Wise Blood

Since I've been reading Flannery O'Connor's stories lately for my book club, I decided to rent the 1979 John Huston film Wise Blood, which is based on one of her novels.

If you can get over the wierdness, this movie has some interesting things to say. There's more than one scene where I was tempted to look away, and yet the film showed me some things about myself that I might not have seen without its disturbing content. In forcing myself to look, I was able to see. In this sense, it is actually good to look at something that could easily be considered inappropriate or offensive.

The film's story follows a young man named Hazel, recently released from the army in what one presumes to be post-World War II years; he returns to his small Southern hometown to find that an interstate has replaced the dirt road, and his family home is deserted and run-down. He unsentimentally disposes of his uniform and buys a sharp 50's-style suit and wide-brimmed, respectable-looking hat. A cab driver who soon after delivers him to a prostitute's house accuses him of looking like a preacher, a comment which infuriates him.

As we learn through a series of flashbacks, Hazel actually embodies a sort of uptight moralism---raised on angry gospel preaching that inspired self-flagellation in him as a child, he is now trying to reject the condemned feelings of his past by living above the reach of conscience and even developing a "Church of the Truth without Christ," a church that says we have no need for forgiveness, redemption, or morality. He seems to represent the worst of fundamentalism: an unbearable burden of guilt which gives him no peace and drives him to self-destruction of two types: the first, a rejection of all faith and conscience in an attempt to escape guilt, and the second, actual bodily and emotional harm done to "pay" for his sins.

Preachers are represented as unequivocally evil, either as shams who have no pretense of real belief in their private lives, like the evangelist who pretends to be blind in order to make money on the street-corner, or as guilt-peddlers like Hazel's relatives who only preach hellfire and drive innocent children like Hazel crazy with guilt.

Ironically, Hazel is accused of being a papist for his self-flagellating ways, which actually stem from his strictly non-Catholic southern fundamentalist upbringing. The main virtue of both his religious upbringing and his nihilistic "Church without Christ," is that both are "not foreign," i.e. Protestant & thus American, ala the ku klux klan. Since Flannery O'Connor was Catholic, it leads one to consider that a middle-ground, a faith that is healthy, moderate, and yet still literal and orthodox, is possibly to be found in the Catholic faith rather than this destructive fundamentalism.

One of the subplots I found most interesting is the presence of desperate women who are willing to do anything to possess Hazel, despite his patent kookiness: they say things like "I don't care if you like me...I don't care if you hit me...You're a sick man, I can take care of you, we just need to get married" and that sort of thing. These extreme and pitiful portrayals of women always hit me right at home...why does this seem to be a weakness of my sex?

Another recurrence is Hazel's irrational, even spiritual, reliance on his car. "Anyone with a good car doesn't need to be justified." Ouch--sort of hurts as an American. Do we subconsciously depend on our cars/lifestyles for a feeling of spiritual safety? As long as he can "get where he needs to go" he runs and runs from his conscience and preaches that faith is all a fantasy. It is only when his car is destroyed and that prop is pulled from under him that he's forced back to his guilt...and to his former, destructive way of facing it.

The music is charming and Southern, almost too light for the content of the movie, but I suppose it adds to the whimsical mood. The main actor, Brad Dourif, possesses a skinny, intense, pointed face that does make him look like an uptight preacher and is eerie combined with his strange behavior and his prim suit and hat.

Altogether, this is a strange movie filled with fascinating "minor" characters and a few disturbing images that in the end serve to highlight some really profound issues.

Vocabulary

When I was in fourth grade, our class undertook an intensive (& competitive) vocabulary study called Wordmasters, in which we particpated in three challenging analogy tests and our scores were compared against other fourth-graders nationwide. We learned those words inside & out, and every possible relationship they could have to each other, as well as every nuance of their meanings.

This phenomenon occurred where we would be reading a book for the class and see one of our Wordmasters words in the book...all of a sudden we knew what "agile" or "azure" meant, and it had a magical feeling, like it was put in that novel just for us, to reinforce our word study, or at least to demonstrate to ourselves how smart we were (we won the national competition). It seemed strange to us that the word was actually there, in usage in the real outside world. I still find this happening today, when I learn a new, big word and see it in a book.

Our teacher, Mrs. Cook, reminded us that it might seem like these words are occurring more often since we learned them, but they've been there all along and nothing has changed. (She was a realist). To us, it seemed special.

Lately I've experienced this phenomenon in a different, less pleasant way. When you feel guilty, or at least anxious, about something you've done, or should do, does it ever seem like related phrases are popping up everywhere? Words that distinctly remind you of the person you've wronged, or with whom your relationship is a bit off and you're avoiding trying to fix it. Or words like "passive-aggressive" popping up in the unlikeliest of places, in a joke even, but it strikes you as serious because you know that's what you happen to be right now. Sometimes it seems like words are ambushing me on every side (from every type of media) and won't give me a rest from dealing with whatever problem it is, or feeling drawn to that person I'm not right with.

There are a few possible beliefs about this phenomenon: either Mrs. Cook is right, and it's just a coincidence, and a self-imposed, neurotic guilt, or maybe God is using them to speak to me, to keep my heart from getting hard because I'm afraid or unable to deal...these words force me to "deal" by taking me off guard, emotional defenses down and reminding me in a tender way of that thing, that person that I temporarily "forgot," and thus motivating me to consider what I should do, and that I can't just forget a person or escape this problem. Just as it seemed every novelist was out to help us with Wordmasters, it really does seem that God is out to help me learn how to live by using the random word out of context.