Her neighbors didn’t see her as a brilliant author but as the strange woman with all the peacocks.
Flannery O’Connor (1925–64) lived most of her life on a farm with her mother where she kept as many as 40 peacocks at one time. With a debilitating illness and a specific temperament, O’Connor did little else other than write and keep livestock. So when father and daughter Ethan and Maya Hawke decided to make a movie about the Southern Gothic writer, they knew they had a challenge. How do you make an engaging film about such a short and quiet life?
With Wildcat, the Hawkes have made a thoughtful and engaging portrait—one that takes seriously O’Connor’s Christian faith and explores the tensions between an artist’s quiet diligence and desired public recognition.
Unseen and Unappreciated
The film chronicles the early years of O’Connor’s career as she struggles to fit in among the uppity peers she studies with in the North and the uneducated folks she lives with in the South. Her loneliness is palpable. Among her peers, she’s the weird Catholic who still believes in God and, maybe even worse, transubstantiation. Among her friends and family, she makes references no one understands and looks down on the comfortable cultural Christianity most people around her practice.
In a word, O’Connor feels unseen. Early in the film, a publisher talks down to her, telling her the early draft of her novel Wise Blood is too strange to publish. He wonders why she feels the need to push pins into her readers. The publisher, behind his large oak desk, isn’t the only one who thinks her stories are strange and unsettling. O’Connor’s mother fails to appreciate the genius living under her roof. Welcome to one of the most vulnerable and painful of all human emotions: feeling overlooked by the people you love the most. It won’t be the last time this feeling haunts O’Connor in the film.
She begins to feel seen by a love interest at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She’s herself with him, comfortable and happy—a peacock beginning to unfurl its feathers. Then he marries another woman who can more easily look and act the part of a 1950s wife. O’Connor must reckon with the fact that someone she loved didn’t love her back in the same way. In these three spheres of her life—work, family, and romance—O’Connor feels unseen and unappreciated.
Costumes of Righteousness
The desire to be seen and celebrated became a major temptation for O’Connor. To be sure, these desires aren’t inherently sinful. But O’Connor recognized that they can become idolatrous when we expect validation from others without first seeking it from God, when our desire to be seen arises out of self-centered pride, or when we desire to be seen as something we’re not. And if these “peacocking” distortions were potent in O’Connor’s day, how much more are they for us in the age of social media?
O’Connor’s wariness of the perils of “peacocking” was likely informed by her deep familiarity with the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5–7). Jesus warns against our tendency to prioritize appearing righteous over authentically practicing righteousness. We tend to put on “costumes” of righteousness to receive applause, shedding the facade in the unseen places of private life. We long for others to see us as beautiful, righteous, and accomplished, but it’s more important to us that we seem that way than actually be that way.
But this sort of hypocrisy comes with serious dangers—not only for those around us whom we deceive but also for ourselves. O’Connor’s fiction routinely explores this—unmaking the dark realities that often lurk inside polished, even pious, outward veneers.
Some of her most memorable characters include an atheist itinerant preacher who preaches a “Church of Christ without Christ” while sleeping with a prostitute, a Bible salesman who steals a woman’s prosthetic leg, and a husband who drinks, smokes, and tries to impress his fundamentalist wife by getting a tattoo of Jesus on his back. These characters show up in Wildcat—snippets of O’Connor’s stories are creatively woven throughout the film.
O’Connor’s frank approach to sin and depravity was shocking at the time, but it stemmed from her devout Catholic faith and keen observations of people. She understood the sin and corruption crouching within all people—including herself.
Wildcat emphasizes this by having Maya’s O’Connor show up as characters in the visualized snippets of her short stories. As an author, she’s not distant and aloof from the stories she tells; she’s part of these dark dramas that emerge from her mind. Several of these mini adaptations are effective, while others come across as awkward or, worse, humorous when they aren’t supposed to be funny.
Eclipsing the Moon
To underscore O’Connor’s struggles with piety and virtue, Wildcat incorporates her private prayers, many taken directly from a journal where she recorded her thoughts, insecurities, ambitions, and prayers (posthumously published as A Prayer Journal in 2013). In these intimate prayers, O’Connor confesses moments when she’s “too weak even to get out a prayer for anything much except trifles” and how her mind gravitates toward a self-centered orbit even during the height of a church service. She admits her soul is “a moth who would be king.”
We long for others to see us as beautiful, righteous, and accomplished, but it’s more important to us that we seem that way than actually be that way.
In an undated entry she probably wrote when she was 20 or 21, O’Connor compares God to “the slim crescent of a moon” and herself to the earth eclipsing the moon’s majority. “I do not know You God because I am in the way,” she admits, “Please help me to push myself aside.”
In her early 20s, O’Connor discovered something many of us today would do well to remember: we have trouble seeing God because we exert so much energy getting others to see us. O’Connor recognized the potential spiritual perils of peacocking—when we unfurl our feathers, we can eclipse the moon.
But in eclipsing God, we cut off the source of our greatest love and the greatest inspiration for all our creative pursuits. Only our Creator sees and knows us perfectly. Only his glory is a grand enough goal to sustain us in often tiresome and thankless work. We need to focus less on getting others to see us and more on making our one desire to see him (Ps. 27:4). He sees every facet of us: our beauty, pain, goodness, and hypocrisy. And his love for us depends on none of this.
When we remember that our entire life is lived before the face of God, we don’t need to perform for others or even for him. The need to be seen by others and the need to post our every achievement lessens. God saw O’Connor when she was writing and when she was writhing on her sickbed. He sees us too.
For him, we need not even unfurl our feathers.
