood giant of Jewish ancestry. “Tara’s Theme” evokes, in the hearer, a yearning for lost grandeur. Decades ago, “Tara’s Theme” served as the intro to a New-York-City-area TV show. “Million Dollar Movie” showed old films on TV. It opened with “Tara’s Theme.” That intro is now on YouTube. The comments there attest to the power of Steiner’s “Tara’s Theme.” Many didn’t realize that “Tara’s Theme” was from GWTW. They just knew it made them long for a lost, better world. That’s the power of art. Some of their comments, below.

“I’m almost 55 years old and I tear up each time I listen to this.”

“I can never get enough of this theme. Just warms my heart. Life seemed so tough back then in the urban jungle but compared against this nightmare society it was almost heavenly”

“originally from The Bronx! This brings back sweet memories.”

“am 68 & I cry too. Memories”

“Memories of my mom letting me stay up late watching tv with her on that little black and white set in our living room. My dad would come home from work and say, ‘what are you still doing up?’ and then he would give me the Tastykake he saved for me from his lunch. He has been gone a while now but when I hear this I can still see him in the doorway, smiling.”

“you can not help getting emotional when you hear this. let me go back just for one day!!!”

“what a treat it was for a youngster to stay up late, either on a non school nite, or snowed in, and see the late movie, and falling asleep on the couch in the den with the black and white tv set flickering”

“Wow…glad I ain’t the only one catching feelings over this. just a small piece of nostalgia to take your mind back to a far better time. Now who used to use the trick of turning the knob in between channels to get a better reception? Hey, we was ghetto! I ain’t ashamed!”

“my mind flashed back to this theme, evoking memories of my Bronx childhood.”

There are hundreds of more such teary-eyed testimonials. “Ghetto” people from the Bronx and Brooklyn are overwhelmed by detailed memories of their childhood on hearing “Tara’s Theme,” written by an Austrian Jew, about a plantation in Georgia. This is what art does. Art is universal.

Yes, the book and film contain racist material. The book uses the N word over a hundred times. GWTW repeatedly refers to blacks as “apes” and “monkeys;” one is a “gorilla;” another is a “baboon.” After the war is over, Scarlett encounters freed blacks. They “turned insolent grins at her and laughed among themselves … How dared they laugh, the black apes! How dared they grin at her, Scarlett O’Hara of Tara! She’d like to have them all whipped until the blood ran down their backs. What devils the Yankees were to set them free, free to jeer at white people!”

Simian vocabulary is used even as Mitchell insists on how beloved Mammy is. “The upstairs hall seemed to shake as Mammy’s ponderous weight came toward the door … Mammy with shoulders dragged down by two heavy wooden buckets, her kind black face sad with the uncomprehending sadness of a monkey’s face … Scarlett ran to her, laying her head on the broad, sagging breasts which had held so many heads, black and white.”

After Scarlett’s daughter Bonnie dies, Mammy takes it upon herself to seek out help. But even in this mission, Mitchell depicts Mammy as less than human. “Mammy waddled slowly up the kitchen steps of Melanie’s house. She was dressed in black from her huge men’s shoes, slashed to permit freedom for her toes, to her black head rag. Her blurred old eyes were bloodshot and red rimmed … Her face was puckered in the sad bewilderment of an old ape but there was determination in her jaw.”

The movie is less poke-you-in-the-eye racist, but the slaves are depicted as simple, happy, and in their proper place. Their liberation puts respectable white women at risk and the – unnamed in the film – Klan must protect whites from freed blacks. In the book, Rhett Butler is jailed on suspicion of being a Klansman who killed an “uppity” black man for insulting a white woman. In the movie, the Yankees arrest Rhett because they think he has Confederate gold.

GWTW is not just condemned because it is racist. It is also condemned because it is popular, because it is erotic, and because the main character is a woman. Those who are better than you and I, that is academics and taste-makers, sneer at the book.

In the American canon, to quote one scholarly publication, Mitchell’s place is “as a vulgar aside having to do with numbers rather than words.” “Gone With the Wind hasn’t a place in anyone’s canon; it remains a book that nobody wants except its readers.”

Elizabeth Austin threw away her copy of GWTW in 2020 to protest the death of George Floyd. The schizophrenia of Austin’s book burning is reflected in her final gesture. Austin literally kissed the book goodbye. Her father had given her the copy for Christmas in 1975 when she was 17. He knew how much his daughter loved the work. Austin watched the movie six times in one week when she was 11 because she was “spellbound … enraptured.” She went on to read the book numerous times because she loved Scarlett “driven, practical, energetic, and fierce.” She confesses, “In one vestigial corner of my heart, I still yearn to be like Scarlett … I fully understand the absurdity of this confession.”

Austin had owned that copy of GWTW for forty-five years! When she was 62, she realized that GWTW is “pernicious … vicious … evil … disgusting … wrong … a disgrace … poison that weaves a spell … in feminist deathlessly lyrical prose … it deserves the same treatment as Mein Kampf and Triumph of the Will … It is time to send Gone with the Wind to the ash heaps of cultural history.” Austin demands that only “scholars” be allowed to read GWTW “as a problematic text.” “Anybody who champions either book or movie is standing up for the cause of white supremacy and should be judged accordingly.”

Hey, lady. Sending folks to the guillotine for their reading choices? You first. Remember the fate of Robespierre; the revolution always eats its young.

Somehow folks like Austin never protest the book’s other hatreds. GWTW is replete with condemnations of Yankees. Poor white trash are the book’s lowest caste. “Contempt for white trash” makes one a true Southern gentleman, even if, like Scarlett’s father Gerald, he was born in Ireland. There are good blacks; there are no good white trash. Scarlett is sexually assaulted by two men. One is black; the other is white trash. She is rescued by a black man.

The Slatterys are poor and must resort to begging. “The sight of Tom Slattery dawdling on his neighbors’ porches, begging cotton seed for planting or a side of bacon to ‘tide him over,’ was a familiar one. Slattery hated his neighbors with what little energy he possessed, sensing their contempt beneath their courtesy … The house negroes of the County considered themselves superior to white trash, and their unconcealed scorn stung him, while their more secure position … stirred his envy. By contrast with his own miserable existence, they were well-fed, well-clothed and looked after in sickness and old age. They were proud of the good names of their owners and, for the most part, proud to belong to people who were quality, while he was despised by all.”

Scarlett’s mother Ellen, a devout Catholic, dies a martyr’s death. Ellen tends to the Slatterys when they are ill and catches typhoid from them. As Mammy puts it, “Miss Scarlett, it wuz dem Slatterys, dem trashy, no-good, low-down po’-w’ite Slatterys dat kilt Miss Ellen. Ah done tole her an’ tole her it doan do no good doin’ things fer trashy folks, but … her heart so sof’ she couldn’ never say no ter nobody whut needed her … Ah tole her an’ tole her ter let dem w’ite trash alone … Dey is de shiflesses, mos’ ungrateful passel of no- counts livin’. An’ Miss Ellen got no bizness weahin’ herseff out waitin’ on folks” like the Slatterys.

Life is complex; witness this episode from Mitchell’s biography. Benjamin Mays was the son of former slaves. He became a Baptist minister and the “intellectual conscience” of the Civil Rights Movement. Mays mentored Martin Luther King, Julian Bond, and others. He was president of Morehouse College. “In 1942, when Mays needed money to help poor students … he went to Margaret Mitchell. Over the next seven years [until her death] the author of Gone With the Wind paid the tuition of dozens of young black men to go on to medical school.”

And also this, from her postmortem legacy. “In March of 2002, Eugene Mitchell, the nephew of Margaret Mitchell, donated $1.5 million to Morehouse College … one of the largest individual gifts in the history of Morehouse College.”

For me, as a reader, there’s an even more significant feature than Mitchell’s charity work that complicates our betters’ book burning of GWTW. In Mammy and other characters, Mitchell created people I experience as real. When I read the above passage about Mammy’s grief after Bonnie’s death, I become furious at Mitchell for using the word “ape.” I want to throw “my” book at her. I want to scream, “How dare you dehumanize Mammy?” Through the magic of art, Mitchell created a character I want to protect from Mitchell’s bigotry.

GWTW was published a mere seventy-one years after the end of the Civil War. Its first readers were closer in time to the end of the Civil War than we are to the end of World War II. Readers related to Union soldiers, and readers who were themselves impoverished by the Depression, didn’t read a 1,037 page book to hate on wicked Yankees and vile white trash. These readers recognized that GWTW is told from the point of view of a girl, sixteen at the book’s opening, who has a limited understanding of the world. She hates all Yankees, even the Yankees who provide her dying mother with medication and tender care.

GWTW includes a vehement condemnation of war profiteers. These profiteers are “scoundrels … I call down the just wrath and vengeance of an embattled people, fighting in the justest of Causes, on these human vultures who bring in satins and laces when our men are dying for want of quinine, who load their boats with tea and wines when our heroes are writhing for lack of morphia. I execrate these vampires who are sucking the lifeblood of the men who follow Robert Lee … How can we endure these scavengers in our midst with their varnished boots when our boys are tramping barefoot into battle? How can we tolerate them with their champagnes and their pates of Strasbourg when our soldiers are shivering about their camp fires and gnawing moldy bacon? I call upon every loyal Confederate to cast them out.”

Rhett Butler, the hero of the book, was a war profiteer. And yet GWTW includes the above excoriation of war profiteers. Back in the day, when English was still taught in schools, readers were sophisticated enough to recognize that the truth value we are to assign to any given text depends on the author’s point of view, the author’s convictions, and the reader’s. Somehow the New York Times could call Soul on Ice “brilliant” and not assume that readers would, like the book’s author, become rapists. And yet Thought Police insist that GWTW will turn readers into racists.

Audiences don’t turn to GWTW as an instruction manual on how to join the Klan, any more than they expect it to teach them how to make a dress out of curtains. In Scarlett’s mind, and maybe in Mitchell’s mind, too, Scarlett’s suffering during the Civil War was caused by Yankees. But in the reader’s mind, that suffering is caused by war, by the war, actual or metaphorical, closest to the reader.

At least one blogger reads a passage from GWTW as an “anti-war gem.” He quotes Rhett Butler, the war profiteer. “All wars are sacred to those who have to fight them … But, no matter what rallying cries the orators give to the idiots who fight … there is never but one reason for war … money.” Is that the POV of, as Manohla Dargis warned, a “monument to white supremacy and the myth of the Southern Lost Cause”? No, it’s a fictional character in a novel expressing his POV.

My friend Sue, a pacifist, reports that GWTW is one of the two “great anti-war” novels she has read, showing “as it does, war from the losing side.” Mitchell, Sue says, “shows the hype and glorification of it all that comes before and then the reality” of the impact of defeat: death, disease, and destruction.

GWTW’s greatness and its flaws exist in different compartments, in the same way that the woman who called Mammy an “ape” appears to have existed in a different compartment from the woman who underwrote numerous black students’ educations.

I saw Gone with the Wind for the first time with my mother and Mrs. Manning, very much not Southern belles. My mother was short; Mrs. Manning, aka “Toots,” was 4’10”. One had six kids; the other, eight, many of them over six feet tall. That such short women had such tall sons and daughters testifies to the malnutrition in their youths. Their legs were sturdy and their hands were workworn. They wore conservative dresses – they wouldn’t think to attend a movie in slacks. Their garments were threadbare but very clean. They wore red lipstick, short, perm-curled hair, small crosses around their necks, and they carried, in the crook of their elbows, pocketbooks full of tissues and reading glasses and other mysterious paraphernalia.

Toots grew up during the Depression. She learned how to find beauty and fun in the most unexpected places, and where they didn’t exist before, she created them out of thin air. She loved her garden full of roses in a small plot in a row of tightly packed, tiny, Cape Cod houses. Her husband worked in Paterson’s textile dye industry.

My mother never recovered from that final trip on an ox cart from her beloved village in Slovakia to a train station, and then to a very big ship. In Pennsylvania anthracite country she knew the kind of poverty where there are no shoes and nothing to fill empty bellies and apa – father – has lungs that are shot and he can’t mine coal any more.

Both Toots and my mother would later lose sons with the same name. Mike Manning and Mike Goska would both die young from cancer. My mother lost a second son; Toots’ daughter was hit by a car, and crippled for life. How did these women make it through? As Mammy says after Scarlett loses her daughter Bonnie, what my mother and Toots had to stand, the good Lord gave them strength to stand.

As we drove home from the movie, I said that I thought Scarlett was mean. Toots and my mother seemed to be sharing a secret between them, one they assumed that I would not be able to understand. “When you get older, you will understand,” they told me. This exchange troubled me. I would understand what?

Shortly thereafter, someone mentioned to our teacher, a nun, that GWTW was playing in Pompton Lakes. Sister, that quick, said, “Let’s call off class and let’s go see the movie.” Saint Francis School shut down. We filled the Colonial Theater with our giggles, our flying popcorn, and our applause. The boys laughed when pregnant Scarlett tripped and went thump-thump-thumping down a flight of stairs. Their laughter clued me in to the jump-the-shark-level melodrama of the scene. Sister insisted with calm authority that Scarlett should have married Ashley, because “opposites attract. She’d support him and he’d get to read poetry all day.”

No child today will experience the magic of that day. The nuns would be accused of racism. The boys would be accused of sexism. Helicopter parents would sue the school for the unapproved, spontaneous field trip. Kids lack the attention span for a four-hour movie. The Colonial theater, founded in 1913, closed in 1996. Saint Francis School, founded in 1905, closed in 2014. There are hardly any nuns any more. What theater owner today would accede to a phoned-in request from a nun to screen a movie for four hundred school kids arriving in minutes? And back in the day Hollywood made a serious movie about death and war and even rape that many generations could watch and discuss together. Toots, my Slovak mother, my celibate nun teacher, and even snotty little boys could get a kick out of it.

Third time: I was “mature,” maybe late teens, and I thought I had outgrown it all, so I brought my ironic sneer to the theater. The only thing I remember is the gasp from the women in the audience when Rhett Butler first appeared onscreen, and having to acknowledge that as much as I dislike Rhett, he exerts a potent testosterone allure.

Fourth Time: Krakow, 1989. Someone screened GWTW on the top floor of the dormitory. Communism was crumbling all around us and we students, in street demonstrations, were doing our part to hasten the end of the Soviet empire. There were tears and messianic pronouncements. Everyone thought that the movie was all about Poland, World War II, Communism, surviving, and rising from ashes. And of course they were right. International audiences react similarly; see the scholarly article “Scarlett O’Hara in Damascus.”

I’ve read the book three times. My older sister Antoinette read it; I inherited it. Our copy was a sky blue, 1968, Pocket Books paperback. The print was tiny and the pages were yellowing. That edition is now a collectible and is on sale for $475.

I am dyslexic. I was slow to learn to read and to this day every single word I write is a humiliating obstacle to my urge to communicate. For a year, I sat on the cement stoop in front of our house on sunny days, and curled up on winter nights with a flashlight. That I was not just able, but also eager, to work my way through 418,053 written words is testimony to the power of Mitchell’s writing.

After finishing it, I reread short passages over and over till I realized that I was both addicted and obsessed, and I got rid of the copy because I knew I didn’t have the self-discipline to stop. I moved on to other books. None has matched it.

Then I was a Peace Corps volunteer, and long books were the order of the day. In remote villages in Africa and Asia I read The Far Pavilions, The Winds of War, Freedom at Midnight, The Snow Leopard, War and Peace, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, The Tao of Physics. In Nepal, at seven thousand feet, in a village without electricity or running water, no roads, no glass, no plastic, no outhouse, I broke my fast and indulged myself and read GWTW the second time. Something about Nepal disenchanted the book for me. One of my students died of a bad tooth. Another died from dysentery. I had no patience for Scarlett and Rhett’s childish shenanigans that had previously struck me as so tragic and so complex.

I read the book a third time a few years back. The third time was a mixture of the first reaction – wow this is addictive writing – and the second time. Wow, these two are so dysfunctional. And the racism was more obvious and much harder to jam into its compartment.

With every viewing, and on every reading, I always recognized that Melanie and Scarlett, Ashley and Rhett, are archetypes. They occupy distant points on a graph and the tension, the push and pull between them, propels the narrative. We can reduce the characters to the following.

Melanie represents Christian spirituality. She’s close to a Christ figure. Her physicality is the opposite of robust Scarlett. Melanie has a “thin childish figure” and a “serious heart-shaped face that was plain almost to homeliness.” Melanie dies a martyr’s death. She knows she shouldn’t have another child, but she loves her husband and she loves babies and so she tries, and dies. But Melanie is strong. Melanie is generous, supportive, and slow to anger. With her charity and reliability, she builds a network of admirers and allies around her, from wealthy and powerful matrons to penniless and crippled war veterans. With this community, she is able to accomplish important goals, always goals that somehow make someone else’s life better.

One of the oppositions that drives the novel is the tension between weakness and strength. Scarlett is overtly strong; she arouses lust, she gives birth, she plants and harvests, she makes money, and she kills. Melanie is small and physically fragile. But while Scarlett’s selfishness and boldness alienate many, and weaken her, Melanie’s love for mankind empowers her. Scarlett’s vitality protects Melanie physically. Melanie’s Christian love protects Scarlett emotionally and socially.

GWTW does not make clear whether Melanie knew about Scarlett and Ashely’s love and lust for each other, or about their few stolen kisses. My Melanie knew. And she was so spiritually strong, that she didn’t care. She loved both her husband and her “sister” Scarlett anyway.

Scarlett represents laissez-faire capitalism. She’s a one-woman Industrial Revolution. After the war and Sherman’s destruction of Atlanta, Scarlett rebuilds the city, through her lumber mill. Her forward momentum is unstoppable. She focuses on the next job that needs doing. The past can take care of itself, and anyone who gets hurt in her wake is not her problem. In the end, they’ll thank her, because her money keeps mouths full and roofs over heads. Her beneficiaries include blood relatives, former slaves, and people she doesn’t much like and who don’t like her. They batten at her trough even while quietly cursing her. They are too intimidated to cross her.

Audiences condemn Scarlett’s selfishness. Selfish Scarlett is the greatest benefactor in the book. She makes money so she can redistribute it. “She didn’t want her children raised in … poverty and grinding hardships and insecurity. She never wanted children of hers to know” the suffering she had known. “She wanted a secure and well-ordered world in which she could look forward and know there was a safe future ahead for them, a world where her children would know only softness and warmth and good clothes and fine food.”

Scarlett loves Ashley. Ashley “moved in an inner world that was more beautiful than Georgia and came back to reality with reluctance.” Gerald repeatedly warns his daughter Scarlett that Ashley is “queer.” Scarlett is “furious at the slur of effeminacy.” Gerald asks Scarlett, “Do you understand his folderol about books and poetry and music and oil paintings and such foolishness?”

“Oh, Pa … if I married him, I’d change all that!”

Ashley is a bleeding heart liberal. Scarlett hires convict labor at her lumber mill. Her overseer is brutal. “I do not believe that happiness can come from money made from the sufferings of others,” Ashley protests.

But you owned slaves, Scarlett reminds Ashley.

I would have freed them after father died if the war had not freed them, he retorts. But Ashley, like any bleeding heart liberal, is a good relativist. He insists to Scarlett that he is not judging her. “Scarlett, don’t think I’m criticizing you! I’m not. It’s just that we look at things in different ways and what is good for you might not be good for me.” Sheesh, Ashley, take a stand.

I fell in love with Ashley on that first viewing. I thought all women would prefer Ashley, the nice guy, to Rhett, the bad boy, who threatens to crush Scarlett’s skull. Boy, was I wrong. I’ve never met another Ashley girl. I even just tried googling “I love Ashley” and I can’t find any women who share my passion. I found only women who “love Ashley” as a baby name – for a girl.

Rhett is the least realistic. He is a fantasy figure representing an impossible-to-achieve combination of women’s desires. He’s a self-made millionaire who satisfies Scarlett’s every whim. He gives her “f— you money” although in GWTW it’s “go to hell” money. He pays enough attention to Mammy to know that the perfect gift/bribe for her is a red taffeta petticoat. In real life, self-made millionaires tend to look like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, or Mark Zuckerberg, not Clark Gable. Rhett has the body of an athlete, in spite of his drinking, smoking, and debauchery. In real life, really gorgeous guys tend to be gay, self-absorbed and shallow, or gym rats who have time for little other than their mirrors.

In spite of his departure from real life, Rhett is larger than life. He exerts the pull that every woman has ever felt around a charismatic bad boy. Rhett the libertine represents libertarianism. He breaks rules, does what he wants, and condemns everyone, except Melanie, as a hypocrite. “I am a monster of selfishness … I always expect payment for anything I give.” Among the first things we learn about Rhett is that he was expelled from West Point for reasons too terrible to spell out. Rhett smilingly profits from the Civil War while scoffing at the ideals Southerners mouth to support it. He’s a regular customer at the whorehouse.

After our betters condemn the book’s racism, they condemn the rape scene. There are debates about why women readers find the scene erotic – see this 1995 New York Times article, “Feminists Give a Damn.”

Let me uncloak the mystery. Rhett is pure alpha male, but the entirety of his maleness, all the power, all the privilege pre-feminism Scarlett could never hope to exercise, is devoted entirely to Scarlett. Rhett hands his superpower, his maleness, to Scarlett. He notices her. He listens to her. He cares about her. He thinks about her while going years without seeing her. He knows her better than she knows herself. He explains her motivations to her. Before Rhett carries Scarlett up the staircase, even as she’s fighting him off, there are three thousand words of text – three thousand words! – mostly devoted to Rhett talking to Scarlett, revealing how besotted he is with her.

A man who’d listen to me? Rather than chiding me that I talk too much and have too many opinions? A man who’d pay attention to me? I once asked a boyfriend what color eyes I have. He didn’t know. The attention Rhett pays to Scarlett, not the rape, is the most erotic aphrodisiac any novelist ever concocted.

Which brings me to Sunday, April 7. I’d been looking forward to the eighty-fifth anniversary theatrical screening for months. I was psyched for a rollicking good time. I got a lecture. Leonard Maltin appeared first. He said, yes, this is one heck of a movie, but there’s racism in it. Then there was a written warning, repeating the same message Maltin had delivered. Oh, that these same Thought Police would append their warnings to every sexist, racist, violent rap song.

Then, finally, Max Steiner’s killer “Tara’s Theme” rose on the soundtrack. I had been waiting to hear that familiar music in a theater for so long. Rather than rejoicing, I suddenly felt very sad. I had not expected that.

This viewing was a memento mori. I’m old. I know more dead people than live ones. Toots, Mommy, Antoinette, all gone. There are adults in Poland for whom 1989 and our anti-Communist demonstrations are nothing but an historical footnote.

And there’s more. When I saw this movie for the first time, the movie hit me so hard because I recognized its deepest message, which is not a message about racism. It’s about how you do life and life’s vicissitudes. At that first viewing, I was looking forward to life and trying to decide on the strategies I’d deploy once I entered the arena. Should I be mean Scarlett or saintly Melanie?

Life is no longer something that is before me. It is something that is behind me. My questions now are, “Who should I name as the decision-maker on my ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ form? Which Medicare Advantage Plan is best?” I’m not planning my path through life; I’m planning my path through death. Life is something I look back at, rather than forward to. I see all the times I should have acted like Scarlett and instead I acted like Melanie, or all the times I should have shot a Yankee soldier, and I let Sherman burn my home.

While watching GWTW this fifth time, I remembered a man. His name was, well, let’s call him Mister. I was young and vulnerable. Mister was my superior in a leftwing, save-the-world type organization. He had outsized power over me and all of my colleagues.

Mister could have played Ashley in a remake. He was six feet tall and he weighed about a hundred pounds. He didn’t eat meat, he didn’t smoke or drink, and he never raised his voice. He practiced Buddhist meditation and he played guitar and sang about peace and love. The injustices that white people have visited upon “people of color” upset him terribly. He shared his poetry with me. He paid me the same compliments Ashley paid Scarlett, as he, my superior, invited me, younger and entirely vulnerable to his outsize power, to share a sleeping bag with him, in an entirely platonic way, of course. And then he screwed me over so badly I’ve been agog ever since.

I got over the crying jags pretty quickly, but any rational interpretation of his behavior has eluded me for decades. How could anyone so kind, so maternal, so Ashley be such a prick? I don’t know the answer. If I could afford a high-priced psychic, that’s the first question I’d ask.

That dizzying switchback from bleeding heart to utterly heartless: I’ve seen Mister’s behavior reflected in the wider world. I’ve seen bleeding heart liberals voice the highest ideals, and yet do serious harm to the populations they claim to serve; check out the real impact of LBJ’s Great Society on black people, for example, in this video. And hard-as-nails conservatives Heather MacDonald and Abigail Thernstrom demand the kind of values that could uplift my neighbors in Paterson. Scarlett, exemplar of capitalism, lacked empathy, but her innate qualities filled bellies and put roofs over heads. Bleeding hearts don’t do that. Scarlett, and indeed my own mother, could be a bitch. But with them you knew where you stood, and the rug was never pulled out from under you in a way that left you reeling for the rest of your life.

My mind gets this. My heart does not. Reading GWTW for the third time, and watching the film for the fifth time in a theater, I fall in love Ashley, and I want to be like Melanie. One of the lessons of GWTW is that we are what our biology makes us, and if we try to change, we just become “a mule in a horse’s harness,” as Mammy, the font of wisdom, was wont to say.

Danusha Goska is the author of God Through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery