Who was Flannery O’ Connor? A new biopic’s portrait almost convinces.
In a letter she wrote in 1956, Flannery O’Connor told her friend Elizabeth Hester to “picture me with my ground teeth stalking joy—fully armed too as it’s a highly dangerous quest.” The quest is dangerous, she goes on to explain, because of the dragon mentioned by St. Cyril: “The dragon is at the side of the road watching those who pass. Take care lest he devour you! You are going to the Father of souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.”
How can you tell the story of one of the greatest Catholic writers who ever lived “stalking joy” through exercising her gift of storytelling, even as the dragon of a death sentence stalks her in turn? Shelby Gaines and Ethan Hawke do it very well in their biopic Wildcat. The film focuses on the moment in 1950 when twenty-five-year-old Flannery, having just launched her career, receives the diagnosis of lupus, the “devouring wolf.” While this focus is the film’s strength, it is also its weakness. It gets the stalking part exactly right. What it seems to forget at times is the joy.
Wildcat treats O’Connor’s fiction better than any adaptation I’ve ever seen (and I have seen them all). All her protagonists are people who don’t know what they don’t know. Like all of us, they stalk love and significance. They build illusions about themselves and how good they are.
O’Connor understood how hard it is to get beyond the frame of reference you’ve been born into—especially in the South. Being born white and upper-middle class in the early twentieth century meant that you were enculturated to see that everyone had a place, and that your place was above “white trash,” foreigners, and people of color. The film thus casts Laura Linney both as Regina O’Connor and several of O’Connor’s most genteel (but self-deluded) female characters, and Maya Hawke both as Flannery and several of her most prophetic (but pretentious and flawed) characters. Both actors perform brilliantly.
This move works well in the re-telling of “Revelation.” Ruby Turpin (Linney) visits the doctor’s office and begins pharisaical ruminating on how thankful she is that she was not born white trash or low down like these others. In one of the few genuinely funny moments of the film (the relative lack of humor is a problem I’ll get to later), a Sallman-white Jesus appears to Ruby and tells her she must choose between being white trash or Black. She is flummoxed, and finally asks that she be made into a “respectable and clean” Black person, “myself, but black.” This is when Mary Grace (Hawke) throws a book entitled Human Development at her and calls her a warthog from hell. Ruby is Regina but she is also all of us. Mary Grace—far from perfect herself—is the prophet that Ruby doesn’t know she needs. Her act opens the way to Ruby’s self-discovery that she is no better than anyone else, that what she considered to be her virtues is worthy only of being burned away in the final judgment.
The interchangeability of Flannery and Regina into various characters works most powerfully in the depiction of Flannery as Julian and Regina as his mother in “Everything that Rises Must Converge.” Julian berates his mother for her racism, only to discover that he is just as guilty of harshly judging her as she had been guilty of being condescending to a Black family. Convicted, he watches her collapse in a stroke in front of a cross.
But it works less well when Hawke plays the arrogant atheist Joy (who named herself Hulga) in “Good Country People,” which is clearly meant to be one of the central scenes of the film. Hulga sets out to seduce Manley Pointer, whom she believes to be an innocent Bible salesman. But she loses her ironic detachment and finds herself falling for him. She imagines him lovingly removing her wooden leg each evening before bed and replacing it the next day. Instead, Pointer throws the leg down the loft declaring that “you ain’t so smart! I’ve been believing in nothing my whole life!” and takes off with it.
It is when Pointer is running away across the field that the “stalking joy” line from O’Connor’s letter is quoted, as if she thought of herself as a kind of Hulga. “Good Country People” was easiest for O’Connor to write (and is my favorite story) precisely because she knew that she wasn’t Hulga, but that she would be without the Church. It’s a cautionary tale, an admittance that all intellectuals have a hard road to faith because the dragon of their pride is standing by to devour them.
But seeing O’Connor as Hulga is potentially misleading when it comes to the precise nature of O’Connor’s struggle against the dragon of pride (and the wolf of lupus). It gives a distorting lens to the film’s climactic scene in which Father Finn (Liam Neeson), a character from “The Enduring Chill,” is seen conversing with O’Connor as she is lying ill in bed. That story features another arrogant atheist, the writer Asbury, who was the object of O’Connor’s thickest irony about the pretensions of intellectuals.
But O’Connor was clearly not at all like the humorless and earnest Asbury. If she saw herself in anyone in that story, it was Mary George, Asbury’s no-nonsense (but also arrogant) sister who sees what a poser he is. What’s potentially misleading is that in the scene with Father Finn (with its clear references to Asbury), O’Connor seems to be in the throes of doubt about how to be a Catholic and a writer without being selfishly ambitious—as if she saw herself in Asbury, who belittled his mother and his hometown and would rather live in New York City. But that was never O’Connor’s struggle. Her struggle was not to accept that her vocation would be lived with these limitations, but to accept the limitations with joy.
At the end of the scene O’Connor asks the priest how she should deal with her struggles. He responds, “give alms.” That exact advice, like so many of the film’s speeches, was not given to O’Connor but given by her. She wrote it to one of the many people who sought her for advice about how to handle their doubts. This was O’Connor’s almsgiving. She had a remarkable ministry of letter writing and visiting with folks in the afternoons on the porch at Andalusia, her mother’s dairy farm in Milledgeville that is the film’s primary setting. The correspondence is loving, selfless, honest, and absolutely hilarious. This is how O’Connor stalked joy and how she loved others.
Bill Sessions was one of these visitors to Andalusia. Throughout the film, I kept wishing I could call him up and ask him if Wildcat got Flannery’s affect right. But Bill died several years ago before finishing his biography, which was to be called Stalking Joy. For all the years I had known Bill, I never felt the need to ask him what Flannery was like as a person. I simply assumed that I knew. I assumed she was introverted, yes, and as useless at a cocktail party as Wildcat depicts her to be, but I also assumed that she had a sparkle in her eye while she let loose all those zingers, especially at her mother.
To me, what shines through her sense of humor is joy. Hers is a satirical voice that cuts with love, not a sarcastic voice that slashes with the bite of superior intellect that, like Hulga’s, “sees through to nothing.” Where is the Flannery who called her crutches flying buttresses? Or the one who drew cartoons? Or the one who wrote to Maryat Lee hilarious letters from “the dear old dirty Southland”? I don’t think that Flannery emerged only later, after intense struggle. I think she was there all along, because the joy of the Lord was her strength.
I could be wrong, of course. But either way, I’m very content with Wildcat, because it shows O’Connor to be the prophetic and charitable writer she was and does not depict her as arrogant or mean. Thus, for me the film’s emotional center was its depiction of “Parker’s Back,” O’Connor’s greatest achievement in a career cut short. The story depicts a drifter who gets a tattoo of the face of the Byzantine Christ on his back to try to impress his gnostic and judgmental wife, Sarah Ruth. Hawke and Gaines did right to place the story anachronistically, as if it were the first story she wrote, because it reveals the absolute consistency of her theological vision for fiction from the beginning to the end of her career. Parker, “as ordinary as a loaf of bread,” is a Christ bearer, as flawed and holy as we all are, made in God’s image to give God glory. When Sarah Ruth rejects him and beats him with a broom, she rejects Christ. Parker thereby shares in Christ’s suffering and is reborn.
“Parker’s Back” is ultimately about the art of fiction. It represents O’Connor’s most mature vision for her work and for her life. Fiction (unlike epic poetry or myth) is always focused like a laser on ordinary human beings. “Parker’s Back” is the best illustration of Irenaeus’s insistence that “the glory of God is a living human being” that I have ever read. Parker’s words in that scene (importantly, words that come from the tattoo artist in the story) are clearly O’Connor’s: “Look at it! It’s God! Just look!”
The church taught O’Connor to look at everyone that way—as beautiful but broken—and that is what she wanted to give us. Because if we can learn to look at all the crazy people in our lives along with her, we can learn the redemptive power of love. And the gift of that kind of love is joy.
Christina Bieber Lake is the author of The Incarnational Art of Flannery O’Connor.
Image: Wildcat, Oscilloscope Laboratories, 2023
To accept the limitations with joy. Amen.