Inessentials

Pretty big spoilers for Gone with the Wind

Rewatching Gone with the Wind yesterday at the local art house theater, I was struck by the dream imagery of the film. It begins with the film’s grandiose foreward:

There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind…

“A dream remembered” gives the viewer a pretty fair handle on how to read the film. The film’s heightened emotions, narrow focus on Scarlett O’Hara, and whitewashing of the unpleasant aspects of slavery in the Old South fit the model of the retelling of a dream. Like a person giving a first-person narrative account of a dream, we are told a solipsistic account of a world that a cold-eyed viewer would recount much differently.

More than the narrative structure, there is another way that dreams figure into the story of Gone with the Wind. The first half of the film (the two hours leading up to the intermission) is the story of Scarlett O’Hara’s slow waking up from a dream. Scarlett, particularly in facing the death and stench of the make-shift military hospital in a church, wakes up from the dream life she has been living. In fact, Dr. Meade shakes Scarlett and tells her to “Wake up! Wake up!” And, unfortunately for Scarlett, she does wake up at the end of the first half, when she returns to Tara, her family’s plantation and vows to never be hungry or poor again. She is waking up from a dream and in doing so finds life to be a horror (much like the awakening in Mulholland Dr., come to think of it). And for Scarlett, awakening to the world around her leads her to lie, cheat, steal, and murder her way through life.

Interestingly, this is the same conclusion about life reached by the film’s other protagonist, Rhett Butler. For the first half of the film, he enters and leaves the story at well-spaced intervals. Like a bodhisattva who has awakened from dream-life yet still walks the earth, Rhett Butler is the only character in the first half of the film who is awakened to the dream-like state of the white characters in the Old South. Like the awakened Scarlett O’Hara, he has the very un-Budhhist attitude that the awakened life is one where anything goes – robbery, fornication, anything that benefits him. In his first speaking scene, Rhett even chastises the eager Southern gentlemen for their “dreams of victory” – a clear statement that he can see through the dream they are living in to the world that has already arrived without their knowing. And his decision is not to side with their gentlemanly honor, but to act as a smuggler out to line his pockets.

In an interesting reversal, Rhett attempts in the second half of the film to re-enter the dream life he accurately punctured in the first half. But his attempts to live in a dream are doomed, as his attachment to Scarlett is doomed. He cannot become a gentleman, and Scarlett cannot become a lady. And the one dream from which Scarlett never awoke was her dream of Ashley, which she realizes too late was only a dream. Rhett knew this all along, as he tells her in the films closing scene, “I’m leaving you, my dear. All you need now is a divorce and your dreams of Ashley can come true.” She has realized by now that it really was just a dream, but she has awoken too late to salvage her real marriage.

Like all dreams, the Old South was always illusory. The happy slaves, the code of gentlemanly honor, the concentration of wealth in the few landowners were all unstable at best and delusional at worst. The Old South is a remembered dream, a dream that never was as it is remembered.