Ethan Hawke’s Wildcat rescued Flannery O’Connor’s brilliantly bleak work for me

I got most of my creative writing and literature education in Florida, so the works of Flannery O’Connor, the author at the center of Ethan Hawke’s new movie Wildcat, were heavily featured in my curriculum. Her Southern Gothic short stories, with their regionally specific character and settings and often violent scenarios, were staples of my classes from high school through college. “A Good Man is Hard to Find” shocked my classmates in AP English Literature with its bleak ending, but I was fascinated. My college creative writing workshops usually featured at least one O’Connor story in the curriculum, with a focus on how she conveys strong themes in the limited space of a short story, and on her sharp grasp of hypocritical human behavior.

Many of my peers strove to emulate her unflinchingly brutal content and style, which directly led to them critiquing my work for not having the dark, gritty quality they associated with stories like “Greenleaf” or “A Circle in the Fire.” Personally, I love O’Connor’s short stories because of her strong characterization and the unflinching look at the American South. And I love to read dark stories, even though I don’t enjoy writing them myself. But as much as I love O’Connor’s prose, part of me still associates her with a sense of not being good enough as a writer — at least among my peers.

But Wildcat helped me recontextualize O’Connor and her work, and fully embrace my love for her writing as something separate from my own. The movie is about 80% biographical, with the rest drawing on O’Connor’s fiction. It finds the author (played by Stranger Things’ Maya Hawke, Ethan Hawke’s daughter) in the days before and after her lupus diagnosis, interleaved with micro adaptations of her most famous short stories, like “Everything That Rises Must Converge” and “Good Country People.”

Image: Oscilloscope Laboratories/Everett Collection

One key scene in the movie resonated with me most, because I’ve been in a variation of the same situation. A flashback scene shows O’Connor reading one of her stories in front of her creative writing class. Like the other stories weaving through this movie, “Parker’s Back” turns into a short film of its own, starring Maya Hawke as Parker’s wife, while she also narrates as O’Connor. When the scene transitions back to O’Connor reading in front of her class, her classmates (mostly men) stare at her, dumbfounded. No one seems to get her story, except for her professor.

But O’Connor doesn’t care. She knows why she wrote what she wrote, and she knows what she’s trying to say. And frankly, she’s not interested in listening to her small-minded peers explaining what she should be doing instead, like softening the language her characters use in order to make her work more commercially viable.

Hawke’s portrayal of O’Connor is stellar. She plays the author as sullen and stubborn, unwilling to let her classmates’ petty critiques get her down. At a department party, she lurks in the corner until she’s drawn into a debate about the Eucharist. She’s uncompromisingly herself in everything she does — from arguing with her publisher at the beginning of the movie to the moment she rearranges her office space after her lupus diagnosis.

Image: Oscilloscope Laboratories/Everett Collection

Ethan Hawke’s built-in short-story adaptations also emphasize O’Connor’s distinct perspective. For instance, a scene where O’Connor’s mother and her mother’s friend, two well-meaning but ultimately small-minded Southern women, drone on about updates in their small town, is interspersed with her short story “Revelation,” in which a prejudiced woman in a doctor’s waiting room makes racist and classist comments to the people around her. The short story is clearly informed by O’Connor’s environment and how she views the people around her. All her short stories come from the way she views the world, a fact repeatedly emphasized throughout the movie, though possibly at the cost of showing viewers more about her life.

But that message was what I needed to hear, and why Wildcat lands better for me as an exploration of O’Connor’s works than an informative biopic. I shouldn’t be trying to write like Flannery O’Connor, because only she could do that. My former classmates who strove to be just as sardonic in their writing — and criticized me for not doing the same — should’ve taken away something entirely different from Flannery O’Connor. Her short stories are fantastic because she wasn’t trying to be like anyone else. She had a specific, unique perspective on the world, and that’s what she tried to convey in her works. No one else could write her stories. Wildcat helped me realize that was one of her greatest strengths.

Wildcat is currently in limited theatrical release, with a wide release coming later this year.