The New York Post's Lou Lumenick likened Gone with the Wind to the Confederate flag in a Wednesday item: "If the Confederate flag is finally going to be consigned to museums as an ugly symbol of racism, what about the beloved film offering the most iconic glimpse of that flag in American culture?" The film critic contended that the classic movie goes to "great lengths to enshrine the myth that the Civil War wasn't fought over slavery — an institution the film unabashedly romanticizes."
Lumenick wasted little time before claiming that Gone with the Wind "isn't as blatantly and virulently racist as D.W. Griffith's 'Birth of a Nation,' which was considered one of the greatest American movies as late as the early 1960s." Of course, that 1915 silent film portrays the Ku Klux Klan as a force for good in the South after the Confederacy's defeat. He added that "the more subtle racism of 'Gone with the Wind' is in some ways more insidious," and continued with his "great lengths" line.
The writer then pointed out that when he had "reviewed the graphically honest '12 Years a Slave' in 2013, I noted, 'It will be impossible to ever look at Gone with the Wind the same way.''" He played up that "apparently someone at the motion picture academy — possibly president Cheryl Boone Isaacs, who is African-American — agrees. 'The Wizard of Oz' got a special 75th anniversary tribute at the same Oscar ceremony where '12 Years' won Best Picture. 'Gone with the Wind,' which beat 'The Wizard of Oz' for Best Picture, barely rated a mention during an Oscar segment on 1939 movies."
Lumenick later asserted that the "racist" film was "based on a best seller by die-hard Southerner Margaret Mitchell...[which] buys heavily into the idea that the Civil War was a noble lost cause and casts Yankees and Yankee sympathizers as the villains." He also spotlighted how "Warner Bros., which has owned 'GWTW' since 1996, resisted any analysis of the film's problematic racial politics until a 26-minute featurette was included with last year's Blu-ray set."
Near the end of his article, the New York Post critic wondered, "What does it say about us as a nation if we continue to embrace a movie that, in the final analysis, stands for many of the same things as the Confederate flag that flutters so dramatically over the dead and wounded soldiers at the Atlanta train station just before the...intermission?" He concluded by predicting that "the movie's days as a cash cow are numbered. It's showing on July 4 at the Museum of Modern Art as part of the museum's salute to the 100th anniversary of Technicolor — and maybe that's where this much-loved but undeniably racist artifact really belongs."
