One reason why people see the same film in very different ways is that we filter it through our past experiences and hopes for the future. Grapes of Wrath, made in 1940, documents the hardship of one family that can no longer make a living on the depleted soil of Oklahoma and leaves the Dust Bowl for California. The family believes California to be the land of milk and honey. But during the Great Depression jobs are very hard to come by even in California. The family finds it very difficult to put enough food on the table. In this struggle for survival, the family disintegrates in part because individual members think they can survive better individually. I once heard that President Roosevelt through his New Deal polices saved “Capitalism” in the United States. This film offers a portrait of how the Great Depression pushed a large number of American families into poverty and despair, shaking the foundation of America’s belief in inevitable progress. Watching the family pack up all their stuff on one truck and then drive to California constantly brought back to my memories of The West, a documentary about how California, Oregon, and Washington State were first settled a hundred years before the Great Depression.  I noticed that making it across the Rocky Mountains and the dessert with horse and wagon was incomparable harder and more dangerous in 1830 than in 1940 with a motorized truck. I also marveled about the portrayal of the notion of a “family.” I always thought that American immigrants, with the exception of Mafia crime rings, had left behind in Europe the idea of a family as an extended household.  The film romanticizes the American family. It implicitly celebrates the family as the most important social organization in agricultural societies and mourns the loss of strong emotional bonds between blood relatives apparently brought about by industrialization.

This film offers a portrait of how the Great Depression pushed a large number of American families into poverty and despair, shaking the foundation of the America