A look at the new film Wildcat:
Anyway – As Wildcat opens, we see a fake movie trailer for a film called Star Drake which is really the short story “The Comforts of Home” – it’s in black and white in the most lurid, sensationalist 50’s melodramatic formatting you can imagine. Very entertaining. But of course, with also very little relation to the actual story. What I think was going on here was a message to the audience and a reflection of the way in which O’Connor’s stories have often been received: with an emphasis on the grotesque, the violent and the sensational, and with everyone pretty much missing the point.
Just wait, I felt it was saying to me – you don’t get her. You think this is what she’s about with the nymphomaniac and the gun? You’re wrong, and we’re going to give you a clue. Just watch.
It’s strange and disorienting and not immediately or easily comprehensible. Just like Flannery’s writing, which is the point. This is the entry point, and it makes sense. A disorienting entry point to meeting a disorienting writer. I liked it.
But as the film proceeds and the story vignettes are interwoven with aspects of Flannery’s life that, it is suggested, inspired them (problematic for reasons I write about here), the deficiencies of the film’s vision emerge. Let’s talk about two of the dramatizations in particular: “Revelation” and “Everything that Rises Must Converge.”
