Angelus News | May 17, 2024 | Vol. 9 No. 10

Elizabeth Hardwick, who dismisses it
as merely a symbol.
O’Connor responds: “Well, if it’s a
symbol, to hell with it.” It’s a great
line, and it affirms O’Connor as a
defender of the faith among secular
intellectuals. Yet the line lands oddly
in the film — and encapsulates one
challenge in adapting O’Connor’s life
for the screen.
In “Wildcat,” the quip about the
symbol is spoken by a Protestant
writer at a party in Iowa City. The
reality is much different. In a December
1955 letter, O’Connor described
the event as a scene. Around 1950,
O’Connor went to dinner with Lowell
and Hardwick, along with Mary
McCarthy, a novelist who grew up
Catholic but left the Church. O’Connor
felt terribly out of place.
“Having me there,” O’Connor recalled,
“was like having a dog present
who had been trained to say a few
words but overcome with inadequacy
had forgotten them.” McCarthy,
in reality, was the one to make the
comment about the Eucharist being
a symbol — the comment having the
sharpness of a Catholic who had left
the faith, and now only appreciated it
for its literary trappings.
This isn’t merely splitting hairs. By
having Hardwick deliver the line
in the film, O’Connor comes off as
a provincial, small-town scold who
corrects a Protestant on a manner of
life in “Wildcat” — including an
implied attraction between her and
Lowell, who is recast in the film as her
professor — distract from the arresting,
central story of her life.
The film is at its best when it creates
sharp, almost hallucinatory moments
that blur O’Connor’s life and her
fiction. O’Connor often wrote about
Christians who skewed religion in
their own interests, including literalists
whose misunderstanding of
Scripture led to prejudice.
That vision comes alive in the film’s
depiction of her story “Parker’s Back,”
a brilliant tale of how a fundamentalist
woman falls for a heavily tattooed,
often acerbic man. In the story, Sarah
Ruth and Obadiah Elihue Parker
make an unlikely couple; she is
attracted to him, but also repelled by
his atheism.
After an accident stirs his fascination
with God, he gets a deeply intricate
tattoo of the face of Christ on his
back. He returns to Sarah Ruth and
takes off his shirt, hoping that she will
recognize his faith and accept him
again, but she reacts violently, screaming
at him that the tattoo is sinful.
Her fundamentalist view causes her
to mistake iconography for idolatry;
in ways both literal and metaphorical,
she is unable to see Christ when he is
right in front of her.
Maya Hawke’s portrayal of Sarah
Ruth and Rafael Casal’s performance
through her characters; not through a
desire to be like them, but to investigate
the mysteries of this world.
“Wildcat” is marked by an unusual
structure, interspersing real and imagined
moments without transitions,
effectively capturing the drifting and
brilliant mind of a fiction writer. Yet
the challenge of the movie is that it
will make the most sense to those who
already know O’Connor well, and it
will frustrate those same viewers. The
blessing and burden of O’Connor,
perhaps, is that we can never recreate
her short, troubled, and brilliant life.
Her fiction is her best testament.
Nick Ripatrazone is a culture editor
for Image Journal and a high school
literature teacher in New Jersey. He is
the author of the book, “The Habit of
Poetry: The Literary Lives of Nuns in
Mid-century America” (Fortress Press,
$28.99).
Film is always fiction; a movie requires a bending
and flattening of reality. Yet the revisions to
O’Connor’s life in “Wildcat” distract from the
arresting, central story of her life.
doctrine. In reality, O’Connor was
challenging a fellow Catholic to confront
her lost faith. She was affirming
the real presence of Christ.
Film is always fiction; a movie
requires a bending and flattening of
reality. Yet the revisions to O’Connor’s
of Parker show two people falling into
each other in lust and repelling in anger.
Hawke, as director, almost seems
freed in these moments of depicting
literature rather than life. O’Connor
died at 39 from lupus; her existence
was marked by suffering. She lived
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