Netflix series “East of Eden”: Steinbeck’s family opus in woke

71 years ago, James Dean became an acting superstar. In the Hollywood film “East of Eden” he played Caleb “Cal” Trask, who delivers one disappointment after another for his strict father. Zoe Kazan, the granddaughter of the then director Elias Kazan, has now filmed the material again as a series for Netflix called “East of Eden”.

In the USA, alarm bells immediately went off among conservatives that Netflix could once again "wokify" a classic, as happened recently with Ronald Reagan's alleged favorite series "Our Little Farm", which suddenly took on a racist and socially critical tinge. The literary source for “East of Eden”, the novel of the same name by John Steinbeck, is one of the most widely read books of the 20th century in the USA.

While the film with James Dean only adapted the last third of the novel, the Netflix seven-parter adapts the entire book and places Cathy (Florence Pugh), Caleb's mother, at the center of the plot, who only had a supporting role in the 50s film. By the way, the young Caleb is played by the little-known Joseph Zada, who can be seen in the cinema in November as the leading actor in the new “Hunger Games” film.

The work, which is peppered with Bible references and is an American Cain and Abel story set on the threshold of the 19th and 20th centuries and tells of different generations of brothers arguing with each other and punishing fathers, seems a little out of time today. That may be the reason why Zoe Kazan focuses primarily on Cathy's story.

She is the toxic, manipulative, poison-mixing evildoer like in the novel, who shoots her husband and leaves the children. But the Netflix series emphasizes the patriarchal violence that Cathy endures and fights against. From the abuse suffered as a child to the almost murderous brutality of a lover to the all-consuming care of her moral husband Adam, Caleb's father.

The Netflix series stages this as a star-studded, visually stunning, but sometimes almost aseptic opus and seems to want to ride the wave of success of similar family series such as “Yellowstone”, “1883” or “1923”.

Anyone looking for the James Dean classic in the series is likely to be disappointed, but in return they are treated to an elaborate and well-crafted literary adaptation that spreads out a family panorama over several decades from Connecticut to California.

The character of the philosophizing Chinese employee Lee (Hoon Lee), who is so central to the novel and fills the social gap left by his runaway mother in Caleb's family, did not appear in the Hollywood film of the 1950s, but is given a lot of space in the series, including a storyline about anti-Chinese racism.

Caleb's father's military career in the late 19th century is summarized in a few brief scenes and suggests a traumatizing massacre of the indigenous population. This almost counteracts John Steinbeck's novel, which has an infamous racist paragraph about indigenous people. Netflix just can’t stop “wokifying” it completely.