A Meditation on Wildcat in 17 Scenes

Hollywood might make more films like this, if it had been somebody there to shoot it every minute of its life.

The following is not a review of Ethan Hawke’s Wildcat, a film about Flannery O’Connor’s creative, spiritual, and physical struggles as a young writer. But I am happy to say I very much enjoyed the film. Hollywood might make more films like this, if it had been somebody there to shoot it every minute of its life.

Maya Hawke and Laura Linney are remarkable as Flannery O’Connor and her mother, Regina O’Connor, as well as an ensemble of other characters from O’Connor’s short stories. And the supporting cast, the cinematography, editing, music—all terrific. Anybody who is a fan of O’Connor’s work as much as I am, and who is also a Catholic and a writer of comic fiction (in the sense of that term O’Connor uses when she describes Wise Blood as a comic novel in her Author’s Note to the 2^nd edition), cannot help but be much taken by this film.   

Wildcat invites its audience to contemplate themes at the intersection of imagination, creativity, and faith, and here I pay the film the courtesy of accepting its invitation.

The following is a meditation on these themes as they arise in the film as well as in other writings read in light of the film. The following is my “chewing” on Wildcat, in something of the film’s own nonlinear, poetic fashion. If it prompts further meditation on your part, it will have done its work.

Scene 1.

One of the film’s great virtues is that it draws upon O’Connor’s Prayer Journal, written from January 1946 to September 1947 when O’Connor, age 21-22, was a graduate student at the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop. The journal was published in 2013. In the journal O’Connor writes:

“Please help me dear God to be a good writer and to get something else accepted. That is so far from what I deserve, of course, that I am naturally struck with the nerve of it.” The artist struggles to achieve two goods: the perfection of the work and an appreciative audience. O’Connor’s prayer, and her portrayal in the film, puts these goods in their proper order: she wants to be a good writer first. Without excellence of craft, what is the point of a large and appreciative audience?

Scene 2.

But it is hard to dismiss the desire for an appreciative audience. The artist has been given a gift of communication, and communication is meant to be heard. So: is an audience for the artist really a secondary or subordinate good?

An appreciative audience may be what philosophers like to call a “property” of art: a feature that is not named in the definition of the thing’s essence, but flows from that essence in some way. Man’s sense of humor is not named in his definition as a rational animal, yet there is no human being without a sense of humor (despite appearances), because humor flows from rationality. O’Connor would have learned from St. Thomas Aquinas via Jacques Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism, one of her favorite books, that art by definition is recta ratio factibilium, “right reason in things to be made.” But the thing to be made is intrinsically made for an audience. Consequently, an appreciative audience, or at least an audience, may not be purely accidental to art—in the way that making money off a work of art is purely accidental to art. An appreciative audience may be a property of art. Which makes it all the more mysterious, and often a cross, when a given work fails to find its audience. It feels, at least to the artist, as though it is missing part of its essence.   

Scene 3.

“Please help me dear God to be a good writer.” Ambition for the excellence of one’s craft is no vice. Quite the opposite, it is the prime virtue of the artist. It is only when ambition turns to secondary goods, like wealth or fame, that the sparks begin to fly.

Scene 4.

There are vices of the artist also. In the wonderful spiritual direction scene between O’Connor and the priest played by Liam Neeson, in a cameo, O’Connor—in lines drawn from her Prayer Journal—says that she doesn’t want to be clever (in her work), but then immediately confesses that she wants to be clever. This dialogue is inspired by the Prayer Journal, where O’Connor wrestles with the desire to impress: “But I do not mean to be clever although I do mean to be clever on 2nd thought and like to be clever & want to be considered so.”

Miss O’Connor’s writing desk at “Andalusia,” the home outside Milledgeville, Georgia that she shared with her mother for the last 14 years of her life. (Photo courtesy of Mary Hosford) 

Scene 5.

The most arresting aspect of the film is that it attempts to plot relationships between what is going on in O’Connor’s life and spirit and what her imagination was conjuring in her stories. Or, as Barbara Nicolosi puts it in her National Catholic Register review, “The creativity in Wildcat is first in the way Hawke uses O’Connor’s stories themselves as the principal metaphors for her spiritual journey as an artist.”

Thus: in the depiction of O’Connor’s story “Good Country People,” the character of Hulga, a young woman with a wooden leg, a PhD, and a nihilist outlook, can be understood, in part, as O’Connor ruminating on what she might have become as a writer if she had not held on so fiercely to her devotion to the Catholic faith and to the Catholic intellectual tradition.

But I feel I would need to see the film again to ascertain how successful it is, in each case, in showing how the story depicted works as a metaphor for O’Connor’s personal experience.

Scene 6.

Barbara Nicolosi also describes the film as eschewing “the niceties of three-act structure.” Yet Wildcat almost, though not quite, has a three-act structure. Act I: Young woman wants to be a great writer. She goes home for a visit and realizes she is sick. Act II: She gets worse. Struggles to be a great writer in apparently uncongenial surroundings. Act III? But there is no Act III. At a certain point, the story simply stops, as if exhausted. But isn’t that how our meditations so often go? There is not necessarily a climactic moment. The conversation simply ends and we go to credits, exhausted.  

Scene 7.

Still, I don’t believe the film’s poetic manner of storytelling would have been harmed by a third act. Hawke has said, in an interview that he and his daughter Maya did for vulture.com, that he wanted to end the film before O’Connor became a published writer. He was interested in her struggle, not her success. All well and good. And granted, it would have been hard to find the action that would have shown O’Connor’s insight that her greatness was to be forged within the circumstances of her suffering. But I think finding such an action would have made this film an even grander achievement. What O’Connor short story would have served as the right “objective correlative” for this final insight?

 

Scene 8.

We all think we know Miss O’Connor. We Catholic writers. We Catholics who love good writing and the arts. I have noticed that students slip into calling her by her first name. At first, I thought it was because they were mistaking her first name for her surname. But no. I realized they simply found it natural to call her “Flannery.” I do not do this myself—I am more prone to call her “Miss O’Connor”—but I understand the impulse. Because we do know her, though we never met her. What we know is the same gift that existed in her, the same Artist fashioning the work in her, the same Spirit fashioning the masterpiece of her life.

Scene 9.

We also love the fact that she was whip-smart and funny and consummately Catholic. The whip-smart and funny—their name is legion. But whip-smart and funny and consummately Catholic? That’s a rare combination. That’s what we find in Flannery O’Connor. And Walker Percy. And Evelyn Waugh. And G.K. Chesterton.

Scene 10.

“Don’t ever let me think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for your story—just like the typewriter was mine.” (from O’Connor’s Prayer Journal).

“The Spirit is the mysterious Artist of the universe.” (Pope St. John Paul II, Letter to Artists, no. 15).

“Dear artists, you well know that there are many impulses which, either from within or from without, can inspire your talent. Every genuine inspiration, however, contains some tremor of that “breath” with which the Creator Spirit suffused the work of creation from the very beginning” (Letter to Artists, no. 15).

Scene 11.  

The film asks us to consider that the perfection of the work and the perfection of the life are not to be separated. “Not all are called to be artists in the specific sense of the term. Yet, as Genesis has it, all men and women [including artists] are entrusted with the task of crafting their own life: in a certain sense, they are to make of it a work of art, a masterpiece” (John Paul II, Letter to Artists, no. 2).

Scene 12.

Indeed: the perfection of the work is a mode of spiritual growth for the artist: “the artist not only summons his work into being, but also in some way reveals his own personality by means of it. For him art offers both a new dimension and an exceptional mode of expression for his spiritual growth” (John Paul II, Letter to Artists, no. 2).

This is the positive notion of art as expression. Because great art is not simply a revelation of the artist’s personality, but a revelation of that personality in light of the place that personality has in God’s own drama. Without God serving as a goal and measure of the personality, there is no yardstick by which to measure its progress. This is how the expression of the personality in art can be an “exceptional” path to spiritual growth.

Scene 13.

The beautiful is not the nice. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (O’Connor’s best known and, for my money, best story) is beautiful. Its beauty comes from its perfect construction and for the way in which it radiates the mystery of humanity made in the image and likeness of God—a mystery made palpable through the fierce and violent action of grace.

The filmmakers show us only a snippet from “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” and as if from an early draft of the story. I wonder why. Is it because it is one of her stories that has the least of her private struggles in it?

Scene 14.

Back to Liam Neeson’s cameo as the priest. He starts off as the good-hearted but uncultured Father Finn from “The Enduring Chill.” But then, halfway through his conversation with O’Connor, he morphs into the more culturally astute priest who gave O’Connor, when she was a student at Iowa, such good counsel regarding the possible moral harm of her fiction (see Brad Gooch’s account of O’Connor’s visit with this priest in the “Iowa” chapter of his biography of O’Connor: Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, 126-27). At first, Neeson’s priest cannot place James Joyce. Later in the conversation he laments that Ulysses is still banned in Ireland and advises her that she “doesn’t have to write for fifteen-year-old girls.”

Scene 15.

The film compellingly portrays O’Connor’s freaks. The freak, O’Connor writes in one of her essays, “is a figure of our essential displacement.” Dis-placement. To have lost one’s place. To be lost in the cosmos. To be without a home. Scientific-technological modernity has been the chief instrument of our displacement in the last 400 years of Western civilization. But such displacement is also part of the experience of fallen man. “Human beings, in a certain sense, are unknown to themselves” (John Paul II, Letter to Artists, no. 14). As when Glaucon, in Republic, remarks to Socrates about the strangeness of the prisoners at the bottom of the cave that Socrates has just described. “They’re just like us,” Socrates replies. (O’Connor’s essay is “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose.)

Scene 16.

Ethan Hawke in vulture.com: “And one of the things that I always loved about Flannery O’Connor is she was this wildly devout woman and she didn’t proselytize. She tried to internalize her faith and live in the real world and write about what she saw, but she’s not trying to convince you to believe something.”

A distinction is needed. No, she didn’t proselytize. Her stories don’t preach. As a writer, she dramatizes conflict. But her stories do try to convince—as any dramatization does. That is what a dramatization, a story, is: a work of persuasion. As I argue in Chapter 3 of my forthcoming book, Beauty & Imitation, a chapter in which I discuss O’Connor’s essay, “Writing Short Stories”: “All stories aim at delivering meaning—which is to say, truth—but they deliver it in the form of a kind of virtual-reality experience.” Of what does O’Connor want her stories to persuade us? That the world is territory held largely by the devil, where grace is forced to break in wildly. (See O’Connor’s essay, “On Her Own Work,” from Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose.)

Scene 17.

It’s a fine film. Her mystery still eludes us.

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Some Deleted Scenes

• Gratitude for Maya Hawke, who in the vulture.com interview with her father says: “Making a movie about religion feels dangerous right now. Making a movie about a not particularly beautiful, not particularly nice, not particularly digestible female southern writer.”

• O’Connor herself would certainly prefer we pay more attention to the stories than to look for connections between the stories and her life. But hers was such an interesting life, we cannot help it.

• I would have liked the girl’s attack on Mrs. Turpin in the “Revelation” episode to be more violent, more upsetting. And I thought the “plain, plain” woman Parker marries in “Parker’s Back” might have been portrayed as colder to Parker when she first meets him.