The Brilliant Bafflement of Wildcat

Sr. Margaret Kerry, fsp 

"Our experience of the grotesque should result in bafflement" (Wilson Yates).

Wildcat is imaginative, faith-filled, and baffling, a genuine Flannery O'Conner come to screen. Robert Giroux, friend, and publisher described his relationship with Flannery as "strange and trusting" while he said her dreary chair at the University of Iowa glowed (The Complete Stories Flannery O'Conner). Her teacher Caroline Gordon described O'Conner's writing as "baffling the reviewers." Giroux confirmed "They all recognized her power but missed her point." 

One of the points to get to right away is Flannery’s use of descriptives that many consider racist. DW, who keeps the weblog Becoming Flame wrote, Flannery “writes about racism, prejudice, and white privilege in almost every story, exposing them for what they are and showing how firmly and pervasively and subtly they lurk in our culture. "I’m not saying don’t take offense at it; that would miss the point." I believe she uses it to show how offensive it is.”

I have tried to keep up with the multiplicity of film reviews for Wildcat. O'Conner is still challenging. That "strange and yet trusting relationship" could be the experience of many. A few reviewers are unsure where to find hope in Flannery's novels. "People without hope not only don't write novels," she said, if they don't have hope they aren’t taking "long looks at anything, because they lack the courage." At her death, Thomas Merton wrote, "I write her name with honor for all the truth and all the craft with which she shows man's fall and his dishonor" (Everything That Rises Must Converge - AudioEditions.com) O’Conner’s desire to be a great writer was met with an equal conviction that her talent and ability flow solely from God.

Named after an early Flannery O'Connor short story that confronts the certainty of suffering and explores ultimate spiritual realities Wildcat's script is curated from Flannery's letters and Prayer Journal, the screenwriters, Shelby Gaines, and Ethan Hawk, explore her creative process as an act of faith. In O'Conner salvation is stripped of romanticism and sentimentality. She describes her characters as those who "are forced out to meet evil and grace and who act on a trust beyond themselves -- whether they know very clearly what it is they act upon or not" (“Flannery O'Connor and the Theology of the Grotesque”).

For those unfamiliar with O'Connor's Southern Gothic style, intentionally jarring to reveal moral and spiritual numbness, this movie needs an introduction. Her use of the grotesque confronts and accepts distortedness, brokenness, and suppressed visions of the truth. "To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man," She writes, "It is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature" (O'Conner, Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction). Our much-altered world already creates in us a longing for redemption. In Parker's Back Sarah Ruth asks Parker if he is saved. He replies that "he didn't see it was anything in particular to save him from."  In O'Conner's thought, "The Catholic novelist believes that you destroy your freedom by sin; the modern reader believes, I think, that you gain it in that way" (O'Conner, "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction").

R. Jared Staudt remarks "Our culture is marked by a peculiar dichotomy…. We keep suffering and death removed from our everyday experience: we cover it over with pharmaceuticals and drugs, remove the sick and dying from the home, and distract ourselves from facing up to its reality."  O'Connor knew that as an artist she needed to make her "vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind, you draw large and startling figures" (O'Conner, "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction"). True, the work of Flannery O'Connor can be "harsh, violent, and discomfiting." It is small relief that she uses as her art-medium the imperfect in ordinary humans. This allows hope to shine "thick with truth, grace and redemption" (Tod Worner, “The Mean Grace of Flannery O’Conner”). 

Sometimes I locate myself in the ordinary while at other times I am Mrs. Turpin in Revelation. I need to be hit by a book (by Mary “full of” Grace) to come to my senses. In the struggle to hide my imperfections the film Wildcat reawakens me to Flannery's aptitude to pry my fingers loose from self-seeking perfection so I can acknowledge being pursued by a great love Who does not hesitate to break down walls of resistance to enter my well-established fortress.

Veronica A. Arntz wrote that Flannery believes there is something within us demanding the redemptive act, which is something that man has forgotten: “he has forgotten the price of redemption.” (“Grace and the Grotesque: Redemption…”– Faith & Culture)

Like O'Connor's stories, Wildcat effects an impression that prompts viewers to reflect on deeper themes of the symbolism portrayed in the film. There is so much to pay attention to: books used in the movie and the novels, names of characters, settings, words – especially words.  This is a unique biopic. Instead of finding the book better than the movie this film encourages you to delve deeper into Flannery O'Connor's work which continues to resonate and challenge. When the film's producer, Joe Goodman, first read O'Conner he realized her books would allow him to make great films. 

Maya Hawke and Laura Linney's talented acting as they switch from Flannery and her mother, Regina, to characters in Flannery's narratives allows the audience to plunge into a cold Lourdes bath of stories. "I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality," Flannery wrote. "It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system” (Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose). 

Someone wrote that in Flannery's novels, you do not know who the protagonist is or who the antagonist is. She flips them so that "everything is off balance." “Jesus thrown everything off balance” (The Misfit). She uses distortion to reveal. The art of film is enacted here as a peacock unfolding feathers of "flagrant, bright-hued symbols." I still have a scene from Parker's Back etched in my mind. Inexorably this happens while I am in chapel making my examination of consciousness. The visual inhabits me all day challenging my view of anyone I encounter.

Flannery was resistant to the idea of a novelist as an evangelizer. Had she met Blessed James Alberione, a pioneer for the language of media for the gospel story and founder of the Pauline Family, he would agree that the best told sacred stories are those of the human person exposed to surprisingly abundant grace.

At the end of the film's premiere in Boston, there was a Q&A with Ethan Hawke and Shelby Gaines. Ethan revealed that during the party scene, as Flannery walked through the house feeling "far from God" he froze frames that could represent the seven deadly sins. This is the same scene where the host announces that she sees the Eucharist as a symbol. "If it is just a symbol, to hell with it!" responds Flannery. 

Listen carefully to the music, especially as the credits roll. Brothers Latham and Shelby Gaines (the screenwriter) perform Shelby's original score with homemade instruments created from found objects.

Ethan's advice to someone who asked about finding their voice as a writer or director was you cannot find your voice until you begin and stop worrying about what to say. Remember that what everyone wants is what you bring to it. Flannery adds, "The great novels we get in the future are not going to be those that the public thinks it wants, or those that critics demand" (https://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/grotesque.html). The novelist will write stories "that put the greatest demands on him, that require him to operate at the maximum of his intelligence and his talents, and to be true to the particularities of his own vocation"….They "will have to descend far enough into himself to reach those underground springs that give life to big work…It will be a descent through the darkness of the familiar into a world where, like the blind man cured in the gospels, he sees men as if they were trees, but walking" (O'Connor, "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction").

Wildcat is clarity for a baffled heart. O’Conner’s goal is to set us on the road to wholeness forced to realize our assumptions and surrender our expectations. The world begins to look like a place hope is hiding where we least expect. “That which you most need will be found where you least want to look,” said Carl Jung. This freedom is rarely experienced and “cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery and one which a novel [or a movie] …can only be asked to deepen” (Flannery O’Conner, Preface to Wiseblood). As you enjoy viewing the theologically brilliant and simultaneously baffling Wildcat get ready to have even your virtues burned away (Cf. Revelation). 

Stories in Wildcat

Comforts of Home (presented as a movie trailer)

The Misfit (the final scene)

Life You Save May Be Your Own

Revelation

Parker’s Back

Everything That Rises Must Converge (named for the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin).

Good Country People