Why not write something that “loads, a lot, of individuals like?” Regina O’Connor asks her daughter, the author Flannery O’Connor, in the midst of the brand new biopic Wildcat. The same query could be put to the film itself. It’s not a movie that lots of people will like. But unlike the creator’s mother, I mean that as a high compliment. Director and screenwriter Ethan Hawke has made a movie worthy of Flannery O’Connor’s genius.
An epigraph from O’Connor’s essay “The Nature and Aim of Fiction” sums up what Wildcat sets out to do: “I’m all the time irritated by individuals who imply writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality.” Fittingly, quite than depict the author’s life from birth to death, Wildcat uses her fiction to find what’s real, to “get down under things” to the issue of suffering, the constraints of human experience, the need for goodness, the habits of evil, and, all the time present, the eager for God.
The result’s a movie as scandalous as considered one of O’Connor’s short stories—“shocking to the system,” to borrow her words. Her devotees will applaud it; a lot of the audience can be left wondering what just clobbered them.
After that opening epigraph, Wildcat rolls a fake trailer for a Fifties-style horror flick inspired by O’Connor’s story “The Comforts of Home.” (A mother brings home a wayward, orphaned teen who tries to seduce her grown son. The son attempts to kill the teenager, but shoots his own mother as an alternative.) The trailer, starring Laura Linney and Maya Hawke—who also play the roles of Regina and Flannery— sets up expectations for Wildcat’s time period, for its gothic weirdness, and for its mixing of fiction and biography.
Most of the movie’s motion occurs in 1950, the 12 months O’Connor returned home to Milledgeville, Georgia, and was diagnosed with lupus. Fictional stories, threaded throughout the biographical narrative, are drawn from throughout her corpus—from “Good Country People” (a Bible salesman steals a crippled woman’s prosthetic leg) to “Revelation” (Mrs. Ruby Turpin is a warthog from hell capable of getting her virtue burned clean).
Flannery O’Connor desired to be an amazing author and an excellent Catholic, and viewers witness her wrestle with disappointments as she tries to be faithful to each God and vocation. We hear voiceover petitions from her A Prayer Journal, composed while she was a student on the University of Iowa MFA program, with beautiful shots of the young woman as a pilgrim. She confesses to the priest Father Flynn (Liam Neeson) in a scene that mimics her story “The Enduring Chill.” (Asbury Fox returns home to his mother’s farm, sick and debilitated, and is catechized by the local priest.)
When O’Connor attends a graduate school party, she drops a bottle of rum before she arrives. This scene, unlike others within the movie, is drawn from her biography; in reality, her friend Sally Fitzgerald thought this incident was a real-life metaphor for a way “Flannery seemed fated to asceticism.” Wildcat does portray O’Connor as an outcast from what her friend called “frolics”; she simply can’t compromise her zealous Christian faith. Through scenes each real and imagined, the film demonstrates the untiring dedication to truth that made O’Connor perhaps unpopular together with her peers. That zeal also made her the good author (and good Catholic) that she desired to be.
Wildcat also brings O’Connor’s writing to life, defamiliarizing even probably the most well-known of her stories. Take, as an example, the ahistorical treatment of “Parker’s Back” (1964). (This synopsis is an easy one: O. E. Parker has a tattoo of Jesus on his back.) We hear the name of the central figure, “Obadiah Elihue,” within the mouth of an editor at Rinehart Publishing. In reality, the editor had nothing to do with this story’s publication, though he did notoriously resolve to not publish O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood.
Later, O’Connor reads “Parker’s Back” at Iowa in front of Robert “Cal” Lowell (Philip Ettinger). The scene is forged as a primary meeting, though the 2 writers actually met on the artists’ retreat Yaddo in 1948, and Lowell didn’t teach on the university until 1950. But seeing his imagined response intensifies our own understanding of the story. The newly converted poet listens enthralled.
And later, Wildcat riffs on “Parker’s Back” yet again, dramatizing the story on screen. O. E. Parker (Rafael Casal) and his future wife Sarah Ruth (Maya Hawke, again) fall in love. Their marriage as portrayed here is much more believable than on O’Connor’s page—perhaps partly due to that final scene, when Sarah Ruth beats her husband’s back. Reading about Christ’s bleeding face is one thing; seeing it, droplets running over the tattoo ink, is one other. Wildcat doesn’t merely translate words into images; it glosses O’Connor’s stories for us, in order that we are able to reimagine them anew.
Though fans are sometimes tempted to deify O’Connor, Wildcat resists that temptation. It allows us to know the lady behind the artistry: her illness, her feelings for friends, her nuanced relationship together with her mother. It’s one thing to listen to about her deterioration from lupus; it’s one other to see the rash on her face, to observe a young girl inject cortisone shots into her thigh with a needle the scale of her hand.
Because of her sickness, O’Connor needed to forego mild love interests that would have turn out to be something more. Biographers publicized her transient affair with Erik Langkjaer, a traveling textbook salesman from Denmark, who said kissing her was like “kissing a skeleton.” That unlucky description casts O’Connor as lower than flesh and blood. However, Wildcat shows a young woman enamored together with her writing mentor (who seems just as drawn to her). One rightly wonders what might need happened had she been spared the ravages of lupus.
Instead, the dominant relationship in O’Connor’s life was together with her mother, whom she called Regina from the time she was a toddler. Some have characterised Regina as overbearing and suffocating, very like the comic maternal characters in O’Connor’s short stories. Other biographers uplift her as sacrificing every part for Flannery, attempting to support the daughter that she didn’t understand but to whom she was devoted until her death. The reality is probably going a mixture of each, which the film balances well.
In 1957, O’Connor’s short story “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” was made right into a televised play starring tap-dancing sensation Gene Kelly. Everyone in Milledgeville thought that “Regina’s daughter who writes” had finally done something worthwhile (“They feel I actually have arrived finally,” O’Connor wrote) because her uncomfortable stories had been sanitized for public consumption. In a letter to a friend, O’Connor derides the congratulations: “The local city fathers think I’m a credit now to the community. One old lady said, ‘That was a play that actually made me think!’ I didn’t ask her what.”
Clearly, Flannery O’Connor didn’t take any pleasure in growing her audience by making her stories more palatable. (Thankfully she was not alive within the era of platform constructing!) She wrote to not placate lukewarm Christians, but to startle them. Like a Twentieth-century Kierkegaard, she knew the reality was absurd, and subsequently it will have too few adherents. She had a prophetic imagination, which suggests that if she was true to using her talent, she’d have as many fans as Ezekiel or Jeremiah.
Wildcat is loyal to that prophetic gift. If Fifties adaptations of Flannery O’Connor’s work to the screen dishonored their maker, Wildcat accomplishes the alternative. It celebrates a author who was once called “prematurely smug,” but who was, by much suffering that she didn’t deserve, beautifully transfigured.
Jessica Hooten Wilson is the inaugural Seaver College Scholar of Liberal Arts at Pepperdine University and senior fellow at Trinity Forum. She is the creator of several books, most recently Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathen Rage?: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at a Work in Progress.
