[COLUMN] Zoe Kazan's East of Eden Asks If We Can Ever Truly Know Our Parents | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Zoe Kazan’s East of Eden, now streaming on Netflix. And Elia Kazan’s East of Eden, which is seventy years old. And John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, an American classic. If you’re looking for a quick recommendation, I had a good time with the miniseries. It does start quite slow; the opening episode is the weakest of the seven. It also squanders Mike Faist. But once it gets moving, it’s very sweet and very sincere and very affecting.

Elia Kazan’s East of Eden is a seismically important movie in the history of Hollywood.

It is generally discussed in the context of its young star. It was one of only three movies made starring James Dean, and the only one of those three to be released during the actor’s lifetime, before he died tragically in a car accident at the age of 24. His performance in East of Eden would go on to garner Dean the first posthumous Oscar nomination for Best Actor. Along with Marlon Brando, James Dean was one of the performers to redefine the craft of screen acting during the 1950s.

East of Eden was also important in the career of Elia Kazan. Kazan was a former New York theatre director who had transitioned into films. He had a long and distinguished career. Today, however, Kazan’s reputation is largely defined by his cooperation with the House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC), where – facing the possibility of being blacklisted – Kazan chose to identify eight alleged communists in Hollywood, destroying lives and careers to preserve his own.

This would remain a source of controversy over the years and decades that followed. When Kazan received a lifetime achievement Oscar nearly half-a-century after his testimony, actors Ed Harris and Amy Madigan pointedly refused to stand or applaud for him. “Yeah, there was no way we were going to do that,” Madigan stated in a recent interview asking about the couple’s decision. “No way.” Some sins can never be forgotten – or forgiven.

While some of those who caved to political pressure felt shame and guilt over their role in destroying the lives and careers of their contemporaries, Kazan would remain defiant about his cooperation with McCarthy’s witch hunt throughout his career. Two days after his testimony, Kazan took out a full-page advertisement in The New York Times explaining his decision and calling on others to follow his example. Even if the industry wanted to forget, Kazan wouldn’t let them.

Although writer Budd Schulberg (who also testified before HUAC) would insist that he did not script it as an allegory, and the first draft was written before either man testified, Kazan insisted that the first film that he completed after testifying, On the Waterfront, was a statement on his decision to name names, writing, “When Brando, at the end, yells, ‘I’m glad what I done - you hear me? - glad what I done!’ that was me saying with identical heat, that I was glad I’d testified as I had.” It remains part of the metatext of that film.

East of Eden was the first film that Kazan made after On the Waterfront, and so the first film that was truly produced in the wake of his testimony to HUAC. So it feels rather interesting that, more than half a century later, another Kazan has returned to offer another adaptation of John Steinbeck’s classic novel. Elia Kazan’s granddaughter Zoe, herself an acclaimed playwright and actor, fell in love with Steinbeck’s novel as a teenager, before she had even seen her grandfather’s adaptation.

“I remember feeling really surprised by how loose an interpretation it is,” she admitted recently to Vanity Fair. The movie covers only a small portion of the text; “some of my favorite characters are not really in it or are really marginalized. It struck me immediately as being a completely different beast than the book.” So there is a sense that Zoe Kazan’s seven-episode streaming adaptation of East of Eden is itself a completely different beast than her grandfather’s earlier screen adaptation.

There is a lot to recommend Zoe Kazan’s readaptation of East of Eden on its own merits. In particular, it is very deliberately and consciously a work of adaptation, an earnest attempt by an artist to engage meaningfully and thoughtfully with a work that they love. It would be too much (and also unfair) to suggest that Kazan has “reimagined” Steinbeck’s original novel, but she has shifted some of the emphasis and focus in interesting ways.

For example, Kazan works very hard to invest two of the novel’s more enigmatic figures with interiority and complexity. The miniseries is very consciously built around Cathy Ames, as played by Florence Pugh, the woman who in many ways serves to heap ruin upon two generations of the Trask family. Pugh is very much the star of East of Eden, and it is very telling that the show’s weakest episode is the premiere, which effectively spends an hour waiting to introduce Cathy.

While the miniseries doesn’t do anything as simple as reinvent Cathy as an antiheroine, it does delve into her psyche and it does grant her both interiority and motivation. “I don’t think anything in her background excuses her behavior,” the younger Kazan told Time about her approach to the character. “At the same time, there’s something really compelling about her insistence on her autonomy and selfishness, especially as a woman.”

The other character who gets a bit more focus in the streaming adaptation is Lee, the Trask family’s Asian American house servant, played by Hoon Lee. Like Cathy, Lee is a character who has a rich and complex inner life in the larger context of a society that cannot tolerate even the idea of that from a person of that background. Critics have, quite rightly, identified Pugh and Lee as “the beating heart” of the streaming miniseries.

However, there is something else stirring in this epic and extended seven-episode miniseries. One of the advantages of this format is that Zoe Kazan can really delve into the generational aspect of Steinbeck’s novel, which follows the Trask family across three generations of familial trauma, of secrets and lies and betrayals passed down like some grim family inheritance, whether acknowledged or not.

One of the central recurring themes across the series is the question of whether a child can ever truly know their parents. This begins as early as the first episode, with Adam (Christopher Abbott) and Charles Trask (Mike Faist) growing up in the shadow of their father Cyrus Trask (Tracy Letts), a Civil War veteran whose reputation and legacy looms large over their lives. Cyrus has lived a long and storied life, having built a career as a representative of various veteran’s causes.

Adam and Charles both spend their childhood trying to measure up to their father. “We’re fortunate being brought up by a hero of the Civil War,” Charles tells Adam. “Father will make us into great soldiers.” However, it turns out that this is all a lie. After Cyrus dies, Charles goes through his father’s things, finding discharge papers for early in the Civil War. Cyrus was seemingly injured at the very start of the conflict, which contradicts all of the stories that he has told about his past glories.

“Well, that would mean that he wasn’t at Gettysburg, or Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, or Richmond or Appomattox,” Charles explains to Adam bitterly, reflecting on this betrayal by a father that he claimed to idolize. “I mean, he wasn’t at any of it. Couldn’t have been.” Charles boils it down to a simple observation: “His whole life was a lie.” And if Cyrus’ entire life was a lie, what does that say about the two boys who grew up idolizing him?

That chain of lies and deception continues to the next generation. Cathy finds her way into the Trask household. She marries Adam and seduces Charles. She gives birth to twins, Cal (Joseph Zada) and Aron (Joe Anders). Adam believes that they are his sons, but the show makes it clear that they could just as easily be Charles’ children. Unable to find any maternal instinct within her, Cathy abandons the family to operate a brothel in the nearby town. Adam tells his children that their mother is dead.

It is another lie, a lie very similar to the lies that Cyrus told Adam. Lee recognizes the danger of this corrupting lie. “There is a beauty in the truth… even if it is a terrible beauty,” Lee warns his employer. “Adam, if you continue to tell your children this lie about their mother, it will infect everything.” However, the truth is too painful. The lie is easier. And so that lie corrupts and taints everything, as first Cal and later Aron discover that not only is their mother alive, but what she is doing.

Performance and perception are strong recurring themes throughout Zoe Kazan’s East of Eden. Lies that are told by people, but also about people. Samuel Hamilton (Ciarán Hinds) asks Lee why the literate and educated “You look in a man's eyes, you see, he expects pidgin and a shuffle, so you speak pidgin and you shuffle,” Lee explains. “English, for me, they don’t listen to, and they don’t understand. Talk Chinese talk, wear Chinese fashion. You savvy?”

Hamilton has some small measure of understanding of this. “I suppose I have my own version,” Hamilton muses. “The merry Irishman. I tell jokes because people expect me to make them laugh.” Lee is quick to correct him, “It isn’t the same.” Lee is correct, but it does speak to the sense in which people are often expected to perform particular roles, and these performances often obscure who they really are – often in ways that cause damage and disruption.

“Sometimes I’m afraid I’m not good enough for him,” confesses Abra (Zoe Phillips), Aron’s girlfriend, to Lee. “In his letters, it’s like he’s not really writing to me. It’s like he made someone up and put my skin on her.” This imagined Abra is “pure. Nothing but pure. Never a bad thing. I’m not like that.” Lee responds, “No one is.” Abra wonders, “What if he sees something in me that isn’t so good? What if I get mad or I smell bad?”

Abra suggests this difficulty that Aron has connecting to her as a person is rooted in his disconnect from his mother. “I think that because Aron never knew his mother he made her up into everything good he could think of and then dumped it all on me,” Abra admits to Lee. This is one of the central themes of Zoe Kazan’s adaptation of East of Eden, and it represents a fundamental point of distinction from her grandfather’s take, which was more tightly focused on the younger generation.

It is impossible to talk about this new adaptation of East of Eden without talking about the relationship between Zoe and her grandfather Elia. This has, understandably, been a point of contention in the past, the shadow that her grandfather’s actions cast over the family. This became a major flashpoint in 2020, when Zoe Kazan starred in an adaptation of The Plot Against America, an alternate history of 1940s America in which the country embraced reactionary fascism.

Kazan fielded a fairly direct question about her grandfather at the Television Critics’ Association panel on the series. While trying not to directly address her grandfather’s choices, she specifically cited East of Eden in her answer, particularly the central thematic concept of ‘timshel’, a word translated as ‘thou mayest.’ “Thou mayest triumph over sin,” Kazan told the assembled critics, “but it’s in the hands of the next generation, that it’s a choice.”

She continued, “I thought a lot about my own choices that I’ve made, the way that I choose to lead my life. I think thou mayest choose a different life. And I think the reason that Steinbeck put that in his book about the foundation of the West in this country is that it’s also about Americans choosing to recognize who they have been — Cain did kill his brother — but also recognize that they may choose a different future for themselves. I think it’s meaningful in the book that it comes out of the mouth of an immigrant.” She was, at the time, in the process of pitching for the adaptation, although the information was not yet public. Two years later, Netflix announced Kazan’s readaptation of her grandfather’s work.

It is impossible to watch Zoe Kazan’s take on East of Eden, an adaptation that is very firmly in conversation with her grandfather’s earlier adaptation, the first film that he completed end-to-end after making the choice that would define him and cast a shadow over his family, without feeling that weight. East of Eden is a work about generational familial trauma and betrayal that has, through adaptation, become a forum for a family navigating its own complex history of trauma and betrayal.

It feels very telling, for example, that Kazan’s East of Eden miniseries devotes its entire first episode to Cyrus Trask, the grandfather of Cal and Aron. In many ways, Cyrus is the family’s original sin. The wealth that he accumulated through his lies becomes something of a gilded cage. Only by the end of the story, when Adam has squandered most of his father’s tainted inheritance on a reckless business venture – one predicated on the idea of freezing and preserving – can the family finally be free.

Central to the resolution of East of Eden is the importance of accepting these complicated legacies. When Cathy dies at the end of East of Eden, Sheriff Quinn (Robert Morgan) visits Adam to inform the property owner of the death of his wife. He asks what Adam wants done with the body of the woman who destroyed his family. “You don’t have to claim her,” Quinn states. “I wouldn’t if I were you.” Adam insists, “I want to. I’ll claim her. I’ll bury her.” There is a sense that families do not get the luxury of deciding who or what they ultimately claim. 

To her credit, Kazan openly acknowledges this. She has largely avoided speaking too directly on the work as a forum through which she is navigating her own relationship to a complicated grandfather, but she concedes that it must be part of the story. “I want people walking away from this talking about themselves, and their own families, and their own histories, and their loves and failures,” she admitted. “You want someone to wrestle with it the way that you wrestled with it.”

If nothing else, East of Eden feels like seven hours of Kazan wrestling with something.