East of Eden

I guess my limited series on East of Eden (EE) can end here. Good riddance!

Verdict?

The Book

Steinbeck, a damn fine writer, made his effort to become a great writer with this book. Failed miserably.

He created some very interesting characters, but the story is way overwrought, the psychology is pathetic, his misogyny is blatant, and his contempt for Indigenous people is beyond horrible. He treats the Book of Genesis as if it provided some authoritative insight into universal human character and redemption.

The Netflix Show

Created by Zoe Kazan more than 70 years after the book and the first movie, the Netflix adaptation is her effort to redeem both. Modest success, but it retains much of Steinbeck’s nonsense. And did it have to be so dreadfully boring?

Yes, I guess it did, when you deliberately recreate the character Cathy as a victim of patriarchy—which is understandable—and then give her hours to babble incoherently in an opium-infused haze. Why? To show how much she suffered at the end? To show the effects of patriarchy on strong women? Florence Pugh is a capable actress, but the role would have been too much for anyone.

Besides, who could ever suffer more than Adam, with his constant vacant stare behind those deep black eyes? Did they enhance that effect on purpose? I can’t find out. But if they didn’t, they should have noticed how weird his eyes looked and changed the effect, or perhaps they thought it was so haunting, perfect for the characterization of a man consumed by guilt.

And is it just me, or did they keep getting darker? By the end of the big blessing scene, they are nothing but two black holes.

Why does Adam suffer so? Couldn’t his two stints in military service, turning down a cushy job in D.C., and his years of vagrancy have atoned for his perverse guilt over his father’s favoritism? John (Steinbeck) wanted us to think so, and Zoe doubles down. He was just dreadful to watch and part of the giant sinkhole this adaptation created.

Zoe gave us a short section on the cavalry killing innocent Indigenous women and children—offscreen—but otherwise, it is as if California is just white people's land (WPL), free of those pesky original inhabitants. The overdrawn characters of Adam, Cathy, Cal, and Aron get to express their agency and trauma fully, without any meaningful confrontation with the violence through which white people came to occupy that land.

Meanwhile, Lee’s character is humanized and given a larger role, and it was mostly interesting, if only because the actor is so good. Hoon Lee, no relation to the character, but I’m not talking about the name. He is Korean-American. No good Chinese-American actors around? Still, I wondered what we are to think when Lee's home is in WPL rather than racially divided San Francisco. As much fun as he is to watch, I’m always thinking that he is a prop for the Trask drama to unfold.

Notice the people I haven’t mentioned yet. Charles, played by Mike Faist, is extraordinary in this role, and if I were Zoe, I would have brought him to California to keep things lively. In a way, she did, because she broke up those interminable scenes of Cathy’s breakdown with hallucinations of Charles—the only times those scenes became interesting, if only, sadly, momentarily.

And there’s only so much time, even in a long miniseries, so if you have to expand one role greatly, something has to give, right?

Goodbye, Sam. I suppose a character who needed no rehabilitation is no longer important. By far the best character in the book, he is given only a few scenes in the adaptation. Played by the great Irish actor Ciarán Hinds—who portrays an Irish emigrant, if you’re keeping score—Sam is not only magnificent but a greatly necessary respite from all the white people suffering. If I had been consulted, I would have cut Cathy’s and Adam’s scenes in half and given all that time to Mike Faist and Ciarán Hinds. It’s a crime what they did to the latter.

These are just horrible choices, but they don’t come close to matching Zoe’s decision to keep the lame timshel concept, along with all the other biblical tropes.

By the way, in case accuracy is important to Ms. Kazan, timshol, the Hebrew form in Genesis 4:7, comes from a verb meaning to rule or govern. Its precise grammatical interpretation is contested, and Steinbeck's celebrated thou mayest is hardly the definitive translation he made it out to be. Scholars were questioning Steinbeck's interpretation more than 50 years ago. Guess she didn’t see the irony.

Because in WPL, white people were indeed doing just that—ruling and governing at the expense of Indigenous Californians, whose communities were devastated by displacement, organized violence, killings, and a state-supported bounty system. Hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people had inhabited California before this conquest. Kazan spent six years on this work, yet this history remains almost entirely outside her story.

But why? Thou mayest is not only the flimsiest of ideas on which to base a “great” book, but it is also just so damn Western mythos, especially the American kind. You have free choice. Say what? Yeah, that has been drilled into my brain a thousand times, and the Bible is one big reason for that.

And it made sense when America “ruled” (remember?) the globe in the 1950s. Happy white men were little kings in those days. But today, Zoe? Really? After 45 years of neoliberal adoration of the free-willed, independent, powerful—and private-sector—individual, or should I say consumer, we still need another reminder that we have choice?

The ideologues want us to think so, so they can keep destroying the economy and the ecology. Don’t forget to recycle … and spend! But come on, Zoe, I expected so much more from you.

Ms. Kazan, you do get credit for the last scene, though, for pure comedy. Hoon Lee’s Lee, who is so methodically deliberate in all his other scenes, is suddenly yelling at Adam to bless his son as if a bomb is about to go off.

“30 seconds, MacGruber!” You can almost hear Kristen Wiig screaming from the corner.

MacGruber — Saturday Night Live sketches

“Adam, give Cal your blessing!” Lee yells.

10 seconds, MacGruber!!

“Adam, free him from lifelong guilt!!!”

… tick, tick, tick.

5 seconds!!!

And then, from behind the two black holes in his face, Adam whispers, timmmm-shellllll.

You expect him to die at that point, for drama—or comedy—but the camera pans to Cal’s face, magically relieved of his two episodes of brooding. And not only that, after admitting to causing his brother’s death, he gets his girlfriend, too.

This whole affair, East of Eden, was tainted from the beginning. Steinbeck, striving to be Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy, doesn’t have the goods, so he poaches the Old Testament for gravitas. Although not religious, he stated in interviews that he considered the Cain and Abel story an expression of a psychologically universal characteristic of humanity, something the Bible was warning us about.

No, John, it isn’t.

It is a story embedded in the ancient religious imagination, reflecting a world in which cultivation, pastoralism, settlement, and competing ways of life had acquired enormous significance. Cain, the cultivator, goes on to build a city. Abel, the pastoralist, is dead. The narrative is not a literal history of Civilization's origins, but it can be read against the much longer history of its emergence and the displacement of earlier ways of living.

Steinbeck turns that history into a morality tale about individual choice and redemption. And more than 70 years later, Kazan gives us the same old lesson.

Thou mayest.

As if that message is what we really need today.