The Steinbeck and Kazan classics are both disgraced.
The new Netflix miniseries East of Eden not only revises the 1952 John Steinbeck novel that is its source; it also challenges the 1955 Elia Kazan movie version. The seven-part show uses a screenplay by Zoe Kazan, granddaughter of the famous Hollywood director. That familial link has been promoted in publicity material, as if to legitimize the rewrite.
This dubious authorial connection only compounds Steinbeck’s questionable original attempt at creating a literary family saga that exploited Christian biblical influence on American history through its secular, post–Civil War parallel of the Cain and Abel story. The Netflix version becomes a different kind of family travesty, one that opposes literary and cinematic canons out of sheer egotistic audacity and cultural depravity.
Zoe Kazan, best known as an indie film actress specializing in the portrayal of freaky waifs (Meek’s Cutoff, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, She Said) interprets Steinbeck to satisfy modern attitudes about sex and gender relations. She prioritizes the character of Cathy (portrayed by British actress Florence Pugh), the epic’s maternal figure who both suffers and practices sexual humiliation. Cathy’s violent, salacious narrative arc establishes the psychodrama that causes turmoil among all the male figures, especially her husband Adam (Christopher Abbott), his half-brother Charles (Mike Faist), and their sons, the fraternal twins Aron (Joe Anders) and Cal (Joseph Zada).
Exchanging mid-20th-century literary and cinematic artistry for Millennial feminist ambition is unsatisfying. East of Eden becomes an extended epic in the decadent style of HBO miniseries. Garth Davis directs the initial episodes, adding Netflix exaggeration and brutality to Cathy’s atrocious ordeals. Zoe Kazan picks up on Steinbeck’s details of Cathy’s experience as a dissatisfied sex object (a proto-feminist, she attempts aborting her baby) who repays her abuse by men by taking ownership of a brothel and becoming a notorious, vengeful madam.
Cathy’s story overshadows Steinbeck’s echoes of Cain and Abel, turning the brotherhood parable into a nightmare of the guilty psyches of men and women who are greedy, selfish, and depraved yet also obsessed with morality. What Steinbeck envisioned as emotionally rich Americana is made sordid. Zoe Kazan debases the depth and emotional excitement in Elia Kazan’s film pageant of American adolescent anguish. The elder Kazan’s movie is famous mostly for adding to the legend of James Dean, who played the soulful, misunderstood Cal — incidentally a romantic for the burgeoning rock-and-roll era.
James Dean embodied the conflicts and contradictions of teenagers, juvenile delinquents, and Beat-movement radicals who represented mid-century rebellion. East of Eden was a prestigious, A-movie elaboration of the straightforward B-movie melodrama in Rebel Without a Cause, and their simultaneous release made Dean a star. But Pugh, an avid second-rater, doesn’t bring star power to Netflix. She’s the new Kate Winslet but not compelling enough to justify Steinbeck’s concept of the ultimate Eve, progenitor of mankind’s jealousy, sin, and gonadal crisis.
To modernize Steinbeck’s conception of Cathy and her sadomasochistic agency, Zoe Kazan forgoes the sympathy that Elia Kazan extended to her, portrayed by Jo Van Fleet as a mysterious figure in black (winning her an Oscar in 1956). It is Zoe Kazan’s feminist confusion that is possibly to blame for inconsistently highlighting Cathy as a sacred monster. Not just a bad wife and mother, she’s also a victim, psychopath, and murderer. This grotesque, flamboyant creature is yet another example of the feminist nervous breakdown that Tammy Bruce identified near the start of the Me Too era.
These repugnant inconsistencies derive from the Netflix style that contravenes the traditional literary and cinematic canon with Millennial narrative gimmicks and sociopolitical trends. Zoe Kazan co-wrote another confused script for the film Wildlife (2018) with her partner Paul Dano, but Carey Mulligan gave it her finest characterization, delineating the tensions of a woman who can’t handle her own sexual contradictions. Back in the Elia Kazan days, making such contradictions vivid is why Brando, Dean, and his East of Eden co-star Julie Harris were relatable and unforgettable. This miniseries remake disgraces that canon.
