Happy Valley (2014; Directed by Amir Bar-Lev)

On a football field in the middle of a stadium filled with 100,000 spectators, men kneel as they are lead in prayer. It is moments before the start of a historic NCAA football game at Pennsylvania State University in State College, Pennsylvania, the first Nittany Lions home game in nearly half a century not to be coached by the legendary secular saint of the college game and the local pope of the symbolic diocese of football fanatics, Joe Paterno. With the university reeling from child molestation charges levelled against his longtime assistant coach Jerry Sandusky, Paterno was judged complicit in the enabling of Sandusky’s crimes (or at least deficient in their detection and prevention) and removed from his longtime post amid a national media firestorm that shook the Penn State faithful’s communal self-conceptions to their very core.

But nothing may stop the onward march of the inexorable mass ritual of college football. One might as well cancel a Penn State home game as brazenly burn a medieval town’s cathedral to the ground: the complete apocalypse of the local infrastructure of collective meaning in either case would be entirely equivalent. And so the game is held against rival Nebraska, with overt attempts to render the occasion as a popular healing exercise highly conspicuous, a transparent thrust at turning the page from a feeling of mass shock and shame for a stadium full of acolytes.

Thus, at this most American intersection of violent athletics and faith (football as religion, religion as football, both so mutually miscegenated as to be genetically indistinguishable from each other) as the locus of collective identity, players from the Penn State and Nebraska teams cluster into a prayer huddle. The congregation leader is Nebraska assistant coach Ron Brown, whom we are informed is a radical Christian conservative with publically-expressed anti-gay views. Demonstrating his evangelical preaching tendencies, Brown tells the gladiators arrayed around him that in front of TVs across the nation, young boys gaze on, enraptured. He says that these impressionable boys want to know what manhood looks like, and they’re observing a fine example of it at that moment.

In Amir Bar-Lev’s remarkable documentary film Happy Valley, Brown’s framing of this seminal event in the history of the community’s and even of the nation’s understanding of the nature of masculinity takes on a depth and breadth that he could not have fathomed when he uttered it as a manly, rah-rah subcultural rallying cry on the field of Beaver Stadium in the fall of 2011. Happy Valley is profoundly about what manhood looks like in contemporary America, and it’s not a remotely flattering portrait. It’s a document of the consequences of unchecked patriarchal authority in an isolated social and cultural system, of the sublimated aggression and popular anger inherent to college football culture, and of the damaging, sociopathic perversions that those men in positions of power in such a structure can carry out under its protections.

Bar-Lev has been involved in some notable social-issues documentaries, including as co-producer on the slice-of-life Hurricane Katrina narrative Trouble the Water and as director of The Tillman Story, but Happy Valley is his most fully-formed and layered statement as a documentarian. His camera catches the discomfort of the intractable social conflicts that stem from the scandal, such as a protestor holding a sign denouncing Paterno’s failure to decisively act to end Sandusky’s crimes when they were brought to this attention next to Paterno’s on-campus statue. He gets into tense confrontations with fans and tourists taking their picture next to the likeness of Joe Pa, the incident acting as a narrative preface in the film for the eventual removal of the statue and commemorative site entirely.

Despite the initial strong reaction of the university to the damaging scandal, the campus and the community did not take long to circle the wagons, especially when the levying of heavy sanctions against the university by the NCAA gave them an outside oppressor to feed into an inflated sense of persecution. Happy Valley provides a decent account of Sandusky’s crimes, as well as his exposure and eventual conviction. But the film is much more concerned with Joe Paterno and the cult of personality he inspired in State College and its surrounding region, a cult that is shaken but never collapses. It’s a powerful portrait of a community’s almost unconscious labours to quarantine off any lingering sense of guilt rather than confront and reform the system that allowed terrible things to happen, to save the corpus of their collective identity by amputating the sources of shame like gangrenous limbs.

A living saint in his late years not only for his success on the field but for his philanthropy and focus on the academic performance of his players, Joe Paterno was depicted in a mind-bogglingly bathetic college town mural entitled “Inspiration” with a literal halo around his head. The artist, Michael Pilato, paints the halo out shortly after likewise removing Sandusky’s image from the mural, a highly ironic erasure given the complaints made in the film by Paterno’s biographer about the rewriting of history after the NCAA vacated all of Paterno’s wins with Penn State over his last 13 years with the team (a punishment that was later reversed). Paterno died of cancer a mere two months after being removed from his Penn State head coaching job and the shame of the scandal’s revelations, as if he could not live without his team or his community’s adulation.  Bar-Lev shows us vivid instances of that adulation on a mass scale, expressed in the thunderous roar of the stadium crowd, the chanting choruses of rally after rally in support of Paterno, and in the violent rage of the campus riots that followed his dismissal. He also shows Pilato symbolically sealing Paterno’s public redemption by painting a white rose into the late coach’s hand on the State College mural.

Happy Valley is less rosy about Paterno’s legacy. His family pays a quack psychologist a handsome fee to spearhead a public relations campaign to absolve not only Paterno but the entire community of complicity in Sandusky’s serial molestation (to summarize: no one could have known anything because Sandusky was an evil supergenius, of course). But Bar-Lev highlights the evidence in court documents and independent inquiries that Paterno did not merely report word of Sandusky’s misdeeds to his superiors at the university rather than to the police, but highly suggestive references to the coach’s role in discouraging the administrators from bringing in the law. And there is no easy redemption for Sandusky’s adopted son, who went public about his father’s abuse of him in support of the man’s other victims and was ostracized from the family as a result.

Such lingering reminders of shame are easily-spackled cracks in the gleaming facade of a college football culture, however. Traditional conceptions of patriarchal masculinity are destabilized briefly before being carefully shored up. The imperatives of collective identity, which always already support the patriarchal power structure, must be maintained at all costs. Happy Valley offers a compelling portrait of what manhood looks like in the preserved conservative heartland America co-built by men like Joe Paterno and Jerry Sandusky: exploitive of the weak, hagiographic of their exploiters, buttressed by belligerent groupthink and feel-good bromides and by the blazing light of mass sports spectacle. A scrupulously-maintained fantasy that obscures a dark reality.