“An outline would be helpful at this point,” an editor warns the young Flannery O’Connor (Maya Hawke) in Wildcat. And viewers might feel the same about Ethan Hawke’s film itself by the time the credits roll.
Hawke is trying to suggest something about how we should respond to the hypocrisy of other believers.
For several critics, Wildcat felt like a disorienting experience. After all, it’s one part anthology, providing a more-or-less accurate depiction of five or six of O’Connor’s southern Gothic short stories. But it’s also one part biography, depicting both a pivotal season in O’Connor’s life, and various flashbacks to her time in university. The connections between O’Connor’s stories and her life aren’t always immediately clear. And in the hands of a lesser director, the tension between these two halves of Wildcat may have torn the film apart.
Yet Hawke’s provocative move to depict O’Connor as being the main character in each of her short stories becomes one of the film’s saving graces. Some lovers of O’Connor may balk at the idea that she inserted herself into her fiction like this, as does Katarina Docalovich in Paste. And there is a valid discussion to be had about whether such a move accurately reflects O’Connor’s approach to fiction.
As a narrative device, though, Hawke’s decision allows the film to focus on a central theme of O’Connor’s stories: the hypocrisy of whitewashed Christians and how we respond to that. By following how this theme is explored in each of the short story vignettes, careful viewers will discover that there’s a progression to these tales. Hawke is trying to suggest something about how we should respond to the hypocrisy of other believers.
We may not particularly like the film’s conclusions.
Wildcat is full of pithy lines from Flannery O’Connor, largely drawn from her letters. And throughout the first half, the film eagerly takes aim at the complacent attitude that pervades certain sections of the Bible Belt. “What people don’t understand is how much religion costs,” O’Connor argues during a dinner party. “They think that faith is a big electric blanket when really it’s the cross.”
Viewers who have called out hypocrisy in the past and experienced rejection from what should have been a safe community may find a lot to relate to O’Connor here.
Characters in O’Connor’s stories who cling to that electric blanket are often brought to a rude awakening. Early in the film, O’Connor reimagines her mother (Laura Linney) as the racist Mrs. Turpin (“Revelation”), spending her life thanking God that she’s a well-to-do member of society—unlike “white trash” or “n*******”. In one particularly jarring scene, Turpin imagines Christ asking her which she’d rather be if she had to choose. The story poetically ends with Flannery imagining herself choking Mrs. Turpin while proclaiming her a warthog from hell. Violence has always been a major theme in O’Connor’s work, and yet the film makes these brutal acts almost feel like O’Connor’s personal confession.
There is a cost, however, to being the only one who sees the hypocrisy of the Christians around her. O’Connor throughout the first half of the film feels perpetually alone, rejected, and a misfit. And that attitude bleeds into each of her stories. In the previously-mentioned story, her character is mocked for being antisocial. In another story (“The Life You Save May Be Your Own”), she imagines herself as a deaf-mute girl, used and abandoned by everyone around her—particularly by the Christians who can’t tell the difference between an honest man and a charlatan.
Viewers who have called out hypocrisy in the past and experienced rejection from what should have been a safe community may find a lot to relate to O’Connor here. When warnings against wolves in sheep’s clothing fall on deaf ears, one may feel as voiceless and homeless as her character is when she’s abandoned by the side of the road. Hawke’s depiction of O’Connor, both in real life and in her story, leaves us with poignant images of what it’s like to feel misunderstood.
When her mom presses her on the novel her editor keeps rejecting, O’Connor explains that it’s “about an atheist who sleeps with a prostitute and then starts his own religion called the Church of Christ without Christ.” “A church without Christ?” her mom asks in confusion. “Like most of the ones I know,” O’Connor quips. But one can imagine the alienation she felt at her editor reading that story and suggesting to her that no, it’s too odd and angular for them to publish.
Spotlighting hypocrisy, it appears, doesn’t just distance one from the people they call out—observers who hear such experiences and fail to understand them also can lead one to feel more isolated and alone.
Halfway through the film, though, O’Connor’s author inserts take a surprising turn. Amid recollections of a moment of literary recognition in college, she tells a story (“Parker’s Back”) imagining herself as a fundamentalist woman who falls in love with and marries a “bad boy” tattooed farmhand. The story ends with her beating her husband for getting a tattoo of Christ needled across his back, screaming, “Who is that? Nobody I know!” The irony writes itself.
Given everything depicted so far in the film, though, this may seem like an odd character for Flannery to relate to. The previous stories have pictured her as a helpless girl suffering because of fundamentalists’ naïveté, or as an enlightened outsider who sees the fundamentalists’ façades for what they are. In what way could she be the naïve, hypocritical fundamentalist?
Flawed humans, as it turns out, often make poor prophets. And decrying the hypocrisy of others does little to address what lies buried in our own hearts.
O’Connor, however, is far from a perfect Christian. “My thoughts are so far away from God, he may as well not have made me,” she murmurs shortly after decrying electric-blanket Christianity. Alongside her invectives of easy believers sits a tremendous well of guilt. The next story (“Everything That Rises Must Converge”) follows her as she verbally beats down her mother’s character with such persistence and ferocity that her mother suffers a heart attack. Her character is left crying out for help, realizing for perhaps the first time that she does care about her mother far more than she let on. More than that, the way she’s gone about condemning her mother’s hypocrisy may not be particularly loving.
In a pivotal conversation with her priest, she confesses that “I don’t mean to be clever…although I do mean to be clever, and I want you to think so.” There is a sin of her own lurking behind her condemnations of the hypocrisies of others—her belief that as a trained intellectual, she’s better than these unenlightened country folk. Whether she’s engaging with the intellects of the University of Iowa or the Georgian farmers, she longs to be a prophet. And yet in a moment of brutal honesty, she tells the priest that “I demand to be a mystic, but I am cheese. I am a moth who would be king.”
This attitude is reflected in the final story (“Good Country People”) as her enlightened college graduate is still naïve enough to be duped by a charlatan. For all her education and pride, she’s hardly wiser than the people she’s spent half her life running away from.
Flawed humans, as it turns out, often make poor prophets. And decrying the hypocrisy of others does little to address what lies buried in our own hearts. Without denying the ugliness of hypocrisy, the film leads viewers to examine whether the Devil might not use such hatred of whitewashed behavior to instill self-righteous pride within us.
One of Christ’s most memorable parables may be that of the Pharisee and of the tax collector (Luke 18:9-14). It may also be one of the easiest to misapply. How many of us read that parable, consider the people in our own lives who act like self-righteous Pharisees, and leave saying, “I thank God that I’m not one of those people!”
Like the parable, though, Wildcat ends with an uncomfortable conclusion: that sometimes, seeking to rid hypocrisy from the lives of others can become a distraction from our need to come to Christ in repentance.
To repurpose the Savior’s words, before we point out our brother’s electric blanket, we ought to first deal with our own.
The film ends with O’Connor painfully (for lupus is now limiting her movement) rearranging her room so her desk is focused not outside at the world (symbolic of her desire to leave her bigoted hometown for most of the film), and instead focused inward. She’s accepted living at home during this season—and realized that she and her mom perhaps share a lot more in common than she would have first admitted. Because both know what it’s like to look down on others and think themselves higher than them. But now O’Connor has attained a more honest reckoning of who she is, warts and virtues alike.
Electric blankets make us believe that the deepest sins lie out there, in the lives of those who besmirch the name of Christ through double-minded deeds. The cross reminds us that suffering points us to the greatest battleline between good and evil, and how deeply that’s fought within our hearts. To repurpose the Savior’s words, before we point out our brother’s electric blanket, we ought to first deal with our own.
The Devil would like nothing more than for us to see the doublemindedness of everyone except for ourselves. Because it can terrify us to turn our gaze from the world to our own souls.
And yet as O’Connor’s priest reminds both her and us, “This notion that grace is healing omits that before it heals, it cuts with a sword that Christ said He came to bring. The way to gladness begins with a hard blow. Joy is sorrow overcome.”
