New "East of Eden" Adaptation Tells Cathy's Story

CAUTION: SPOILERS HEREIN

The new "reimagined" Netflix series "East of Eden" from Zoe Kazan tells the extraordinary story from the John Steinbeck novel of Cathy (Florence Pugh), the mother of the James Dean character in the 1955 movie adaptation directed by Zoe's grandfather Elia Kazan. In that film we only know that Cathy has become the madam of a brothel in town. (in an Oscar-winning performance from Jo Van Fleet). Steinbeck reportedly based Cathy on his second wife, who was unfaithful to him, and Dean's character Cal may have been based on Steinbeck's second son, John Steinbeck IV.  

"I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents," begins the chapter were Steinbeck introduces Cathy Ames, adding,"There was a time when a girl like Cathy would have been called possessed by the devil. She would have been exorcised to cast out the evil spirit, and if after many trials that did not work, she would have been burned as a witch for the good of the community." 

Cathy's story is told, beginning at age 10 with her mother finding her partially undressed and lying in a barn with a rope tying her wrists together, and two 14-year-old boys kneeling near her. The boys' defense was that Cathy had orchestrated the event, charging them five cents apiece. 

“She’s haunted by it,” Mrs. Ames told the neighbors. “If she could only talk about it, maybe she would get better. But when I ask her about it—it’s like it came right back to her and she goes into shock again.” She tries to advocate for punishment for the boys, arguing that her daughter couldn't very well have tied her own hands. But Mr. Ames stayed silent, not protecting his daughter. 

The scene has been interpreted as young Cathy being the instigator, but Kazan and Pugh offer the interpretation that Cathy was the victim.  “Her version of safety has been damaged from the moment she was abused," Pugh told Vanity Fair.  "And she told her parents, and her parents didn’t listen. This isn’t someone that understands family life is necessarily a good thing. This child was raped when she was tiny. And her distrust for men, it was ignited then.”

Steinbeck writes, "Cathy grew more lovely all the time. The delicate blooming skin, the golden hair, the wide-set, modest, and yet promising eyes, the little mouth full of sweetness, caught attention and held it....she was so fresh and pretty that people walking turned and looked after her when she had passed." At school, her Latin teacher developed an obsession with her, banging on her family's door one night demanding to speak to Mr. Ames, who refused. The teacher then went home and killed himself. Cathy appears to take the news calmly, spreading a rumor that he was "in some kind of trouble in Boston." 

Soon afterwards, just after her 16th birthday, Cathy refuses to get out of bed one morning and tells her mother she was never going to school again. In bed with her was a book: Alice in Wonderland. Taking off from the bottle labeled "Drink Me" that shrank Alice, Cathy says, “I can get to be so little you can’t even see me....Nobody can find me.”  

She soon engineers her escape from the town, setting her parents' house on fire with them inside, and faking her own death in her father's office, after taking the money from his safe. Attempting to find work as a prostitute, instead the pimp falls in love with her and beats her savagely when she tries to escape. She is rescued by the brothers Charlie and Adam Trask, with Adam nursing her back to health, falling in love with her and marrying her. (Charlie, being shy, visits whorehouses instead of dating women, something Steinbeck explores at some length.)

Seemingly incapable of feeling love, Cathy attempts a knitting-needle abortion and fails, giving birth to twin boys. Unable to handle motherhood, she shoots Adam to escape and finds her way back into prostitution, becoming the madam at a brothel after befriending and then poisoning the old madam (Martha Plimpton). Adam tells his sons Aron and Caleb that their mother has died, but Cal discovers the truth and confronts Cathy, now calling herself Kate. 

After Adam demonstrates to his sons that he loves only Aron, Cal takes Aron to see their mother, causing him to immediately sign up for the military, abandoning his fiancee Abra. If you've seen the James Dean movie, you know the rest, except for what happens to Cathy. 

Cathy is given morphine to recover from her injuries after she is beaten, and she continues using it. After a confrontation with Cal: 

With her bandaged forefinger she dug out a slender chain which hung around her neck and pulled the chain’s burden up from her bodice. On the chain were strung two safe-deposit keys, a gold watch with a fleur-de-lis pin, and a little steel tube with a ring on its top. Very carefully she unscrewed the top from the tube and, spreading her knees, shook out a gelatine capsule. She held the capsule under the light and saw the white crystals inside—six grains of morphine, a good, sure margin. Very gently she eased the capsule into its tube, screwed on the cap, and dropped the chain inside her dress. Cal’s last words had been repeating themselves over and over in her head.

Cathy is shattered by meeting the innocent Aron, and his revulsion at meeting her. Afterwards she goes into a "shame spiral" that takes her back to her childhood: 

Then she remembered. She was a very small girl with a face as lovely and fresh as her son’s face—a very small girl. Most of the time she knew she was smarter and prettier than anyone else. But now and then a lonely fear would fall upon her so that she seemed surrounded by a tree-tall forest of enemies. Then every thought and word and look was aimed to hurt her, and she had no place to run and no place to hide. And she would cry in panic because there was no escape and no sanctuary. Then one day she was reading a book. She could read when she was five years old. She remembered the book—brown, with a silver title, and the cloth was broken and the boards thick. It was Alice in Wonderland. 

Kate moved her hands slowly and lifted her weight a little from her arms. And she could see the drawings—Alice with long straight hair. But it was the bottle which said, “Drink me” that had changed her life. Alice had taught her that. When the forest of her enemies surrounded her she was prepared. In her pocket she had a bottle of sugar water and on its red-framed label she had written, “Drink me.” She would take a sip from the bottle and she would grow smaller and smaller. Let her enemies look for her then! Cathy would be under a leaf or looking out of an anthole, laughing. They couldn’t find her then. No door could close her out and no door could close her in. She could walk upright under a door. And always there was Alice to play with, Alice to love her and trust her. Alice was her friend, always waiting to welcome her to tinyness....

Gingerly, she fished the chain out from her bodice, unscrewed the little tube, and shook the capsule into her hand. She smiled at it. “Eat me,” she said and put the capsule in her mouth. She picked up the tea cup. “Drink me,” she said and swallowed the bitter cold tea. She forced her mind to stay on Alice—so tiny and waiting....

Her eyes closed and a dizzy nausea shook her. She opened her eyes and stared about in terror. The gray room darkened and the cone of light [from a lamp] flowed and rippled like water....And her heart beat solemnly and her breathing slowed as she grew smaller and smaller and then disappeared—and she had never been. 

Kazan's adaptation brings back Alice at Cathy's death scene. She explained that when Cathy is close to death "and she remembers being small and pretending that she could shrink like Alice in Wonderland, to me, when I read that, I see a picture of disassociation," a defense mechanism adopted by many who are abused as children. Disassociation disconnects a person from their memories, and their feelings, making them feel small, distant, or diminished.  The thing that really sticks with Kazan about Cathy, she says, “was her loneliness, and how she, out of a belief that the world is evil and that everyone around her is evil and stupid, has isolated herself to the point that she doesn’t have anyone."

John Steinbeck IV: The Importance of Being Stoned in Vietnam

John Steinbeck IV, the son of the novelist who wrote The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, was drafted into the army in 1965 and served as a war correspondent in Vietnam.  On January 1, 1968, he published an article in The Washingtonian titled, "The Importance of Being Stoned in Vietnam." 

Steinbeck wrote that soldiers were supplied dextro-amphetamine by the army in survival kits given to soldiers in the field, and that pharmacists in the port of Hong Kong, an R&R center, sold "all manner of barbiturates, and other prescriptive drugs, to military personnel without a prescription." Writing that soldiers eschewed incapacitating opium, "a drug for old men in this part of Asia," he added: 

After opium, what remains are the fields and jungles of Southeast Asia, including Vietnam, which for thousands of years have been the natural home of the ever-popular Cannabis sativa, or marijuana. It has a more powerful brother known as hashish or kif or plain hemp. It is basically the same cannabis plant, but it is richer in resins, and thus in intoxicating tars when smoked or eaten. Unlike opium, which is a body drug rather than a mind drug, you can learn to function normally with marijuana. In the southern areas, the best of this plant comes from Cambodia, and the vast majority of “good stuff” comes across the border via the Ho Chi Minh trail, the same route made famous by the Viet Cong—a fairly romantic migration. 

For the most part, the drug is cheaper and easier to find in Vietnam than a package of Lucky Strikes. It might be interesting to find out if the derivation of the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company’s slogan, “I’d walk a mile for a Camel,” might not have come from the revered Arab expression, “A puff of kif in the morning makes a man as strong as a hundred camels in the courtyard.” In any case, marijuana is as easy to find in Vietnam as a Vietnamese national, and you needn’t find one to find the other. 

Steinbeck remarked that "practically no civil or military controls" were used to inhibit the smoking of marijuana, not so much as "a matter of kindness" but for practical reasons. "To enforce a prohibition against smoking the plant would be like trying to prohibit the inhalation of smog in Los Angeles." 

Rest in Power Dolly Parton, Who Joined the Pot Party in "9-5"

Parton in "9-5"

Dolly Parton, who died at age 80 yesterday, managed to project an authentic, down-home womanly image wearing outrageous wigs and fake fingernails, while making jokes like, "It takes a lot of money to look this cheap." 

The fourth of 12 children raised in a one-room cabin in Tennessee, her father Robert Lee was an illiterate tenant farmer and her mother Avie Lee (Owens) sang old Anglo-Celtic ballads and hymns while doing housework. Dolly said she admired a woman in town considered trashy due to the way she dressed, and began emulating her as she began her singing and songwriting career. 

In one of her first hits, "Dumb Blonde" (1967), she sang, "Just because I'm blonde don't think I'm dumb / 'Cause this dumb blonde ain't nobody's fool." She was smart enough to form her own publishing company at age 20, retaining the rights to her own songs. When Elvis Presley's manager demanded The King take half of the publishing profits for recording her song "I Will Always Love You" in 1974, Parton refused (then cried all night). Instead, Whitney Houston made it a monster hit in 1992 and Dolly made $10 million in royalties, investing part of the money in an office complex in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Nashville. 

Tokin' Woman Jane Fonda, who produced the 1980 feminist film "9-5," starring Lily Tomlin and herself, reportedly was looking for a third co-star to broaden the film's appeal when she heard a tape of Dolly singing and decided to make her a movie star. Parton's film debut is a tour-de-force performance in which she sweetly but strongly threatens to turn her lecherous boss Mr. Hart "from a rooster to a hen" with one shot from the gun she carried in her purse. 

In the film, Tomlin's character Violet suggests that her co-workers Judy (Fonda) and Doralee (Parton) smoke a joint together. "Is that one of them marijuana cigarettes?" Doralee asks, offering her home as the setting for their "old-fashioned ladies pot party." Doralee says, "that stuff really don't do much for me" and Judy says she tried it once and "could never figure out what the big deal was." Cut to: the three ladies laughing uproariously (and soon, munching out). 

Sture and Charlotte Johannesson: "Hash Girl" and Galleri Cannabis

Dow Shalt Not Kill! U.S.A - Union of
Stoned Anarchists (Sture Johannesson). 

At the Oakland Museum of CA (OCMA)'s Gallery of California History, I spied an amazing poster featuring an image of LBJ surrounded by corporate logos and phrases and, subtly in the margins, cannabis plants. 

Some research revealed the title of the 1967 poster is "Dow Shalt Not Kill! U.S.A" and it's attributed to the Union of Stoned Anarchists and the Swedish artist Sture Johannesson.   

According to the Oak Tree Review, Johannesson’s psychedelic posters "scandalised the progressive Swedish society of the sixties. His defence of psychotropic substances, used as a critique of State control, provoked censorship in both public and private institutions. For more than twenty years, his poster production served to denounce that the way in which society builds and transmits its patterns of authority is ultimately more hallucinatory than the effects of any drug."

When interviewed by Swedish magazine FIB Aktuellt in 1967, Johannesson "enthusiastically spoke about his use of psychedelics and cannabis. For instance, as he discusses an elaborate marker drawing with the reporters, Johannesson admits he created it under the influence of hashish, LSD and mescaline. 'That’s why it’s so great,' he says of the drawing."

Appropriately enough, the interview took place at “Galleri Cannabis,” an art gallery and studio space in Malmö, Sweden, which Johannesson founded in 1965 with his wife Charlotte Johannesson, also an artist. The gallery "functioned as a meeting point and production house for the self-styled underground." 

What Made the Etruscan Women Smile?

Sarcophagus lid in The Etruscans: From the Heart of Ancient Italy exhibit in SF

The Etruscans, who thrived in Italy between the 9th and 2nd centuries BC before they were slowly conquered by the Romans, invented so-called "Roman" numerals and the famous "Roman" sewers, and pioneered winemaking in Italy, among their many accomplishments and innovations. Wealthy traders, they were among the three main powers in the ancient Mediterranean, along with the Greeks and the Phoenicians. 

Nearly all of their written records were destroyed, but a current exhibit at the Legion of Honor museum in San Francisco tells their story in the form of over 200 amazing Etruscan artifacts from museums around the world, including finely crafted pottery, metal work, and statuary. Household objects like mirrors and vases depict parties or (s)heroic scenes, and both Etruscan women and men are depicted on funeral urns and sarcophagi. 

The Etruscans were people who loved to party, it seems. Banquets were very important to them and banquet scenes are found on painted the walls of their tombs, since they felt death was more a transition than a finality. There's such a thing as the "Etruscan smile," and many of the pieces in the exhibit recorded these, particularly on the women, whose eyes look rather dreamy as they give a kind of knowing Mona Lisa smile. 

"The Odyssey" and The Goddess

Despite its tepid reviews, I did see "The Odyssey" because it seemed like it might have some strong female characters, especially considering the casting. Co-produced by the husband-and-wife team of Emma Thomas (who gets top producing credit) and Christopher Nolan (who wrote the screenplay), it's said to be inspired by a fresh 2017 translation of the Homeric epic by Emily Wilson, the first translation into English by a woman. 

I was hopeful when the Goddess Athena is bestowed as protectress to the warrior Odysseus (Matt Damon) by his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway). Athena, portrayed by Zendaya, briefly visits Odysseus throughout the film. Her best lines came when assuring Damon that gods are not hard for mortals to understand: "Who doesn’t understand thunder? Fire?" Zeus and Poseidon are the gods that seem to have the most effect on the characters. 

In the film, only Odysseus makes it to hang out with the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron) in the Land of the Lotus Eaters, and the lotus flower is rather abused by him, only blunting his memories. (Scholars think the Lotus may have been the psychedelic Egyptian blue lotus, or opium.) The scene in which Circe, played by Samantha Morton, turns Odysseus's men into pigs is inventively portrayed, but gone is the holy moly herb given to Odysseus by Hermes that protects him from Circe's magic potion. Even the Sirens are not seen or heard, only Damon's screaming reaction to them. 

Helen of Troy (Lupita Nyong'o) is demoted to launching only 500 ships by her abusive husband, and half of her face is horribly disfigured. There is no mention of nepenthe, Helen’s drug of forgetting one’s sorrow, which Homer depicts she serves to Telemachus during his search for his missing father Odysseus. Scholars speculate nepenthe was a mixture of opium, mandrake, henbane, belladonna and hashish. In a 2023 profile of Wilson in The New Yorker, Judith Thurman calls the queen "semi-divine Helen, Zeus' daughter," with "a witchy seventh sense, a ventriloquist's voice, and a pharmacy of magic potions." Also absent from the film is Zeus' wife Hera, about whom Wilson says, "Nothing beats Hera, dressing up with super-chic earrings and skin creams to mess with Zeus' plans." 

Bill Maher and Mark Twain: Both Inspired by Cannabis

Before Bill Maher took his summer break from HBO's Real Time, he did his usual "Future Headlines" segment, including one that said, "Bill Maher Turns Prestigious Mark Twain Prize Into Bong." 

The mock headline alluded to the fact that Maher would soon be the well-deserved 27th recipient of comedy's biggest prize, named for the US's most revered political humorist. The awards ceremony at the newly, properly renamed John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in DC is now airing on Netflix. 

Maher has been a longtime champion of marijuana legalization, admitting that he sold it in his youth, and enjoys smoking it, including during his podcast Club Random. 

Comedienne Whitney Cummings lead off the Twain award tribute with lots of snark, and pot jokes. "Bill is loyal a fighter for equality and justice," she intoned. "Day in and day out, he has committed his life to make sure that women, people of color and the disenfranchised all have equal access to the opinion of unmarried, childless white millionaire for only $23/month." (If ABC hadn't cancelled him, his show would still be free to all. It is watchable now on CNN on Saturday nights.)

Maher, Cummings continued, is like that cool stepdad who tells kids, "If you drink, as long as you call me, I'll come pick you up, no questions asked....but I am stoned so it's going to take me a while." 

"Bill embodies the essence of Mark Twain in more ways than you even know," Cummings noted. "Both men: very shrewd investors. Twain put all of his money into new technology including the revolutionary Paige typesetting machine. And Bill just went halfsies on a weed store....with Woody Harrelson" (camera goes to Woody, one of the night's presenters). 

Like Maher, Twain tried his hand at a drug business. After reading William Herdon's Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon: 1841-1852, the young typesetter still calling himself Samuel Clemens was struck by Herndon's description of the coca plant and the effect it had on the Inca people, enabling them to cheerfully work long hours with a suppressed appetite. Twain considered the plant "miraculous" and set out to start importing, talking up the idea with associates and jumping on a boat to New Orleans, hoping to get to South America. That's as far as he got, as he had almost no capital and means to transporting himself to the continent. 

Maher's been making the talk show rounds talking about how cannabis inspires his work, and this seems to be something else he has in common with Twain. 

The San Francisco Chronicle ran an item on September 18, 1865 saying Twain was spotted on the previous day walking up Clay Street under the influence of hasheesh. At the time, concentrated cannabis in tincture or solid form was commonly available in drug stores, such as Richards & Co., which stood at the corner of Clay and Sansome streets and advertised "Hasheesh Candy" in the Chronicle. 

While in San Francisco, Twain met Fitz Hugh Ludlow, well known for writing "Confessions of a Hasheesh Eater," published in 1857. Ludlow suggested that Twain should focus on his humor rather than straight news writing and in October 1865, one month after Twain took his stoned stroll in SF, he wrote to his brother Orion: "I have had a 'call' to literature, of a low order - i.e. humorous. It is nothing to be proud of, but it is my strongest suit." Weeks later, Twain's humorous piece, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" made him nationally known.