I’m going to use my own space right here to offer a bit more of a review, with some more specific comments and yes, critiques.
Short take: A+ for effort and intention, no question. A regretful B- for execution. The CWR piece gets to the heart of why – that there’s a huge internal missing piece, I think. Or at least a failure to connect some dots.
I also was working towards this conclusion in our podcast episode on Wildcat – go here for that.
The problem is made clearest in the dramatization of the stories. I highlight a couple of issues over there – fundamental ones – but I’ll go into a bit more detail here. In short, for the most part, the dramatizations fail to communicate the heart of the story.
A caveat, first. This isn’t necessarily about what the stories “mean.” As Flannery herself said….
When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one. The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning, and the purpose of making state¬ments about the meaning of a story is only to help you to experience that meaning more fully.
When a professor wrote to her offering an interpretation of “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” she responded:
The interpretation of your ninety students and three teachers is fantastic and about as far from my intentions as it could get to be. If it were a legitimate interpretation, the story would be little more than a trick and its interest would be simply for abnormal psychology. I am not interested in abnormal psychology. . . .
The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it.
My tone is not meant to be obnoxious. I am in a state of shock.
So there is a fine line here – to avoid a reductive, simplistic “theme” or “message” – but also, to acknowledge that a story does carry meaning and it’s possible to dramatize a story and lose that – say, if in The Gift of the Magi Della sold a silver dish to fund Jim’s gift, and not her hair.
So let’s look at a couple of the stories as dramatized in Wildcat.
(Before I get going, I”ll say that I think the vignettes of “Parker’s Back” and “Good Country People” and “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” were better than those I’m going to dissect below, but even they suffered from not getting to the core of the thing.)
First off, “The Comforts of Home.” If you’ve seen the movie, you might expect me to go especially off on this one, but I’m not going to at all because I think I understand what Hawke is doing here. I had hoped to be able to ask him about it at the Q & A in NYC, but as it turned out, it was not an audience talkback, but just an interview by a reporter from Indiwire. And he pretty much ran off afterwards (much to the irritation of a gaggle of professional autograph seekers I passed outside later, who were loudly complaining about how quickly he’d jumped into a waiting car when he emerged from the theatre.).
Anyway – As Wildcat opens, we see a fake movie trailer for a film called Star Drake which is really the short story “The Comforts of Home” – it’s in black and white in the most lurid, sensationalist 50’s melodramatic formatting you can imagine. Very entertaining. But of course, with also very little relation to the actual story. What I think was going on here was a message to the audience and a reflection of the way in which O’Connor’s stories have often been received: with an emphasis on the grotesque, the violent and the sensational, and with everyone pretty much missing the point.
Just wait, I felt it was saying to me – you don’t get her. You think this is what she’s about with the nymphomaniac and the gun? You’re wrong, and we’re going to give you a clue. Just watch.
It’s strange and disorienting and not immediately or easily comprehensible. Just like Flannery’s writing, which is the point. This is the entry point, and it makes sense. A disorienting entry point to meeting a disorienting writer. I liked it.
But as the film proceeds and the story vignettes are interwoven with aspects of Flannery’s life that, it is suggested, inspired them (problematic for reasons I write about here), the deficiencies of the film’s vision emerge. Let’s talk about two of the dramatizations in particular: “Revelation” and “Everything that Rises Must Converge.”
Perhaps you know the outline of “Revelation.” We meet self-satisfied Ruby Turpin in a doctor’s office. Ruby is forever dividing humanity into categories, judging them, and being really thankful that she is not in one of those lower categories – especially not Black or white trash, but Jesus gave her a choice, yes, she’d choose the former – a nice, clean Black woman would be fine. While waiting, her smugness becomes quite evident in her conversations. There’s a college girl named Mary Grace reading a Human Pscyhology textbook, and she becomes so enraged by Ruby that she throws the book at her, throttles her and calls her “an old warthog from Hell.”
At the end of the story, after Ruby has stewed over this, she goes to feed the pigs on her farm. She’s still angry, an anger that is directed, no longer at Mary Grace, but at the universe, for she intuits that the girl’s accusation has come just might be a sign. Filled with rage, she shouts, “Who do you think you are?”
The color of everything, field and crimson sky, burned for a moment with a transparent intensity. The question carried over the pasture and across the highway and the cotton field and returned to her clearly, like an answer from beyond the wood.
She opened her mouth but no sound came out of it.
And after, comes the vision – the famous vision of the varied, ragtag, messy march to Purgatory as “even their virtues were being burned away.”
Even their virtues were being burned away. That is, anything – even our self-perceived goodness – that builds up our pride, our conviction of self-sufficiency, superiority and our sense that we are not just like everyone else.
In Wildcat, we get the waiting room scene and a truncated peak at the final vision that does not include that critical moment of the echo – which is the moment that shocks Ruby, that reveals the sin of her pride, that voice demanding back to her: Who do you think you are? We’re left with a sense that Ruby is, yes, shocked into some kind of awareness, but the essential element of cutting the life out of her pride is missing.
“Everything that Rises Must Converge” suffers from the same problem but, I think, even more so.
The story is simple: Julian and his mother are on a bus, on the way to her “reducing” class because the doctor has told the mother that she must lose twenty pounds. The mother is your garden-variety patronizing racist and Julian is your garden-variety patronizing anti-racist (which actually is just another manifestation of racism).
Short version: the mother is proud of her hat and, of course, racist. A Black woman gets on the bus with a little boy – and she’s wearing the exact same hat. During the ride, Julian is thinking and articulating various presumably anti-racist thoughts, but it is really all just a manifestation of pride. Whether or not he believes anything he’s saying, the reason he’s saying it is to feel and express a sense of superiority to his mother.
As they get off the bus, Julian’s mother decides to give a coin to the boy. Julian begs her not to, knowing how the Black woman will receive the gesture. Julian’s mother forges ahead and yes, the Black woman wallops her with her purse. The action shocks Julian’s mother, sends her into an almost catatonic state, which Julian ignores at first, continuing to lecture her about her sins. And then, the mother collapses:
Stunned, he let her go and she lurched forward again, walking as if one leg were shorter than the other. A tide of darkness seemed to be sweeping her from him.
“Mother!” he cried. “Darling, sweetheart, wait!” Crumpling, she fell to the pavement. He dashed forward and fell at her side, crying, “Mamma, Mamma!” He turned her over. Her face was fiercely distorted. One eye, large and staring, moved slightly to the left as if it had become unmoored. The other remained fixed on him, raked his face again, found nothing and closed.
“Wait here, wait here!” he cried and jumped up and began to run for help toward a cluster of lights he saw in the distance ahead of him. “Help, help!” he shouted, but his voice was thin, scarcely a thread of sound. The lights drifted farther away the faster he ran and his feet moved numbly as if they carried him nowhere. The tide of darkness seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from moment to moment his entry into the world of guilt and sorrow.
So when you read this story, what is evident is that Julian’s arrogance and pride is just as much the subject of the story as his mother’s – perhaps even more. And yes, in the Flannery mode, both Julian (the Apostate?) and his mother’s pride is shattered only when it’s, well…shattered.
In Wildcat, the basics of the first part of the story are dramatized, and Julian’s (played by Maya Hawke, awkwardly) smugness is apparent, but it is a minor note in a story in which the mother’s racism takes center stage – as the dramatization is juxtaposed with moments of bigotry and pride Flannery observes around her (producing a reductiveness I look at here). When you read the story, you are struck most of all, though, by Julian, and our attention is drawn to him and our hearts are broken by him when he realizes, all too late, what he done and what he had failed to do.
The film’s version doesn’t indicate any of this, with its focus on the mother to the exclusion of Julian’s own prideful presence.
I’ve spent a lot of time on this, and don’t get me wrong – I enjoyed Wildcat and very much appreciate what the Hawkes have done here. The moments focusing just on Flannery herself are very, very good and Maya Hawke should be nominated for awards for her performance. There are some moving moments – a couple that indeed made me well up. I enjoyed the film and will go see it again when it hits Birmingham later in the month. I also understand the limits of what anyone can do on film in regard to spirituality without being pedantic or preachy – heck, I spent hours and hours and hours over the past few months talking about it!
So yes, so many of the pieces are there: her faith, her sense of distance from the world around her, her writing process and struggles, her illness, the nature of her fiction. All of that makes the film worthwhile. But what bother me is the failure to connect all of those elements with the account that Flannery herself gave of her life, vocation and writing. It’s unfortunate that a viewer of Wildcat with no previous knowledge of Flannery, would come away from seeing the film with, I suspect, no better idea after than before as to why in the world she sent her first story collection to Sally Fitzgerald with the message:
Nine stories about Original Sin, with my compliments.