‘He who controls the media controls the mind of the public’– Noam Chomsky
What are the requirements to become a film classic?
This question has resulted in decades of contentious debate. For many a classic film transcends cultural and temporal boundaries. An apt example is Mean Girls.
Despite being released 20 years ago, the themes of girlhood and acceptance still resonate with today’s youth. This has spawned communal experiences of Halloween costumes, quotable lines, and a litany of pop culture references.
But who (read: what group) chooses what transcends? Who do they alienate in the process and what boundaries do they erect? I will examine how the aesthetically pleasing poster for Victor Fleming’s Gone with the Wind obfuscates societal ills and reinforces myths like Forced Seduction and prescribed gender roles. I will call on scholars bell hooks, Judith Butler, and Stevi Jackson. Even though the character of Scarlett O’Hara is praised for
not yielding to the traditional pressure from society, the poster promotes hegemonic ideals of masculinity and femininity in this annus mirabilis film.
Gone with the Wind’s poster entered a difficult balancing act that all film posters perform. For The Guardian, Paul Rennie states that film posters are tasked ‘with giving a clear representation of the story, genre, and action while including a wealth of information about the cast, crew, and production.’ But such a density of information is antithetical to the dominant orthodoxy in graphic design: economy. To satisfactorily integrate these competing obligations, the poster has sacrificed the story of inequity during the Reconstruction era at the altar of gender compliance.
The film is based on Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 best-selling novel and the promotion elects to focus primarily on the leads Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) and Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) who take up most of the poster’s space. Additionally, Butler is looking down at O’Hara with a stoic and protective expression. He is holding her in a way that resembles how a groom may carry their new bride. Resultingly, a standardised heteronormative ideal was promoted to the 60-80 million Americans that attended the cinema every week in 1939.
Cultural theorist Judith Butler states that ‘masculine and feminine roles are not biologically [fixed] but socially constructed.’ As gender is not ‘an internal reality’, aspirational imagery like this poster helps in the constant reproduction of gendered ideals. This sadly alienates bodies that exist outside of these standards like the fire and victims of the civil war who are used only to express passion and adventure.
Moreover, the poster serves to sanitize and immortalise a horrific ‘romantic’ climax. In the scene, Rhett kisses Scarlett against her will and carries her to the bedroom.
There are two main schools of thought regarding literary film adaptions. Neil Sinyard’s Adaptation as Criticism exemplifies the appreciative model. It states that ‘the best adaptations [are] approached as an activity of literary criticism’, ‘as something that stresses [its main theme]’. Peter Reynold’s Marxist dialectic model of adaptation illustrates a second approach, where adaptation constitutes ‘a forum in which [to] debate and contest social and moral issues.’ Unfortunately, by amorously framing a scene of assault, this poster accomplishes neither. It adds to the construction of hegemonic masculinity, one that Black American author, professor, and social critic bell hooks wrote ‘insists that males are [ordained] to dominate, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females.’
The clinch being painted in a realistic and expressive style is especially sinister knowing that Gables’ character is seventeen years older than his victim. Placing this scene against the sky highlighted with red and gold communicates what hooks called endowed rights. Men like Rhett assault girls and women because they ‘rule over the weak’ and maintenance of their dominance is paramount, irrespective of the form of ‘psychological terrorism and violence’ it may take.
Scarlett’s receptive expression promotes the dangerous idea of Forced Seduction. This is a theme found in Western Literature (mainly romance novels and soap operas) wherein man-on-woman rape transforms into a genuine love affair. Aligning with Judith Butler’s view about the performativity of gender, scholar Stevi Jackson in The Social Context of Rape (first published in 1978) describes the ‘Conventional sexual scripts’ that allow these tropes to persist. Males are filled to the brim with ‘uncontrollable sexual aggression’ and ‘women need some degree of persuasion’ before they surrender themselves to sex. In the paradigm the graphic reinforces, sex is not for mutual pleasure and exploration.
Men are socially constructed to chase, and women are to remain chaste.
Until they can’t.
Beneath the couple runs a frieze of smaller pictures showing dramatic highlights in the film. The frieze is arranged so scenes of conflict and struggle flank “Tara”, the plantation house that is Scarlett O’Hara’s home and inspiration. Minimising these crucial elements marginalise the African-American house servants in the film (namely Mammy played Hattie McDaniel). Sadly, this slight was not out of place in 1939.
Even though 1939 hosted many innovations like the first electric typewriter, fluorescent light, and first FM radio receivers, segregation was still the law of the land. Born to formerly enslaved parents, McDaniel was unable to attend the movie’s premiere in Atlanta because it was held in a whites-only theatre, and even though she became the first African-American to win an Oscar for this role, she had to sit at a segregated table during the ceremony. Her dying wish to be buried in Hollywood Cemetery was denied because the graveyard was for whites only.
In many ways, this poster and the treatment of one of the film’s stars is a lesson for life. Look at what is put in front of you, investigate what is left behind.
