Golden Boy
Odets wrote Golden Boy during a demoralizing stint in Hollywood, where–like many of his fellow Group members–he’d moved, hoping to create a celluloid “folk theater.” Instead he discovered that his artistry was coveted to produce marketable, formulaic scripts. Suddenly on the front lines of the battle between art and commerce, Odets reimagined his struggle in a fictional counterpart: skinny, cockeyed, monstrously ambitious amateur boxer Joe Bonaparte, who grew up feeling like a freak because of his immigrant family’s poverty, his crooked eyes, and his devotion to the violin. Music, he explains, is his only solace in a world that makes him feel like an outcast. But in our fiercely competitive society, which prizes material success above all else, he foresees nothing but humiliation as a struggling musician. So he bullies his way into the boxing ring, hell-bent on beating his sensitive self into submission and earning a fortune in the process. Joe is the embodiment of the American dream turned against itself.
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This crosscut transition also creates a critical psychological pressure: things change before anyone’s had a chance to breathe. That kind of urgency makes Joe’s headlong rush to self-destruction feel credible. If he has a fatal flaw, it’s his mad desire for speed: he’s desperate to outrun his own humiliating life. Tellingly, he fetishizes the automobiles speeding by on the city streets. “Those cars are poison in my blood,” he tells Lorna in the park one evening. “Speed, speed, everything is speed–nobody gets me!”
