Zoe Kazan’s “East of Eden” makes her intentions for Cathy Ames, deftly personified by Florence Pugh, clearer in one scene than John Steinbeck does over the course of almost 600 pages.
Based on Steinbeck’s 1952 novel, the Netflix limited series devotes its second episode, “Cathy,” to the backstory of the book’s notorious femme fatale and possible Devil incarnate. In a flashback, we see her as cherubic child reading “Alice in Wonderland” in a field. A faceless older boy offers her candy and disappears into the nearby woods; Cathy, intrigued, toddles after him. Though the director Garth Davis doesn’t follow her down the rabbit hole, the sight of a tiny girl disappearing into the brush is unmistakably sinister.
The incident scars Cathy and trails her throughout the series, which traces the entirety of her extraordinary, damned life. Whenever she remembers it, Pugh’s face clouds over with resigned revulsion before re-calcifying into Cathy’s default expression of grim self-possession. The bruise of this childhood memory becomes darker, uglier and angrier every time a man — whether he’s her father, pimp or husband — tries to have his way with her. Her pain embarrasses and enrages her.
Unlike her grandfather Elia Kazan, who directed the film adaptation of “East of Eden” (1955), Zoe Kazan is too fascinated by Cathy’s motivations to let her be two-dimensional. Instead, she digs into Steinbeck’s subtext to excavate an astonishingly human portrait of a traumatized woman committed to self-preservation above all else.
Pugh, also an executive producer, does her part to flesh Cathy out with a performance that is sensational in dramatic moments and heartbreakingly precise in quieter ones. The choice to root Cathy’s ruthlessness in something so human as trauma is a risk, but one both the writer and actress take on with care.
Where Steinbeck’s Cathy Ames is larger than life, Kazan and Pugh’s is familiar and depressingly relevant. You can draw a straight line from their interpretation of Cathy to a modern-day character like Catherine, the sex trafficking victim turned serial killer of “Furious,” the hit Hulu crime drama. Their anger is palpable, their coping mechanisms warped, their sense of self inextricably tied to the damage wreaked by selfish men.
But Cathy and Catherine (played by a riveting Lola Pettigrew) split in their reactions to the destruction they keep causing. Catherine’s lust for revenge weakens with every kill; Cathy, who began her journey to hell by setting fire to her parents’ house with them still in it, only feels more empowered.
For as much empathy as Kazan has for Cathy, she doesn’t shy away from the awful impact of her decisions. Cathy is not the only character in “East of Eden” who had a terrible childhood, but she is the only one who murders her parents, shoots her husband, leaves her children for dead and takes over a brothel by slowly poisoning its motherly madam (a terrific Martha Plimpton). Confronting Cathy only seems to make her more vicious. If anything, contextualizing her malice as a response to sexual trauma — one of the world’s oldest and most common evils — only makes her more terrifying.
Kazan’s take on Steinbeck’s villain has proved contentious. The book is thick with biblical allusions — it is based roughly on the story of Cain and Abel — and Cathy is more traditionally understood as an unholy version of Eve, the original temptress, or even Lilith, Adam’s treacherous first wife in Jewish folklore. For those who read “East of Eden” as strictly allegorical, turning Cathy into a flesh-and-blood person — especially since the novel suggests she was born a “monster” — is practically sacrilegious.
From the start, Steinbeck’s Cathy is more slippery and shocking than Kazan’s. While the series hinges on that eerie sight of the woods swallowing her up, the book’s introduction of Cathy describes a different, more visceral scene: Cathy’s mother finds her daughter in a barn, half-naked and bound, with two older boys. Cathy, seemingly in shock, offers no explanation, but the boys insist she lured them and tied herself up.
Many don’t believe them — but others, including Cathy’s own father, are more skeptical of her than of the boys. Without solid evidence to convict her, the novel’s narrator — not some omniscient authority but a tertiary grandson who frequently second-guesses himself — can only point to the vague queasiness she seems to inspire in people.
Whenever a boy found her alone, he says, he was magnetically attracted to “a force he could neither understand nor overcome.” When a teacher’s fixation on Cathy ends with him dying by suicide, the insinuation is that she pushed him to the brink. When she finally snaps, to devastating ends, the narrator takes it as proof that she was always irredeemable.
What Kazan’s adaptation proposes is that the simpler explanation is the true one: Cathy is the victim of a crime that scars her for life.
Decades later, Cathy’s long-abandoned husband, Adam (Christopher Abbott), finds her at the brothel she now owns. He is floored to realize the woman he once mistook for an angel is actually deeply bitter and won’t — or can’t — see the good in anyone. Caught out, Cathy brags about making men like her schoolteacher do whatever she wants, then notes that “all he wanted was to go to bed with me, a little girl.”
Adam’s response in the novel is that “he must have been very sorry about something” to die by suicide. But in the series, he doesn’t rush to defend the teacher’s honor; instead, he lets the implications of the revelation sink in. After years of confusion about her wretched actions, he can finally see their rotting foundations.
Kazan didn’t invent Cathy’s inability to shake off the pain of her past when taking such scenes from the page to the screen. She just moved it from the margins to the center, where it is impossible to ignore.
The viewer, like Adam, can then decide if Cathy deserves any sympathy — but it doesn’t particularly matter. The greatest achievement of Kazan’s “East of Eden” is that its audience doesn’t have to sympathize with Cathy Ames to understand her.
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