Wildcat, 2023. Directed by Ethan Hawke.
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.
This realism submits the audience’s mind to a test of the moral imagination by harnessing their attention and seeing how it responds to the weight of reality: Do we escape or take the plunge? It is only then that we as an audience can come away prepared to hone our attention and reverence for our next encounter with paradox and mystery. Rather than conforming the aesthetic to the predictable sensibility of the audience, Wildcat elevates our imagination to new and greater heights by offering all of reality—the sacred and profane to reveal the splendor of the inner life sometimes hidden by Christ-haunted shadows.
O’Connor’s Vocation
Through relying on O’Connor’s stories, letters, and prayer journal, the film weaves together O’Connor’s life in the years following her lupus diagnosis and pivotal moments from her fiction. Unlike typical biopics, the story approaches her life like a bildungsroman, tracing the transcendent story of her spiritual growth when she experienced disappointment and suffering but was being called in relationship with God. When she leaves Iowa to come back to Milledgeville, Georgia to live with her mother Regina (Laura Linney) due to her declining health, we see O’Connor wrestle in her vocation to serve God as a writer and in her holy longing to be led closer to God through her writing.
While her work may not be for a mass audience with infinite desires, it is certainly for a universal audience who possesses a holy longing for the infinite.
Both Maya Hawke and Linney master their performances as mother and daughter but also key characters from O’Connor’s stories. To distinguish between vignettes from her short stories and the biographical pieces, cinematographer Steve Cosens changed the color and composition. But the way Maya Hawke and Linney take on various roles reveals how imagination and attention to reality are deeply entwined. In some ways, we see this fraught relationship as an expression of the tension O’Connor experienced as a Catholic immersed in the Christ-haunted South: “I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The Southerner, who isn’t convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God” (Mystery and Manners). Their various roles and the intercuts make for a much richer understanding of their human relationship than what a psychoanalytical approach could offer.
Wildcat depicts grace working not just on her characters but on our own hearts as well. Reading “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” for instance, often jolts readers from complacency. We feel this jolt with O’Connor when Hawke shows the startling Misfit (Levon Hawke) fire his gun into the camera at which point the story cuts back to O’Connor writing at her typewriter, and we witness her interior response as her head falls to the keys. Wildcat makes these inexplicable, violent, and gratuitous moments of grace a way to awaken us to the spiritual realities of life. But the film also uses these moments to show how her vocation as a writer through her path of discipleship converged.
The Hidden Mystery of the Sacraments
Two scenes in particular treat the sacraments with a reverence that resists any sentimentalization or moralization. Hawke relies on O’Connor’s own words to reveal her Catholic faith, which are critical to revealing her devotion and sense of awe and mystery professed as an artist. At a dinner party hosted by Robert “Cal” Lowell (Phillip Ettinger), O’Connor rebuts another’s comment on the Eucharist saying, “If it’s just a symbol, to hell with it.” This line in the movie makes clear her understanding of the reality of the incarnation, that God came as Christ in the flesh to be in communion with his creation. It should also draw us into the understanding that art is incarnational in that it looks to the concrete to express reality to us. O’Connor is revealed not so much as approaching truth by way of apologetics but as a literary artist and prophetess who knew the limits of a symbol but God’s real presence.
Another moment comes when O’Connor meets with her parish priest (Liam Neeson). She wonders if her writing can still serve God even though it is scandalous. The scene ends when it’s time for her to make her actual confession, an accurate handling of the Seal of Confession. This accuracy supports how O’Connor herself understood sacraments. She intended for them to “carr[y] enough awe and mystery to jar the reader into some kind of emotional recognition of its significance” (Mystery and Manners). The loss of a sense of sacramental reality is a crisis we are facing in not just the culture but in the human experience.
In a post-film interview with Hawke, he called this “a movie of the mind.” But he achieved this penetrating look into O’Connor’s interior life not with a shallow or gnostic appeal; rather, he noted how as the director, he focused on the space between characters and their movement, rather than close-ups, to accomplish this task. This makes sense, of course, when we see human experience as an incarnate reality expressed through our very bodies. This space also invites us to attend to and revere what’s most real in our own lives.
Enchanting the Audience
We live at a time when many have lost their sense of enchantment. Wildcat comes at a time when the tension between art created for mass appeal and art created without a sense of mass appeal in mind is worth exploring. Indeed, O’Connor herself faced the same predicament when her work wasn’t always well-received or understood.
But while her work may not be for a mass audience with infinite desires, it is certainly for a universal audience who possesses a holy longing for the infinite. The imagination—where our soul and sensory experience meet—enables us to access that transcendent we long for. Wildcat was a call of sorts, probing the interior lives of those who possess that transcendent longing: Are we prepared to receive this kind of art? Do we have the imagination and foundation to understand? Christian films these days are often poorly executed due to a belief that audiences are disenchanted enough to express their desires in the same way O’Connor faced the demand to make her work “likable.”
Both the film and O’Connor’s stories take up the question of how liminal the space is between where we engage in our daily lives and a transcendent reality calling us to order our lives in light of higher goods. As a work of art that reflects O’Connor’s Catholic realism, Wildcat redeems both our attention and sacramental vision.
Jody C. Benson is a freelance writer and editor in Wisconsin. She received her master’s degree in bioethics and humanities from the Medical College of Wisconsin. She is the author of Behold: A Reflection Journal Where Wonder, Creation, and Stewardship Meet. Her writing can be found in Public Discourse, Anselm Society, Ekstasis, and others. Learn more at jodycbenson.com and jodycbenson.substack.com.
Posted on July 30, 2024.