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

polygon.com:

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.”

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