{"id":255,"date":"2024-08-14T18:46:37","date_gmt":"2024-08-14T22:46:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/ten-images-fall-2024\/?page_id=255"},"modified":"2024-08-14T18:46:38","modified_gmt":"2024-08-14T22:46:38","slug":"what-ethan-hawkes-wildcat-gets-right-about-flannery-oconnor","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/ten-images-fall-2024\/what-ethan-hawkes-wildcat-gets-right-about-flannery-oconnor\/","title":{"rendered":"What Ethan Hawke\u2019s \u2018Wildcat\u2019 Gets Right About Flannery O\u2019Connor"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Those familiar with her menagerie of grotesques, her views of Southern society, her tortured faith and inner contradictions will get what his film is doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"In
Maya Hawke as Flannery O\u2019Connor in \u201cWildcat,\u201d which blends the story of the author\u2019s life with dramatizations of her work.Credit\u2026Good Country Pictures<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Alissa<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

By Alissa Wilkinson<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

May 11, 2024<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nobody\u2019s ever really known what to do with Mary Flannery O\u2019Connor. They didn\u2019t know when she was alive, and they haven\u2019t known since she died in 1964, at 39, after years of battling through lupus to write her nervy, weird stories about Southerners, sin, religion and the God to whom she prayed so fervently. Her mother, Regina, with whom O\u2019Connor lived for the last third of her life in Milledgeville, Ga., once asked her daughter\u2019s publisher, Robert Giroux, if he couldn\u2019t \u201cget Flannery to write about nice people.\u201d He couldn\u2019t. Not that he would try.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"In
O\u2019Connor in 1959 on the steps of her home in Milledgeville, Ga. She\u2019s a patron saint to writers who explore the fault lines between religion and belief, transgression and salvation. Credit\u2026Floyd Edwin Jillson\/ Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Associated Press<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The screen adaptations of O\u2019Connor\u2019s work have not quite captured her essence either, though some attempts have been more successful than others. A telling instance comes in \u201cThe Life You Save<\/a>,\u201d a 1957 TV adaptation of her short story \u201cThe Life You Save May Be Your Own,\u201d starring Gene Kelly in his first small-screen role. He plays Tom T. Shiftlet, a one-armed vagrant who talks a woman into taking him on as her handyman, then marries her mute, deaf daughter, Lucynell. Tom and Lucynell drive off toward their honeymoon and then, at a diner, as Lucynell naps on the counter, Tom makes his getaway. In the story, Tom picks up a hitchhiker, who insults him before leaping out of the car, and Tom just keeps driving away. In the TV version, however \u2014 presumably to avoid offending viewers\u2019 delicate sensibilities \u2014 Tom has a change of heart, returning to the diner to retrieve Lucynell after all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That kind of moment would never have made it into an O\u2019Connor story. She saw the episode, and \u201cthe best I can say for it is that conceivably it could have been worse,\u201d she said. \u201cJust conceivably.\u201d (It paid for a new refrigerator for her and Regina.) She was not interested in writing tales of cheap redemption, or those that dramatize a change of heart that brings about a pasted-on happy ending, even if they\u2019d have sold a lot better. Her stories are full of darker things, the \u201caction of grace in territory held largely by the devil,\u201d as she put it. A traveling Bible salesman steals a dour intellectual woman\u2019s false leg. A young man berates his mother for her backward views on race until she has a stroke. A family on the way to a vacation is murdered by a roving serial killer. A pious woman beats the hell out of her reprobate husband after he gets a giant tattoo of Jesus on his back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWise Blood<\/a>,\u201d John Huston\u2019s 1979 adaptation of O\u2019Connor\u2019s 1952 novel of the same name, comes much closer to her uncomfortable tales of uncomfortable grace. The book was adapted by Benedict and Michael Fitzgerald, sons of Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, close friends of O\u2019Connor (she lived with them for a while, and they edited \u201cMystery and Manners,\u201d her 1969 collection of lectures and essays). \u201cWise Blood\u201d is the story of a somewhat unhinged veteran named Hazel Motes (Brad Dourif), the grandson of a traveling preacher, who returns to his Tennessee home and tries to spread an antireligious gospel, only to discover he can\u2019t quite get away from God. The Fitzgeralds chose Huston to direct in part because he, like Motes, was an avowed atheist, and they thought that\u2019s what O\u2019Connor would have wanted: a director who wasn\u2019t afraid to skewer the pieties of her native South. But on the last day of shooting, Huston turned to Benedict Fitzgerald and said, \u201cI\u2019ve been had.\u201d He realized he hadn\u2019t managed to tell an atheist\u2019s story at all. He\u2019d told O\u2019Connor\u2019s story, and that meant it was soaked in hideous divine grace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"In
Brad Dourif as a somewhat unhinged veteran trying to spread an antireligious gospel in \u201cWise Blood.\u201dCredit\u2026Anthea Film<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

What none of these capture is the author herself, which is the task that Ethan Hawke\u2019s new film, \u201cWildcat,<\/a>\u201d takes on. The result is not entirely satisfactory, at least as a stand-alone film; to borrow the form of a cinephile joke, \u201cWildcat\u201d is for O\u2019Connor fans, not biopic critics. That\u2019s not to say it\u2019s destined for the dustbin \u2014 this critic, anyhow, liked it very much. But if you\u2019re not steeped in O\u2019Connor\u2019s life and work already, \u201cWildcat\u201d is not all that accessible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But to my eye, \u201cWildcat\u201d gets O\u2019Connor just about right. She\u2019s hardly an obscure author, but her peculiar combination of fervent faith, unsentimental satire and flair for the bizarre have made her a patron saint to many writers who explore the fault lines between religion and belief, transgression and salvation. Hawke\u2019s film gets this in spades, spotlighting text drawn from her prayer journals<\/a> (published in 2013) and quips that are, among her devotees, famous and repeatable. For instance, during a dinner at the writer Mary McCarthy\u2019s house, O\u2019Connor memorably declared that if the Eucharist was \u201cjust a symbol, to hell with it.\u201d (The movie places this at a different dinner party, in a different city, but the gist is the same.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The O\u2019Connor of \u201cWildcat\u201d \u2014 played by Maya Hawke, Ethan Hawke\u2019s daughter, who became obsessed with O\u2019Connor while looking for Juilliard audition material \u2014 is prickly, funny, and also afraid of the cosmic tug of war between being a great writer and loving God sufficiently. It\u2019s all exacerbated by her physical pain from lupus, the disease that killed her father, and her emotional pain at being back in Georgia, back with her mother, back among people whom she views as having replaced true Christian faith with propriety, niceness and the mandate to uphold social norms. (O\u2019Connor\u2019s views on race are complex and unsatisfactory; from her stories you\u2019d think she was progressive, but her own letters tell another story<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Ethan
Ethan and Maya Hawke on the set of \u201cWildcat.\u201d Credit\u2026Steve Squall\/Oscilloscope Laboratories, via Associated Press<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The way \u201cWildcat\u201d tackles this is vaguely reminiscent of \u201cShort Cuts,\u201d<\/a> Robert Altman\u2019s 1993 film that placed various Raymond Carver stories in the same universe, with characters crossing over from one story to the next. In \u201cWildcat,\u201d Hawke and Laura Linney, who plays Regina in the movie\u2019s main narrative, reappear in dramatizations of several of O\u2019Connor\u2019s best-known short stories, which crop up like dreams in her subconscious. The movie posits that each story wasn\u2019t so much a plot drawn from O\u2019Connor\u2019s life as a sliver of light, dancing on a wall, a refraction of whatever vexed or amused or disgusted her in the world. They are sometimes caricatures \u2014 as O\u2019Connor wrote, \u201cto the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.\u201d But they\u2019re also her active mind\u2019s way of processing, and reproducing, what she senses about the world. No wonder they were disconcerting to her readers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I finished college and, for the first time, was able to freely choose my own reading material quite apart from the demands of school, I picked up the thick volume of O\u2019Connor\u2019s complete stories, edited and published by Giroux. (I would heartily recommend it, but not perhaps to a burned-out recent graduate looking for a break.) In the years since I\u2019ve often found myself sitting under the wisdom of O\u2019Connor, and in particular her ideas about the function of storytelling in our age. Somehow her ideas in \u201cMystery and Manners\u201d feel even more urgent in our time, when fiction is often assigned a moralizing, instructive role, and readers are often obsessed with finding \u201crelatable\u201d characters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"In
\u201cWildcat\u201d portrays O\u2019Connor as prickly, funny, and also afraid of the cosmic tug of war between being a great writer and loving God sufficiently. Credit\u2026Good Country Pictures<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

One of her sentiments has stuck with me as a rubric for watching and thinking about movies, which is what I spend most of my professional life doing. She wrote that to understand good fiction requires \u201cthe kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.\u201d The same idea cropped up over and over in her work: that an artist\u2019s job \u2014 particularly for the artist who believes in a world beyond what\u2019s seen \u2014 was to filter truth through the wild confusion of life, to tell things as she saw them but give the enigma of being a human a wide berth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWildcat\u201d grabs all of that and molds it into a slice of O\u2019Connor\u2019s life. Its central scene isn\u2019t from her writing at all. It\u2019s when she\u2019s bedridden with lupus and asks for a visit from a priest (played by Liam Neeson). The priest at first offers her pleasantries and aphorisms about dealing with suffering, but after listening to her agony, his affect changes. He, as she does, understands the pain of trying to see his way through the fog of life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She begs for reassurance that it\u2019s good to pursue her writing and that God also cares for her. \u201cIs your writing honest?\u201d the priest asks her. \u201cIs your conscience clear?\u201d When she nods, he continues. \u201cThen the rest,\u201d he says, \u201cis God\u2019s business.\u201d It seems to be just what she needs to hear. There\u2019s no easy way to deal with O\u2019Connor\u2019s work and life, its messiness and weirdness and discomfort, and even a movie like \u201cWildcat,\u201d with its grasp of its subject, can only go so far. But O\u2019Connor, at least, knew exactly what she was doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alissa Wilkinson<\/a> is a Times movie critic. She\u2019s been writing about movies since 2005. More about Alissa Wilkinson<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Those familiar with her menagerie of grotesques, her views of Southern society, her tortured faith and inner contradictions will get what his film is doing. By Alissa Wilkinson May 11, 2024 Nobody\u2019s ever really known what to do with Mary Flannery O\u2019Connor. They didn\u2019t know when she was alive, and they haven\u2019t known since she died … Continue reading What Ethan Hawke\u2019s \u2018Wildcat\u2019 Gets Right About Flannery O\u2019Connor<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":114,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-255","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/ten-images-fall-2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/ten-images-fall-2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/ten-images-fall-2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/ten-images-fall-2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/114"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/ten-images-fall-2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=255"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/ten-images-fall-2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/255\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":256,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/ten-images-fall-2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/255\/revisions\/256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/ten-images-fall-2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}