The Truth Shall Make You Odd
Ethan and Maya Hawke’s biopic succeeds in bringing to life both O’Connor’s vivid imagination and her mundane reality.
Review by Whitney Rio-Ross
I went to see Wildcat with fear and trembling. I love Flannery O’Connor. She was Southern, Christian, and strange. I am also these things. She was, furthermore, hilarious, wise, and undeniably talented. (You can hate O’Connor’s narratives, religion, and vibe, but who can fail to admire the prose itself?) Despite my fandom, I worried that any kind of biopic would flatten her into a collection of stories and dogma. I thought her life was fascinating, but how would a film contain Flannery’s writing, biography, philosophy, and contradictions?
Yet as the theater lights dimmed, I also felt something far more dangerous—hope. I hoped because Ethan and Maya Hawke were at the helm of the project. They are both sharp, nuanced, and blessedly weird. Ethan Hawke’s films are much like O’Connor’s stories—profound and moving for some viewers, too odd and disturbing for others. But I just couldn’t imagine how perfectly he would capture her. Of course, my college American literature professor couldn’t resist emailing me about the historical inaccuracies (especially that the character Cal—a love interest—seems to be a mix of several men O’Connor knew but never spoke of as a romantic partner). But like me, he loved it, even forgiving the romance plotline because the whole film revealed her character so well.
Wildcat manages its seemingly impossible task first by including O’Connor’s fiction. The film is not simply a biopic but also an anthology of her most famous stories. We go from her being annoyed with her mother (whom she calls Regina instead of Mom) to the maddening waiting room in “Revelation.” Her graduate school memories (which include a disorienting and painfully relatable literary party) are mixed with scenes from “Parker’s Back.” In addition to the fiction, the dialogue sounds just like O’Connor because much of it comes straight from her letters, essays, and journals. In this way we get to hear O’Connor’s wit along with her internal struggles and foibles. Her fevered confession to a priest acknowledges how her literary ambitions could get in the way of her Christian devotion. We even hear some of the silences and ambivalence in her letters when she merely rolls her eyes at Southerners’ cruel statements about their Black neighbors rather than fight against them or actually engage with Black people as equals. Most importantly, Hawke offers us more than O’Connor’s words (fictional or autobiographical). He shows an unglamorous woman struggling with her own body and the small world to which it confines her. It’s painful and far from poetic. For me, it was nauseatingly realistic.
I had aspired to be like her in many ways, but not like this. I wanted her mind, not her body. And I certainly didn’t want to think about how her mind and body were inseparable.
Here’s the outline: A young woman from the South goes up north to study literature and writing. She inherits an autoimmune disease in her early twenties and ends up back down South being taken to doctors by a tireless mother. She writes as much as she can and hates when her body gets in the way. Her religion oscillates between being a comfort and the straw that broke the existentialist’s back. That’s not O’Connor’s story—it’s mine.
When I came back to Tennessee after graduate school—when I got sick—I took a break from Flannery. I still taught her fiction, but I didn’t want to linger on her life story. I had aspired to be like her in many ways, but not like this. I wanted her mind, not her body. And I certainly didn’t want to think about how her mind and body were inseparable. O’Connor wrote vehemently against this kind of dualistic thinking, but we O’Connor scholars often talk about her in an oddly disembodied way. Literary Protestants love quoting her when speaking against dualism (though “dualism” is frequently used as a catch-all term for “heresy”). Yet they don’t seem to connect why embodiment might matter so much for O’Connor herself. She wasn’t just a good Catholic; she was a sick Catholic.
One day, when I was in bed and trying to distract myself from the unpleasant side effects of a drug Regina O’Connor would have killed for, I finally reached for The Habit of Being. I came across the quote I have read at least a thousand times: “I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.” This quote is all over the O’Connor world and beyond. It’s been used as an epigraph, an Instagram bio, and an inspirational quote for spiritual retreats. It’s a great sentence, but the context is important. O’Connor is not referring to suffering in general but a specific suffering—a physical one. As I read through dozens of her letters, I was shocked by how many of them referred to the specifics of lupus. She writes about doctors, rashes, and treatments, revealing a woman who cannot dedicate her entire life to writing but who must actively struggle with her failing body. When I was a college student, these details meant little to me, and the O’Connor scholarship I read didn’t encourage me to linger on these aspects of the letters. She was supposed to be sick in a vague, romantic way. But real illness is neither vague nor romantic.
Wildcat is visceral in its depiction of lupus. We watch O’Connor shivering on the train home, an angry butterfly rash blooming with the fever. When she learns that she has lupus, she cannot shrug off how it will ravage her body because she saw it happen to her father. She eventually needs crutches and struggles to figure out how to use them. She screams when she falls trying to go upstairs and angrily declares that she will not climb them anymore. I cried at that scene, remembering my own small meltdown when I realized I could not lift a heavy baking sheet from the oven. The tragedy of illness isn’t just about dying; living with the limitations from pain and exhaustion is also devastating. The film understands this truth better than any book I’ve read on O’Connor, and Maya Hawke’s portrayal won’t let you forget it.
O’Connor didn’t write escapist literature but literature that deepened and expanded our vision of the world that is, unglamorous as it may be.
When reading fiction, I’ve always leaned more toward new criticism than authorial intent. But I believe we lose something when we try to erase the author altogether, even if it’s only the historical/social/philosophical context in which they are writing. I have always found it difficult to divorce Flannery O’ Connor the woman from her work, and for good reason. Her religious views and frustrations are at the heart of her fiction. Her narratives are theological and philosophical texts, profoundly informed by whatever she was reading at the time. You can find hundreds of papers about O’Connor’s Catholic imagination. But Wildcat suggests that her religion, as central as it was for her, wasn’t the only part of her life that influenced her writing.
I believe this is why weaving her short stories between the scenes of an often-mundane life works so well. Even when she wasn’t at her desk, her imagination was at work. With Maya Hawke and Laura Linney masterfully playing the characters in the stories, the film isn’t saying that O’Connor’s characters are all based on herself or her family. Rather, he’s showing that while her own life was limited to Milledgeville and its sometimes-infuriating inhabitants, her imagination managed to make something fantastic from her small world. And there is no denying that many of her characters are informed by her mother and herself. Of course Flannery is present in the girl who can’t walk on her own in “Good Country People.” Of course she would think of herself and Regina when writing a story in which the son is so proud of not being as racist as his mother. O’Connor didn’t write escapist literature but literature that deepened and expanded our vision of the world that is, unglamorous as it may be.
Isn’t that what O’Connor experts want in a biopic—to glimpse not only her thoughts and creative output but also the human that breathed life into them? If we are intrigued by her work alone, why watch a film chronicling her rather mundane life and unflattering illness? Those who entered the theater with hope must have already felt that O’Connor’s words came not from a disembodied divinity in the Georgia sky but a woman made in the image of God and living in a fallen world. That is the woman Wildcat shows—one who prayed before the image of Christ twisted in pain, one who believed that grace is nothing less than body and blood.
Whitney Rio-Ross holds a Masters in Religion and Literature from Yale Divinity School. Her writing has appeared in Sojourners, Reflections, America Magazine, LETTERS Journal, The Cresset, St. Katherine Review, The Other Journal, and elsewhere. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Birthmarks and lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with her husband.
Wildcat was directed by Ethan Hawke, written by Hawke and Shelby Gaines, and distributed by Oscilloscope Laboratories. It was released to select theaters on May 3, 2024, and a wider release is expected soon. It is not currently streaming.
