Cathy Ames Is Evil. That’s the Point.

Netflix’s East of Eden reveals Hollywood’s growing inability to believe in evil—and our culture’s growing inability to believe in choice.

2026 might just be the year of atrocious book-to-movie adaptations.

Back in February, we were subjected to the revolting BDSM fantasy that, for whatever reason, bore the title “Wuthering Heights” (the film, I assure you, has no relation to Brontë’s monumental Gothic novel of the same name). Several months ago, we all became embroiled in an Internet battle over the merits (or lack thereof) of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey (see my personal stance here). X has already been seething over Greta Gerwig’s anticipated Narnia adaptation, which has apparently cast none other than feminist advocate Meryl Streep as Aslan—AKA the voice of Jesus Christ (the Lewis family is rightfully upset).

But no cinematic assault on classic literature is perhaps as egregious as Netflix’s new adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden.

I first read East of Eden when I was sixteen years old. I had dragged my family out to Boston for the nerdiest reason you could possibly imagine: I wanted to see a plaque on The Anderson Memorial Bridge in Cambridge dedicated to my favorite literary character, Quentin Compson. Unfortunately, however, the plaque had been taken down for renovation that year, and a disheartened teenage Liza would not set eyes on it for another decade (I finally scouted it out last year). But our trip did not go to naught: while in Cambridge, I picked up a copy of Steinbeck’s longest novel, East of Eden, from the Harvard bookstore.

I’ll admit, I had low expectations. I think I gave Of Mice and Men two stars on Goodreads after reading it for the first time during my freshman year of high school, and I was not particularly moved by The Grapes of Wrath (it’s objectively a great work of literature, but I am not a personal believer in the whole “the American Dream is broken” narrative). I didn’t love The Pearl, and I even left Cannery Row unfinished.

I was what you might call an “unlikely Steinbeck fan,” and several chapters into East of Eden, I remained unmoved by the intergenerational saga introducing the Trask family. In fact, I’m positive that sixteen-year-old Liza only kept reading because there was a character named Liza (though I’m sure she pronounces her name differently). I’d also just finished Henry James’s A Portrait of a Lady, so I welcomed Steinbeck’s terse, straightforward sentences after weathering weeks of James’s more meandering prose.

Then, I hit Chapter 8.

I remember exactly where I was that afternoon thirteen years ago. We had just gotten back from a college visit to Tufts and were strolling around Northeastern’s campus following a quick trip to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. We had an hour or so to spare before dinner, and I dashed into a public library to squeeze in some reading.

That was when I met Cathy Ames—and from the moment she pranced onto the page, I couldn’t help but be obsessed.

“I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents.”

What a powerful way to introduce one of literature’s most memorable antagonists.

But what was it about Cathy that made her so demoniacal? After all, when we first meet her, she’s just a baby, then just a kid.

Nevertheless, the narrator tells us that Cathy was “not like other people, never was from birth,” and as I learned more about this uncanny portrait of a subhuman woman, I found myself nodding along to the chapter’s thesis that “just as there are physical monsters,” there are also “mental or psychic monsters” among us. We are told that Cathy is “a liar” who “made people uneasy.” She is “not like other children” yet “could enter no room without causing everyone to turn toward her.”

Cathy Ames was born with a “malformed soul.”

“There was a time,” the narrator continues, “when a girl like Cathy would have been called possessed by the devil.” Indeed, in a letter to a family friend, Steinbeck once wrote that Cathy is supposed to be “representative of Satan.”

That’s no exaggeration—Cathy commits her first act of evil at the ripe age of ten.

It’s a spring morning when her mother finds her in a carriage house alongside two fourteen-year-old boys. There’s a “murmur of voices,” but Cathy isn’t engaged in some innocent game: she’s lying on the floor “naked to the waist” with her “skirts pulled up,” her wrists tied with a “heavy rope.” The boys insist that Cathy had paid them each to be there—and that she had tied her hands herself. Cathy’s mother, of course, is in disbelief—especially because her daughter, the ever-manipulative liar, feigns what her doctor calls “shock” and refuses to talk.

We are never told whom to believe, but the implication is that ten-year-old Cathy has just framed the boys for rape.

Cathy doesn’t stop there, of course. At fourteen, she has an affair with her Latin teacher, whom she quickly drives to suicide, and at sixteen, she burns her parents alive in her own childhood home.

And all over the course of a single chapter.

I stayed up late that night zipping through the next two hundred pages of the novel, captivated by Steinbeck’s depiction of unadulterated evil. With the exception of, perhaps, Othello, I’d never read anything like it. There seemed to be no logical explanation for Cathy’s misdeeds. She was evil because… she wanted to be.

Maybe that was the point.

Indeed, by the time we reach Chapter 24, there is no question not only that Cathy Ames is evil—and that she’s evil simply because she wants to be.

The novel’s most famous chapter introduces us to the Hebrew term timshel—or “Thou mayest”—which summarizes East of Eden’s moving thesis: no matter who you are or where you come from, you have the power to choose good over evil. And that’s exactly how we know that Cathy’s misdeeds are not the result of trauma or suffering but the consequence of personal choice. Cathy chooses evil because she wants to be evil.

Hollywood, however, has a different interpretation.

In a recent interview with The Atlantic, actress Florence Pugh, who portrays Cathy in the new miniseries, states that writer “Zoe [Kazan] wasn’t interested in making [Cathy Ames] just a monster. She was interested in understanding her.” In fact, Pugh wants us to “sympathize and maybe fall in love with [Cathy] a little bit.”

Really? Sympathize with a woman who burns her parents alive in their house—just for fun?

Writer Zoe Kazan seems to think so. In a recent interview with Good Morning Washington, she defended her choice to make Cathy Ames into a sympathetic character in the following terms:

“I’m just really curious about, like, well, what if we think of [Cathy] not as the embodiment of evil but as a person who does really bad things? … And I think we learn more about ourselves if we don’t think about evil people as being that different from us.”

If evil people aren’t that different from Zoe Kazan, then perhaps we can conclude that Zoe Kazan might just be evil.

At the very least, she hasn’t read the book. Earlier in the same interview, she states, “[Steinbeck] is riffing on the story of Adam and Eve and the fall of man.”

Wrong story, honey. East of Eden retells the story of Cain and Abel—not that of Adam and Eve. Steinbeck derives his title, in fact, from Genesis 4:16: “So Cain went out from the Lord’s presence and lived in the land of Nod, east of Eden.”

It seems that no one at Netflix understood or even tried to understand Steinbeck’s fundamental message, but there’s a reason for that. In fact, Kazan gives away the name of the game in another one of her recent interviews:

“I think that Cathy is the most extraordinary character,” she explains. “To see a girl and then a woman who has no care but her own autonomy and gain, who is not doing anything for anyone else’s benefit, it was bracing... I felt, like, re-atomized by it or something.”

In other words, Kazan reinterprets Cathy’s sins in a positive light—and in doing so, she represents the dogma currently at the heart of our artistic institutions: the obliteration of objective morality in our art.

Our art was once bold enough to portray its characters in morally unambiguous terms. Voldemort, for instance, is purely evil—so is Iago, and so, too, is Cathy Ames. But when you create a culture that no longer believes in morality, a character like Lord Voldemort becomes impossible: without objective morality, nothing can be inherently evil. As a result, when evil does dare to exist in our art, it is always either downplayed or tempered by some heart-wrenching backstory.

That is why today, every villain on our screens seems to have a traumatic past. Take a look at the difference, for instance, between the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and the 2005 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory remake. In the 1972 film—and, indeed, in Roald Dahl’s original novel—Willy Wonka was just sinister, and no one sat around wondering why. We didn’t need a trauma story to explain why he chooses to blow up Violet Beauregarde—he just does. Tim Burton’s 2005 reinterpretation, however, gave Wonka a tragic backstory in an attempt to explain why he had ended up that way. The result is a more sympathetic, and, indeed, a less evil antagonist.

In other words, the theory in vogue in the art world is that all evil has a clear origin—and that evil, therefore, can always be excused. The problem with such a mentality is that it obscures the reality that many evils ought to be taken at face value. Try explaining, for one, why Adolf Hitler decided to kill six million people simply for being born a certain way.

You just can’t.

But Hollywood wants to—and it’s not just Hollywood. Our entire society seems to have lost sight of good and evil.

Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro often says that “culture is upstream of politics”: our society’s beliefs and values shape our laws and current events. If we choose to excuse evil in our art, then we begin to excuse evil in our society.

This past month, we witnessed mobs of women expressing solidarity for Lindsay Clancy; similarly, back in 2023, influencers flooded TikTok to “understand” where Osama bin Laden might have been coming from. These events did not spring out of a vacuum—they are the logical culmination of decades of what Gad Saad has called “suicidal empathy,” and it begins with our art.

East of Eden creators want you to “fall in love with Cathy” because as a society, we have stopped believing in personal agency. We excuse Lindsay Clancy on the basis that she was not responsible for her crime. We sympathize with Osama bin Laden because he was simply “driven” by “external events” to orchestrate one of the deadliest terror attacks in human history.

And the moment we start telling ourselves these lies is the moment that our society begins to crumble.

As a literature nerd, I am veritably more annoyed by the bowdlerization of East of Eden than perhaps anyone else on the Internet—and, in fact, I was almost singlehandedly responsible for the “backlash” on X against Zoe Kazan (sorry, not sorry, Zoe)—but Netflix’s new adaptation should worry us all. The reimagining of Cathy Ames as a sympathetic character is not just a case of “the movie got it wrong”—it is a moral catastrophe with repercussions for a society that is quickly losing its grasp on good and evil.

That is why great literature is and always will be one of our society’s most precious artifacts. I have said many times—and I will continue to maintain—that great literature is not defined by a writer’s command of prose or his ability to tell a good story. Great literature must contain a moral vision. And that is why East of Eden is by far Steinbeck’s greatest literary accomplishment. The Grapes of Wrath may observe our society—and it does a damn good job of it—but East of Eden offers a solution to its problems. That is why it is the second greatest novel ever written about the power of personal agency: it reminds us that when faced with evil, we have the power to choose good no matter what we may have gone through in our past.

That power is timshel.

Thou mayest.

Perhaps it is time we remembered what it means.

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