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 2nd 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?