First light

I was watching the end of The Grapes of Wrath this morning. It reminded me of the real end of the book, when the family has just about washed out, a lot of the characters have died or moved on and the young woman, Rose of Sharon has tried to bury her dead baby. The book ends with her nursing a man who is dying with the breast milk intended for her dead child. The image is arresting and pretty shocking but exemplifies the lengths to which the poor Okies will go to carry on.

The movie ends differently. The Joad family makes it to a camp for transient families operated by the Department of Agriculture. The operator is a government worker in a cardigan sweater, smoking a pipe. He is kindly and altruistic, the image of government goodness you couldn't find in our time. In retrospect it almost seems like something which would only have been possible during the Depression when FDR's New Deal was looked on as the last chance for families who couldn't make it on their own, without government assistance. Kind of an antique concept.

Anyway, the movie ends with the group of transients polices their homeplace and removes a bad element sent in by the Sheriff's Department to cause trouble and give them the opportunity to enter the camp and arrest everyone. After the dance and the altercation, the Tom Joad character, who is introduced as an ex-con at the beginning of the book, decides that he has to leave in order to protect his family.

The movie ends with him saying goodbye to his mother in the early hours of the morning. The sunrise is just a hint on the edge of the scene as Joad walks toward it away from his mother. She lets him go, giving him a kiss which she acknowledges is something the Joads "don't do." The leaving of the family and his mother to walk off into the morning light is symbolic of the choice he has to make in order to protect his family and give them the hope of a new dawn.

So the movie ends as it began with a sunrise. The difference lies in the fact that in the beginning of the movie we see Tom Joad coming home from prison to return to his place in the family. The movie ends with Tom Joad leaving his family at sunrise. The difference ends up being his direction and the difference of his motivation. At the beginning he wants to return to his place as a child, the return of the prodigal; at the end he leaves to act like a man in order to protect his family.