Farmland flooded to save Cairo, Illinois, reminded me of the 1960 film, Wild River, a fictional feature film validating the TVA projects along the Tennessee River in the 1930s. To save the town of Cairo from flooding, levees were breached to divert water to Missouri farmland. According to local farmers, an entire season of crops was destroyed by the floodwaters, and damage has been estimated at $100 million. Farmers have filed a class action suit against the Army Corps of Engineers, saying it will be years before their soil can recover from the tsunami of water that hit it.
Set in 1936 Tennessee, during the height of New Deal programs like the TVA, Kazan’s 1960 film, Wild River, had been called “an anomaly—a social-issue film from a major Hollywood studio that refuses to take sides” (Chase 1). Yet critics define that social issue not in terms of the environmental (and economic) reasons behind the TVA project the film highlights but in relation to the class structure called into question by the romance between the northern TVA representative, Chuck Glover (Montgomery Clift) and the rural southern daughter in law, Carole Garth Baldwin (Lee Remick) of the woman Chuck has come down from the North to “relocate,” Ella Garth (Jo Van Fleet), a Southern island landowner. The film, however, highlights the environment and the consequences of environmental catastrophe almost immediately: it opens with black and white documentary footage of flooding along the Tennessee River which, according to the film’s voiceover narration, will be eliminated with the help of TVA projects comprised of a series of dams intended to stop the loss, devastation, and waste caused by the Tennessee River floods.
Yet in Wild River it is the river that is blamed for the devastating flooding, not humans’ overuse of the land. And the federal government, represented by the TVA projects, is the only possible savior for the South. In Wild River, a film shot around 1960 but foregrounding problems and solutions from the mid-1930s, the TVA brings rural poor out of poverty, provides them with housing wired for electricity, and finds jobs for all men, no matter their race. Here the benefits of TVA projects are highlighted, especially in relation to economic and race issues. TVA projects will extend Civil Rights to the oppressed and underprivileged rural Southerners, according to the film’s narrative. Positive consequences of TVA projects rather than human causes for the flooding these projects curtail are the focus of Wild River.
Kazan’s Wild River provides a positive perspective of the TVA and its successes. After providing the documentary black and white footage of people avoiding flood waters, even on their rooftops, the film switches perspective to a color view of the landscape from the window of the plane that is carrying Chuck to the South of the Tennessee River region to take over the local TVA office. Such a contrast suggests that the technologically advanced North must rescue Southerners from not only Tennessee River flooding but also from the stagnant rural life that stifles progress.
Because Wild River looks back on the devastation caused by the flooding of the Tennessee River from a perspective influenced by post-World War II prosperity that has seemingly transformed the Tennessee River Valley, the film establishes several binary oppositions in which Chuck, who represents the TVA and all it stands for, acts as the superior end of each, especially those in which nature and the environment play a role. Ella, Carole’s mother-in-law and the owner of an island that will soon be flooded by waters from a dam, seems most to represent nature and the natural, since she argues that taming the river goes against nature. She refuses to leave her land and clear the way for the river’s dammed waters, an act she sees as unnatural and soul-wrenching. The TVA, on the other hand, is seen as a civilizing influence, giving Southerners the chance for a soul by providing them with electricity, jobs, and economic freedom.
Ironically, however, reliance on such skewed historical memory hides the human reasons behind the flooding and incorrectly defines both nature and the natural as based on private ownership because they are shown from the perspective of Ella’s own misinformed historical memory. The film does underline some of the negative ramifications of a flooding Tennessee River—loss of homes and homeland and of human life—but unlike The River, the film does not explain the reasons for the river’s flooding—humans’ overuse of the land. Instead of demonstrating that the troubles characters like Ella are enduring happened because they exploited nature, Wild River highlights Ella, an old woman living with her family and her Black laborers on a small island, who refuses to leave her land, seemingly to undermine the TVA’s plan to dam the river and flood her island, a plan she sees as going “against nature.”
The film’s narrative resolves in favor of Northern progress, but Ella leaves her island only by force, while waters rise toward her home. And, still the rugged individual, she watches Black workers cut down her large trees as she floats away. On her new home’s front porch, Ella refuses to sit in a rocker, refuses the services of her Black Mammy, and asks Carole to pay off her last debts: “That’s all I owe anybody,” Ella says, just before she dies, alone and unencumbered by obligations. Chuck looks on in dismay as Ella’s island house burns down, but an American flag flies on the boat, as they watch. Only the cemetery where they bury Ella remains above the rising waters. Carole and her children leave Tennessee and the South with Chuck, and they all look down on the island as they fly away, but the film closes on a bird’s eye shot of the dam, with an iris in to highlight its prominence and perhaps suggest that Chuck, or at least other TVA representatives, plan to continue the work of the TVA.
Wild River, then, argues for the benefits the TVA produces: electricity, work for both Blacks and Whites, and revitalization of a failing agrarian economy. But at the same time, because of its reliance on a dimming historical memory, the film fails to show the human reasons behind the flooding and seems to assert that taming the river with dams goes against nature—as Ella proclaims—and creates problems for White Southerners and, perhaps, the lands The Tennessee River floods when the dam is closed. Although the film illustrates that racism serves as an essential cog in the Southern economic ecosystem, it does not offer a viable alternative for slave-like labor. In fact, Chuck uses Blacks to serve his own purposes, just as did Ella and the other propertied Whites. The environmental message here is confused, perhaps as confused as the conflict between farmers and Cairo residents recently established by a breached levee and a flood plain turned into farm land.
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