A Myth Has More Than Two Feet
Doing battle with a sinus infection, I watched several movies yesterday, and -- warning! -- will watch a couple more tonight. Yesterday, I also watched Elia Kazan's East of Eden. I remember that, in high school, I had a dry affinity for the novel, probably due to the internalized good son / bad son I was quite naturally going through at the time. I was an odd mix of Cal and Aron: not rebellious by deed but rebellious by contentious word, placing my own idealism against that of my parents' and their church. I was never caught red-handed but wagged my red tongue all over the place. Those were my adolescent politics.
Now, in the film, Cal and Aron seem to me to be opposites drawn too academically -- one standing for realism and the other for idealism. I look at Aron (and his father) and think, "Who could hold dear to an idealism that doesn't consider the experiences and needs of those they love?" And then I blink at Cal, wondering, "Who would lay claim to a realism that they've only derived for attending to their own most immediate experiences?" What is more ideal or real?: Love and respect for humankind -- even across social difference -- or love and respect for parent, child, or spouse? Do we really have to choose? Isn't this question kind of like Solomon's with his saw over the belly of the battling mothers' baby?
The story strikes me now, mostly, as a modernist allegory with concerns more relevant to the period that raised them than now. Kazan shakes each boy up and lays their values one against the other, emotionally and ethically sundering poor Abra (Julie Christie), and forcing the audience to make their own valued choices from options maybe over-familiar to us now. This is, of course, Cain and Able. But from scripture to Cold War, I hope we are now more wary when we are told their are only two sons, two possibilities.
Or one parent.
In this viewing, it was the mother (Jo Van Fleet) who caught my attention most. (Maybe I am developing a taste for largely male-driven stories where a strong female supporting character breathes life into the possibility of some third way?) In the scene where she -- un-illusioned business woman, dealing in sanctioned desire -- squares off with her son Cal (James Dean), she speaks bitterly of the purity of her former husband and muses whether he is still above dirtying his hands in the business of making money.
It's Van Fleet's worked-for coolness, her somewhat genderqueered distillation of the film's thematic poles, her measured emotion that pack the punch ... and remind us that survival and rightness must always regard each other.
As does the character of the sheriff (Burl Ives), when he gingerly steps into the German townsman's tiny-picketed yard, stops a mob-in-the-making with a marmish voice, assuring Albrecht that his rose garden will be restored in the name of social decorum, and presses on the audience that the law that governs the many must always attend to the one, the minority.
So much of the brotherly quibble (maybe due to over-exposure) is just rote melodrama to me -- though Dean does wrench so much life into Cal -- in comparison to these smaller roles' darting impact. And the movie -- for being in such a dialectical balance -- strikes me as seriously off-kilter due to its framing: that yawning, yellow-lettered, coastline OVERTURE at the outset with all its fanfare and immobility contrasted to the movie's hastily drawn conclusion leaves me wondering if EofE's theme is something to be borne with the gravity of a slow march or the scamper of tiny, hurried boots.
Still, I suppose such films make history as we now know it. I guess I just prefer looking elsewhere than to the generals and statesmen.