ArteFact

Though I’m usually watching streamed content on a screen while lounging in a living room, rather than sweating in a sultry Grecian amphitheater, straining to hear the lines of masked actors, what moves me to pity and fear remains remarkably similar to what moved ancient audiences. Mr. Sunshine, originally broadcast in 2018, is one of the Korean shows I’ve enjoyed recently, and one of the highest-rated K-dramas of the past ten years. It is a sageuk, a type of historical drama that has flourished on the Korean silver screen for years, featuring large-scale dilemmas that would be familiar to ancient Greek audiences of tragic dramas.

Christian art faces unique challenges: How is hope realized without sentimentalization? How to resist moralizing when grappling with modern skepticism? How to reveal the mysteries and paradoxes in the pursuit of truth and in reverence of the human person? These were just some of the challenges that Hawke and co-writer Shelby Gaines would face in creating Wildcat, a profoundly Christian film that depicts Mary Flannery O’Connor’s life and her fiction. But rather than appeal to the styles of Hollywood entertainment or rest content in the successes of convention, they chose a path that drew on the very Catholic realism that animates O’Connor’s stories.

Time rules over man. It propels him through life, which is short when compared with eternity, and ushers him through life’s events, which often seem inconsequential beside history’s kings and wars. All of man’s experiences exist in and through time, and the means by which man communicates these experiences and thoughts—language—is also temporally bound. The nature of a novel, a poem, a sentence, or even a word, signals its mortality. It exists in time; it begins, and it ends.