TMA 691 Online Response #2: How Green Was My Valley & Wollen

The opening and closing scenes of How Green Was My Valley, while not as visually symmetrical as those of The Searchers, present a similar dichotomy of arrival and departure, except in reverse order.  The film begins with a waist-level shot of Huw Brown, now fifty years old, packing his belongings in a shawl as he prepares to leave his valley and never return.  “I am leaving behind me my fifty years of memory,” he muses.  “Memory.  Strange that the mind will forget so much of what only this moment has passed and yet hold clear and bright the memory of what happened years ago, of men and women long since dead.”  The topic of memory returns in the closing scene after the death of Huw’s father: “Men like my father cannot die.  They are with me still, real in memory as they were in flesh, loving and beloved forever.  How green was my valley then.”  A memory montage follows Huw’s narration.  In order, the entire family sits at the dinner table; a young Huw meets and greets his sister-in-law Bronwyn as she goes to the market; his sister Angharad opens a gate leading out to the meadows to see Huw and Mr. Gruffydd walking towards her; Huw and his father walk together up a hill, spanning left to right on the screen, while in the next shot his older brothers enter right and continue left, signaling an inevitable convergence. 

In contrast to the final shot in The Searchers of Ethan Edwards, “[leaving] the house again to return to the desert, to vagrancy” (573), the Morgan clan returns home.  The horizon, visible in both endings, serves different purposes: In The Searchers it completely envelopes Ethan, who becomes smaller and smaller as he walks away from the camera and into the desert’s vast expanse; in How Green Was My Valley the characters divert attention away from the horizon by coming towards the camera.  

The endings of both films emphasize “the master antinomy in Ford’s films…between wilderness and garden” (573).  Wollen explains differences in antinomic presentation thusly: “As we have seen, in the case of Ford, some antinomies are completely reversed.  Instead, there will be a kind of torsion within the permutation group, within the matrix, a kind of exploration of certain possibilities, in which some antinomies are foregrounded, discarded, or even inverted, whereas others remain stable and constant” (575).  The antinomy of wilderness and garden, contorted by the reversal of arrival and departure in The Searchers and How Green Was My Valley, has the same implication in both films: the wilderness is the garden. 

Wilderness is Garden most certainly means something different to the Morgan family than it does to Ethan Edwards.  After all, they are settlers, or at least established in their village; one could even make the case they are natives, this film's version of the Comanche (the Morgan's occupation of this role depends on the civilized/uncivilized antinomy between mine workers and mine owner, townspeople and clergy transplant Mr. Gruffyd; the obvious torsion here is the Morgan's attachment to their land versus the Comanche's transient relationship to land as hunters/gatherers).  Cwn Rhondda is the only place Huw knows before beginning school; it is his home until he leaves at age fifty.  As an adult he associates his childhood in the valley with purity: “So I can close my eyes on my valley as it is today, and it is gone, and I see it as it was when I was a boy.  Green it was and possessed of the plenty of the earth.”  The earlier the memory, the better, for he associates the infiltration of industry with corruption: “In those days, the black slag, the waste of the coal pits, had only begun to cover the side of our hill, not yet enough to mar the countryside nor blacken the beauty of our village, for the colliery had only begun to poke its skinny black fingers through the green.” 

Oppressive and ever looming, the colliery remains the sole means of subsistence for the majority of the valley’s residents.  Trouble begins when a notice is posted announcing a reduction in wages.  Too many men are willing to work for less, which leads to talk of creating a union.  Crucial to this plan is Mr. Gruffydd, the new preacher.  Like Ethan Edwards, Mr. Gruffydd plays the role of the nomad; he is an outsider from the University of Cardiff, come to “conquer the world with truth,” more plough-share than sabre.  In helping the miners unionize, he hopes for them to stay, not to become nomads in a different sense by going to America. 

His entrance also reveals a forbidden love.  In The Searchers, the barrier between Ethan and the woman he loves, or at least used to love, is his brother; in How Green Was My Valley, the barrier between Mr. Gruffydd and Angharad Morgan is his status as clergyman.  In the wilderness/garden overlap, or torsion, Mr. Gruffydd, like the colliery owner Mr. Evans, brings civilization to the people of the valley.  The difference between the two is their method: Mr. Gruffydd hopes to civilize via the Word, Mr. Evans via industrialization.  Mr. Gruffydd's method proves unsuccessful when rumors of a scandalous relationship between Angharad and him surface.   The accusers call a deacons’ meeting to determine a fit punishment for the female party involved.  No one has accused Gruffydd of wrongdoing, which is proof to him that Christ’s teaching have become corrupted, perverted.  He announces his departure: “This is the last time I will talk in this chapel…I am leaving with regret.”  His regret is not an admission of indiscretions but of a sorrow that his stewardship over the people of Cwn Rhondda did not have its intended effect.  Mr. Evans also has a corrupting influence on the people and the village, although one could argue that his intentions were never as altruistic as those of Mr. Gruffydd.  His unstated contribution to the village--providing employment on a large scale--only serves to dispossess Huw's brothers and accelerate their exodus to America.      

Mr. Gruffydd’s presumed exit is never confirmed; as he is readying himself to leave, the emergency horns at the colliery begin to blare, distracting him from his plans.  Whether he stays or goes is not as important as the fate of Huw and the rest of the Morgan family, though, considering How Green Was My Valley opens with Huw and ends with Huw.  The “My” of the title belongs to Huw, who, though just a boy, is the protagonist in a story full of adults.  The placement of nomad onto a supporting character is just another torsion of John Ford, always mindful of “the theme of the quest for the Promised Land, an American re-enactment of the biblical exodus, the journey through the desert to the land of milk and honey, the New Jerusalem” (574).  For Ethan Edwards, never able to stay put in any one place, the Promised Land is the wilderness.  Conversely, for Huw Morgan and his family the Promised Land is a memory of times lost; it is a garden, a virgin land uncorrupted by industrialization's pollutants.

TMA 691 Online Response #1: Studio 60, Garnham, and some Smythe

The pilot episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip begins with the revelation that it is a show about a show.  One of the actors/comedians of the fictional show, also called Studio 60, gives the studio audience an inside view of the set, while the real behind-the-scenes takes place in an office backstage between Jerry, who is in charge of Broadcast Standards and Practices for the National Broadcasting Station, and Studio 60 showrunner, Wes Mendell.  Just minutes before a live airing of Studio 60, Jerry informs Wes that he must cut one of the planned sketches from that night’s episode.  The censoring of sketch 4A, the contents of which are a mystery at this point, sends Wes into a very public tirade.  He interrupts the opening sketch by walking in front of the camera and telling two actors dressed like President Bush and Vice-President Cheney to leave and then invites the television audience to turn the channel, or better yet, “turn off the TV.”  The cameras, however, continue to roll as Wes reveals the source of his frustration: the declining quality of television programming as a result of commercial interests. 

            “This show used to be cutting edge political and social satire, but it’s gotten lobotomized by a candy-ass broadcast network hell-bent on doing nothing that might challenge their audience.”  He continues: “There’s a struggle between art and commerce.  There’s always been a struggle between art and commerce, and now, I’m telling you, art is getting its ass kicked.”  His last condemnation of NBS involves an unflattering comparison: “Pornographers.  It’s not even good pornography.  They’re just this side of snuff films, and friends, that’s what’s next because that’s all that’s left.  And the two things that make them scared gutless of the FCC and every psycho-religious cult that gets positively horny at the very mention of a boycott, this prissy, feckless, off-the-charts, greed-filled whorehouse of a network, this thoroughly unpatriotic, mother”…at which point the cameras cut to the non-diegetic opening credits of Studio 60. 

            Wes’s diatribe reveals the tension between the producers of media, at least in a creative sense, and the distributors.  Studio 60 is one example of NBS’s “free lunch,” which according to Smythe, “must always be subordinated to those of the formal advertisements, because the purpose of mass media is to produce audiences to sell to the advertisers” (38).  Programming takes a backseat to advertising, as evidenced by the reaction among NBS execs dealing with the crisis; their primary concern is which sponsor they have undoubtedly offended.  Perhaps the only NBS employee unfazed by the incident is Jordan McDeere, who has just been named president of the National Broadcasting Station.  Ever opportunistic and blessed with the right connections, she has a contingency plan that will save Studio 60; in fact, she closes a deal that same night to bring back two former Studio 60 employees to run the show—one a writer, the other a director, both of whom became famous after being fired four years earlier. 

            Though they go about it using different methods, both Wes and Jordan both seem interested in upending current imbalances of power.  After all, they both want to run the controversial 4A sketch.  Wes’s “contribution to the general project of overthrowing domination” (Garnham 67) is the more obvious of the two, considering the direct subversiveness of his impromptu television appearance.  He knows what he is doing will bring about his certain dismissal, but in his opinion he is saying what has to be said.  On the other hand, Jordan seems an unusual agent of change as president of NBS; her only apparent superior, Jack Rudolph, tells her so much, implying that the status quo and subsequent retention of sponsors, advertisers, and audience are more important than her constructed story of Matt Albie and Danny Tripp’s return.  She insists the audience will buy her story of bringing back Matt and Danny, two men who “hate [Jack’s] guts,” because NBS is “committed to quality.”  Jack has little reason to doubt Jordan, given her previous accomplishments.  She has made impressive turnarounds everywhere she has been: Atlantic Records, NBC, ABC, etc.  Once Matt and Danny are on board, she gives them permission to do something Wes Mendell could only have dreamed of a week earlier: run sketch 4A, which was actually written by Matt years earlier, titled “Crazy Christians.” 

            When Jordan tells Studio 60’s new showrunners to “open with it next week,” Matt turns to Danny and asks, “What if she’s for real?”  Her sincerity should be called into question, her motives for promoting “Crazy Christians” arguably disingenuous in comparison to Wes’s, whose progressive call to action exposes the reactionary opportunism of Jordan.  While not successful in getting “Crazy Christians” on the air, Wes does successfully make the link between media and political economy, the former subordinate to the latter.  Jordan’s position in a “specific class fraction within the mode of production” (68) gives her power that Wes does not have, such as the ability to show a sketch considered un-airable just a week before, but it also clouds her judgment with regard to media-economy relations.  Like many cultural theorists bent on liberating the masses, Jordan aims to validate the culture, in this case the airing of a biting social satire, rather than attack its economic base.  However, unlike said theorists, her intentions are not liberating but monetary. 

            Studio 60’s pilot ends with the hope that this long-running program, albeit fictional, will regain its relevance from earlier years.  Unfortunately, the fate of the actual Studio 60—its cancellation after one season—dampers much of the positivity one might feel about Jordan McDeere, Matt Albie, and Danny Tripp taking over the fictional show.  The real Studio 60 offers viewers a glimpse of Hollywood’s power structure, including its backroom deals, and while condemnatory of it, the show is still subject to the same powers decried by Wes Mendell.  Studio 60 pushes boundaries in its critique of media’s subservience to money, “but nothing is done about processes of economic development” (70).  Viewed on DVD or a streaming service without commercials, it is easy to imagine the ironic effect of the real commercial break after Wes’s tirade, which must have shown a preview for a program in which “people are having contests to see how much they can be like Donald Trump,” or one in which “people eat worms for money.”  It must have shown an advertisement “courting 12-year-old boys, and not even the smart 12-year-olds.”  That Studio 60 lasted just one season is proof that “no empowerment will mean much unless it is accompanied by a massive shift in control of economic resources” (70).