Elia Kazan's East of Eden Scott Dill

An Image of Social Character: Elia Kazan’s East of Eden Scott Dill In a letter written just before the release of Elia Kazan’s East of Eden (1955), John Steinbeck warmly praises the adaptation of his 1952 best-selling novel, claiming “it’s a real good picture . It might be one of the best films I ever saw” (Benson 773). The commendation has its own humility. Steinbeck includes the speculation that his own absence from the film contributed to its success. He writes, “I didn’t have anything to do with it. Maybe that’s why.” Kazan’s East of Eden significantly departs from the structure and symbolism of Steinbeck’s generation-spanning novel. The change is in part due to Kazan’s use of Paul Osborne to write the screenplay instead of Steinbeck. Kazan and Steinbeck had previously worked together on Viva Zapata! (1952), were still good friends, and Kazan had to “ask him as gently and tactfully as I could if I could fool around” with the novel (Young 197). Kazan, who thought Viva Zapata! too “diffuse,” agreed with Osborne’s suggestion to limit the script to the last third of the novel. This decision became the focal point of the adaptation, resulting in a film ironically immersed in some of the changing social mores disdainfully spurned by the novel. Where Steinbeck’s novel champions individual responsibility, Kazan’s film attacks the hypocrisy of narrowly individualistic morality. While both the film and the book celebrate the individual’s freedom to choose good over evil—leaving little to subtle suggestion—Kazan’s film more thoroughly expresses the moral temper of midcentury America. Kazan meant the film to be “an attack on the puritanical point of view,” a hypocritical morality Kazan associated with his own father’s continual disapproval (197). What he means by “puritanical” here, however, is only partly personal; more broadly it has to do with a shift of moral authority in midcentury America from the individual to the group. The sociologist David Riesman made this generation- defining break famous in his 1950 study, The Lonely Crowd. Riesman attempts to grasp the changing nature of what he calls “social character,” the combination of morality and mores that maintain a given society. His oft repeated distinction between “inner-directed” and “other-directed” individuals marks an epochal shift in how 168 Scott Dill Americans perceive their social relations. According to Riesman, inner-directed individuals look to a religious tradition or set of strictly internalized guidelines; other-directed individuals internalize a capacity for discerning others’ expectations, whether one’s peers or experts. Inner-directed societies effect their cohesion through guilt; other-directed societies, through anxiety. The powerful allure of Kazan’s East of Eden has in part to do with how it formally captures precisely this account of social character. While the film captures a specific contemporary concern, its ability to do so is largely due to Kazan’s use of the medium and genre. East of Eden is a study in the image of social character; but it is also a study in the social character of film’s images. Kazan’s formal decisions as director, the perceived shift in the nature of social relations during the fifties, and the generic differences between an allegorical novel and a film melodrama, contribute to create a film that neither fails nor exceeds the novel, but seems to elude it altogether—perhaps the true source of Steinbeck’s praise. From Isolation to Comprehension The film opens with the teenage Caleb Trask (James Dean) pursing his mother Kate (Jo Van Fleet) down the streets of Monterey, some twenty miles from his own home in Salinas. The story focuses on Cal’s struggle to distance himself from his mother’s moral failures (she runs one of Monterey’s brothels) and to embrace the bourgeois successes of his bright-eyed, hardworking brother Aron (Richard Davelos), his genial if wooden father (Raymond Massey), and Aron’s light-hearted but finally empathetic girlfriend Abra (Julie Harris). Cal attempts to prove his goodness by privately undertaking to earn back the money his father lost in an ill-fated business venture: Adam Trask’s attempt to send refrigerated lettuce east ends disastrously. But Adam rejects the money Cal gives him, asking him why he can’t give a gift more like his brother Aron does—an engagement announcement. Cal responds to this rejection by revealing to Aron his mother’s identity, causing the previously anti-war but now broken blue-eyed-boy to enlist. Adam collapses as Aron’s train leaves and the film ends with Abra—the only one who seeks to understand Cal— effecting reconciliation between Adam and his heretofore unlovable son..

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