Winter Movies 2013: The Grapes of Wrath

This month we’re taking a look at movies where plants are the movie stars. This week’s movie is The Grapes of Wrath, which premiered in 1940 and was based on John Steinbeck’s novel from 1939. In the movie, Tom Joad, played by Henry Fonda, returns home after a stint in jail to find his family has been evicted from their farm in depression-era Oklahoma, and is packing the car to head for California. The Depression, drought, and Dust Bowl have caused economic hardship. A marketing campaign has painted California as veritable Garden of Eden, and a way out for “Okies.”

The journey to California is filled with peril and death, and on the way the Joad family learns that the “milk and honey” of California has its own perils and hardships. Still, they determine to complete the journey, since there is nothing left for them in Oklahoma. The story is gritty and sobering – a family’s struggle with the land and change, waged against the backdrop of economic hardship and ecological disaster.

I recently watched the first episode of Ken Burn’s documentary The Dust Bowl, and learned more about the man-made ecological disaster of the Dust Bowl. Great expanses of the United States prairies were turned into crop land during the “Great Plow-Up”. The ensuing prosperity came to an end with a decade-long drought, resulting in dust storms of primal proportion. Turns out the prairie ecology required the deep roots of the prairie grass to stabilize the soil of the mid-west. Knowing more about the origins of the Dust Bowl, made the plight of the Joads, and many others like them, all the more gripping. It makes one wonder – could it happen again?