“An outline would be helpful at this point,” an editor warns the young Flannery O’Connor (Maya Hawke). WildcatAnd by the time the credits roll, audiences may feel the same way about Ethan Hawke’s film itself.
Hawke is trying to suggest something about how we should respond to the hypocrisy of other believers.
Many critics have Wildcat It’s a confusing experience. After all, this is an anthology that’s a more or less accurate portrayal of five or six of O’Connor’s Southern Gothic short stories. But it’s also a biography, drawing on both key periods in O’Connor’s life and various flashbacks to her college years. The connections between O’Connor’s stories and her own life aren’t always immediately clear, and in a lesser director’s hands the tension between the two parts can be too great. Wildcat I might have torn up the movie.
But one of the film’s saving graces is Hawke’s provocative move to portray O’Connor as the protagonist of a short story, even though some of her fans may balk at the idea of ​​her featuring herself in a novel in this way. Katarina Dokalovic paste. And there is legitimate debate about whether such a move accurately reflects O’Connor’s approach to the novel.
But as a narrative device, Hawke’s decision allows the film to focus on a central theme in O’Connor’s story: the hypocrisy of white supremacist Christians and our response to it. In following how this theme is explored in each of the short stories, the attentive viewer will notice a development in these stories, with Hawke trying to suggest something about how we should respond to the hypocrisy of other believers.
We may not particularly like the ending of this movie.
Wildcat is packed with Flannery O’Connor’s pithy lines, many of which are taken from her letters, and throughout the first half of the film it is a passionate critique of the complacent attitudes that pervade certain corners of the Bible Belt. “What people don’t understand is how much religion costs,” O’Connor argues at a dinner party. “They think faith is a big electric blanket, but it’s actually a cross.”
Viewers who have previously called out hypocrisy and been rejected by communities in which they were supposed to be safe may find much to empathize with O’Connor here.
In O’Connor’s stories, characters who cling to electric blankets often suffer terrible things. At the beginning of the film, O’Connor reimagines her mother (Laura Linney) as the racist Mrs. Turpin (“Apocalypse Now”), who spends her life thanking God that she is a well-off member of society, unlike the “white poor” and the “niggers.” In one particularly striking scene, Turpin imagines Christ asking her which she would rather be if she had to choose. The story ends poetically with Flannery imagining herself strangling Mrs. Turpin, declaring her a warthog from hell. Violence has always been a major theme in O’Connor’s work, but in the film these brutal acts feel like personal confessions from O’Connor.
But being the only person who notices the hypocrisy of the Christians around her has a price. Throughout the first half of the film, O’Connor feels lonely, rejected, and out of place, and that attitude permeates each of her stories. In one story, her character is mocked as antisocial; in another (“The Life You Save May Be Your Own”), she imagines herself as a deaf-mute girl who is used and abandoned by everyone around her, especially Christians who cannot tell the difference between honest people and charlatans.
Viewers who have called out hypocrisy in the past and found themselves rejected by communities that were supposed to be safe may find much to empathize with here. They may feel just as voiceless and homeless as her character, abandoned by the side of the road when warnings against wolves in sheep’s clothing go unheeded. Hawke’s portrayal of O’Connor is a poignant portrayal of what it’s like to feel misunderstood, both in real life and in the story.
When her mother confronts her about the novel, which editors keep rejecting, O’Connor explains that it’s about an atheist who sleeps with prostitutes and starts his own religion, the Church of Christ Without Christ. “A church without Christ?” her mother asks, perplexed. “Like most churches I know,” O’Connor jokes. But it’s not hard to imagine the alienation she must have felt when an editor read the story and suggested “A Church Without Christ” to her. No, that’s weird and angular It’s for publishing.
Apparently, shining a spotlight on hypocrisy doesn’t just distance a person from those they criticize; it can also make them feel more isolated and alone, with observers unable to hear or understand their experiences.
in the middle But throughout the film, O’Connor’s authorial insertions take unexpected turns. Recalling a moment of literary recognition from her college days, she tells a story in which she imagines herself as a fundamentalist woman who falls in love with and marries a tattooed, “bad boy” farm worker (“The Back of the Hoodie”). The story ends with her punching her husband, who has a tattoo of Jesus Christ on his back, screaming, “Who’s that? Not the man I know!” The irony is self-evident.
But Flannery might seem an odd character to sympathize with, given what the film has previously portrayed her as: either a helpless girl suffering under the fundamentalists’ ignorance, or an enlightened outsider who sees them for what they are. she Will they become naive, hypocritical fundamentalists?
After all, flawed humans are often poor prophets, and calling out the hypocrisy of others does little to address the problems buried deep within our own hearts.
But O’Connor is far from a perfect Christian. “My thoughts are so far removed from God’s that it’s as if he never made me,” she mutters, moments after denouncing Christianity as an electric blanket. There’s a huge well of guilt beside her easy-going condemnation of believers. In the next story (“All That Rises Converges”), she verbally berates her mother character until she has a heart attack. Her character cries out for help and realizes, perhaps for the first time, that she cares about her mother far more than she shows. Not only that, but the way she berates her mother for her hypocrisy might not be particularly endearing.
During a crucial conversation with the priest, she said, “I don’t want to seem clever… do Behind her denunciations of others’ hypocrisy, she harbours her own sin: that as a trained intellectual, she believes herself superior to these unenlightened country folk. Whether engaging with intellectuals from the University of Iowa or farmers in Georgia, she yearns to be a prophet. But in a moment of brutal honesty, she tells the priest, “I want to be a mystic, but I’m cheese. I’m a moth who wants to be king.”
This attitude is reflected in the final story (“Good Country People”), where a recent college graduate is still naive enough to be fooled by con artists: she is educated and proud, but no smarter than those who have spent half their lives on the run.
After all, flawed humans are often useless prophets, and condemning the hypocrisy of others does little to address the problems buried in our own hearts. Without denying the ugliness of hypocrisy, the film invites viewers to consider whether the devil might use such hatred for glorified behavior to instill in us a sense of self-righteous pride.
One Perhaps Christ’s most memorable parable is that of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector (Luke 18:9-14) It may also be one of the most easily misapplied: How many of us read this parable, think of people in our lives who behaved like the self-righteous Pharisee, and walk away saying, “Thank God I’m not like that”? Those people!”
But, as in the parable, Wildcat The book ends with the uncomfortable conclusion that sometimes trying to remove hypocrisy from other people’s lives may be a distraction from our own need to repent and come to Christ.
Another way to interpret the Savior’s words is that we need to deal with our own issues first before we can point out our brother’s electric blanket.
The film ends with O’Connor (whose mobility is limited by lupus) struggling to organize her room so that her desk focuses inward rather than the outside world (which for much of the film represents her desire to leave her prejudiced hometown). As she comes to terms with living at home this season, she realizes that she and her mother may have more in common than she initially admitted, since they both know what it’s like to look down on others and think they’re better than others. But now, O’Connor is able to understand who she is more honestly, with all her flaws and strengths.
Electric blankets are the deepest sins ThereIn the lives of those who dishonor Christ with their double-minded acts, the cross reminds us that suffering points to the greatest battle line between good and evil and how deeply it is fought in our hearts. To interpret the Savior’s words in another way, we must first deal with our own electric blanket before we can point out our brother’s electric blanket.
The devil wants us to see the double-mindedness of everyone but ourselves, because when we turn from the world to our own souls, we feel fear.
But Rev. O’Connor reminds her, and us, that “this idea that grace is healing omits the healing followed by the slashing with the sword that Christ said he came to bring. The path to joy begins with a hard blow. Joy is the overcoming of sorrow.”
Source: Christ and Pop Culture – christandpopculture.com
