Hollywood Doesn’t Believe In Evil Anymore

I don’t know who decided 2026 was the year we’d destroy every great work of literature with a Hollywood adaptation, but boy, are we in deep.

Most of us have already (thankfully) forgotten about the BDSM atrocity that besieged us in February in the form of “Wuthering Heights,” and while Nolan’s “Odyssey” was a decent standalone film, it did little justice (at least in my view) to Homer’s original creation. The internet’s been abuzz this past week with talk of Greta Gerwig’s anticipated “Narnia” film, zeroing in on the controversial casting choice for Aslan, who will be voiced by Meryl Streep. Based on Ben Shapiro’s recent commentary, we can probably expect another dud.

The latest book-to-movie atrocity comes courtesy of Netflix’s upcoming “East of Eden” miniseries, and before I tell you what they’ve gotten wrong this time, I’d like to quote from Ben Shapiro’s “Narnia” piece:

This is also where we are as a culture… We have moved beyond a pure and innocent love for our basic civilizational principles.

Bingo.

Shapiro correctly identifies the malaise that has plagued our artistic institutions: we’ve abandoned “basic civilizational principles,” the most obvious of which is our belief in traditional religious morality.

As an avid lover of literature, I first read “East of Eden” over 10 years ago in high school, and I can think of no novel other than “The Brothers Karamazov” that had such a profound effect on teenage me. These great works of literature move us not only because they retell familiar biblical stories but because they carry a powerful message about good and evil.

Lucky for us, no one in Hollywood is intelligent enough to approach Dostoyevsky, but they have already done immense damage to “East of Eden” by doing away with the novel’s moral commentary.

The original “Eden” teaches us about the existence of evil in our world, and in Steinbeck’s beloved novel, the embodiment of unadulterated evil is our villain Cathy Ames. Steinbeck does not write her as a morally ambiguous anti-hero; in fact, we first meet Cathy as follows: “I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents.”

Cathy is quite literally a monster from birth.

Throughout the rest of the novel, we witness Cathy perform a series of evil deeds: she becomes sexually promiscuous at the age of 10, and by 16, she burns her parents alive in their house and runs away to a brothel. In a letter to a friend, Steinbeck once wrote that Cathy is “a total representative of Satan.”

In other words, there was never a question of sympathy — Steinbeck explicitly portrays Cathy as the Devil incarnate.

But Hollywood has a different interpretation.

The writers of the upcoming Netflix series want you to “fall in love” with Cathy Ames.

The whole point of East of Eden is that we learn that some things are good, and some things are evil. You know, that’s, like, what happened in Eden…

Our culture’s obsession with doing away with objective morality in our art is going to catch up to us one of these days.

— Liza Libes (@pensandpoison) September 21, 2026

In an 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.”

That would be fine if we weren’t literally told in one of the novel’s early chapters that Cathy is “a monster.”

But Pugh and Kazan want us to “sympathize” with Cathy. In an interview with Good Morning Washington, Kazan defends her choice of making Cathy Ames into a sympathetic character, stating, “I’m just really curious about, like, well, what if we think of her 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.”

It is clear that Hollywood — and, indeed, our culture at large — has a difficult time wrapping its head around the existence of objective morality, and while nuance is necessary for a healthy society, so too is a clear understanding of right and wrong. Evil can and often does exist on a spectrum, but just like any spectrum, that of good and evil has its unequivocal extremes.

Our art was once bold enough to portray its characters in morally unambiguous terms. J.K. Rowling has stated, for one, that Voldemort was inspired by Adolf Hitler — and that the Dark Lord is purely evil because Hitler was. Voldemort, therefore, reminds us that evil lurks among us — and that it is up to us to call it out.

Unfortunately, we have already started to forget these basic truths, abandoning good to side with evil in many cases. This past month, we witnessed mobs of women expressing solidarity for Lindsay Clancy; similarly, on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, 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.

Ben Shapiro often says that “culture is upstream of politics”: our society’s beliefs and values shape our laws and current events. The bowdlerization of “East of Eden” might annoy me more as a literature nerd than it bothers the average American, but we should all be worried.

Morality used to exist for a reason in our art. It helped us tell right from wrong and guided us towards virtue. Since we traded objective morality for moral relativism, our art has suffered, and our society has never been the same.

The reimagining of Cathy Ames as a sympathetic character is therefore 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. It would do us well to regain that moral clarity before it’s too late.

***

Liza Libes is a writer and the founder of Pens and Poison. She holds degrees in English from Columbia University and writes about literature and culture at pensandpoison.org. Follow her on X @pensandpoison.

More from this network:
Domains for Sale · GOTPeople.org · TheDSAPlatform · The Truth About Socialism

Donate to GOTPeople.org