Mike O’Connor: Rewrite the books, ban the movies so we don’t offend revisionists

OPINION: Who knew that Cleopatra was black or Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind was a homicidal white supremacist? Welcome to 2023, where the ‘torturous search for grievance grinds on’, writes Mike O’Connor.

One of the more memorable scenes in the history of cinema must surely be Elizabeth Taylor’s entry into Rome as the Egyptian queen in the movie Cleopatra.

As a wide-eyed barely pubescent teenager, I devoured the newspaper reports of the adulterous, steamy off-screen romance between Taylor and her co-star Richard Burton during the making of Cleopatra and the scandal – and scandalous it truly was back in 1963 – that ensued.

What I didn’t realise at the time was that Cleopatra was black.

I mean, you don’t get much whiter than Liz Taylor, and while some years have passed since I saw the movie, I distinctly remember Liz being snowy white.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, claims a docudrama, Queen Cleopatra, soon to be released on Netflix.

According to filmmaker Tina Gharavi, Cleopatra was of black African descent, which in a happy coincidence, blends in with the claims by some black Americans that they are descended from an Egyptian civilisation.

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in 1963 film Cleopatra. Picture: Supplied

While Liz was being blackwashed, down in Melbourne long-departed actors Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh were being denounced as homicidal white supremacists for the roles they played in the epic 1939 movie Gone with the Wind and for being partly to blame for the behaviour of the rioters who broke into the Capitol building in Washington.

Gone with the Wind, if you were wondering, is set in the 1860s during the American Civil War.

And you might well ask why 84 years later, anyone would bother trying to depict it as racist, but welcome to 2023, when people make careers out of trawling through history in search of damning indictments of white society.

American author Sarah Churchwell, heading Down Under to give the Melbourne Writers’ Festival the benefits of her scholarship, says that Gable as Rhett Butler and Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara are “homicidal white supremacists with profoundly fascistic world views,” telling The Australian newspaper that the book on which it is based is about “enslavers busily pretending that slavery doesn’t matter which is pretty much the story of American history”.

Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra. Picture: Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images

So did Margaret Mitchell sit down almost 100 years ago to write a 1037-page defence of slavery or create a fictitious romance novel set in the Deep South of the 19th century, a book that won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction?

Tear down the statues, rewrite the books, ban the movies, stop John Cleese mentioning the war and sanitise our literary heritage lest anyone encounter a word or image with which they might feel uncomfortable or which – horror of horrors – might offend them, and the world will be such a better place.

Meanwhile back in Cairo, the Egyptians were not reacting kindly to the news that their former queen was black with Egyptologist and former Minister for Antiquities Dr Zahi Hawass, denouncing the news as “completely fake.”

“Cleopatra was Greek, meaning that she was light-skinned, not black,” he fumed, accusing Netflix of “spreading false and deceptive facts that the origin of Egyptian civilisation is black” while other prominent Egyptians accused the streaming service of “Afrocentric thinking.”

Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable in 1939 film Gone with the Wind.

Gharvi shot back, asking why shouldn’t Cleopatra be a “melanated sister.”

Possibly because being Greek, she was significantly lacking in melanin.

“We need to have a conversation with ourselves about our colourism and the internalised white supremacy that Hollywood has indoctrinated us with,” she said.

Little did Liz Taylor realise as she rode into Rome before slipping away for a shagathon with Richard Burton that she was promoting white supremacism.

Adele James, the appropriately melanated actor who plays Cleopatra in the docudrama, has reacted to criticism of a black Cleopatra by telling people that “if you don’t like the casting, don’t watch the show”.

US author Sarah Churchwell, author of The Wrath to Come: Gone with the Wind and the Lies America Tells.

I can’t imagine that Netflix was particularly happy with Ms James for so speaking, but I think it’s excellent advice.

The torturous search for grievance grinds on.

Black Americans built the pyramids and should be given the credit for so doing, having been denied it for too long by those dreadful Egyptians, who have been fraudulently claiming all the credit and Mitchell, who died in 1949, was one of the driving forces behind the rioters who broke into the US Capitol building in 2021.

Sounds reasonable to me.

Should the energies consumed in trying to rewrite the past and assign historical blame be directed to creating a brighter future then the world would indeed be a better place.

As for the revisionists, I echo Clark Gable’s sentiments when in the final moments of the film, he says to Leigh: “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.”