Wise Blood: Novel and Film

Flannery O’Connor’s short novel Wise Blood, the first of two short novels completed during her lifetime, was published in 1952. It was the first major work of her short career. The novel is set in the latter half of the 1940s, at a time when the American South was entering a period of major change. GIs, returned from the Second World War, were taking advantage of the G. I. Bill and entering institutions of higher education. When they graduated, they would enter the work force and contribute to major expansion of the regional and national economy. Institutions of higher education would never be the same and began a period of expansion that continues today. Eisenhower’s interstate road act (1956) formally initiated a period of road building that had been ongoing for some time and that would connect the South with the rest of the nation. Faster and safer airplanes would connect it with the rest of the world. The continued growth of radio and the new industry of television began a leveling process that began to chisel away at many aspects of the distinctive southern character: dialect, lifestyle, isolation. David Halberstam’s book The Fifties discusses the crucial changes that occurred nationally in the 1950s and that contributed significantly to the national character. Some of the changes mentioned here were going on before the novel was published and continued afterward. The Eisenhower Act is evidence of a trend in road-building that was in evidence when Wise Blood appeared.

One of the major changes that continued and intensified in this area (a trend that had begun decades before but that now accelerated) was urban growth. Southern cities offered excitement, connections with other people and other parts of the nation, and jobs. As agriculture increasingly relied on mechanization, therefore requiring a smaller work force, people who decades before would have lived out their lives without ever entering a large city now moved there. A major population shift began to occur.

Socially, culturally, demographically, these changes heralded the birth of the modern South. I mark 1945 and the end of World War II as the starting date for that new era. For Flannery O’Connor, the changes were symptoms of a shift away from spirituality towards secularism. This shift from the traditional to the modern, from a way of life where matters of the spirit were important, to a way of life where for many people religion had lost its importance, if it continued to matter at all, occasioned struggles and conflicts that became the central focus of O’Connor’s fiction. They are at the heart of the novel Wise Blood. These changes are hardly specific and limited to the American South. They began with the Renaissance and represent a marked distinction between the medieval world and the modern. It is this difference that O’Connor was most interested in.

When Hazel Motes returns from four years of service in the military, presumably service in the Second World War (he was wounded, apparently, but does not want to reveal where on his body), he discovers an altered and transformed world. The small town near where he grew up has almost disappeared. Everyone has moved to the city. The house where he grew up is a broken down shack. His mother had died before he left for military service, and now all that remains of her is the chiffarobe on which he leaves his note threatening that anyone who takes the chiffarobe will be “hunted down and killed.” It’s evident in both the film and the novel that his family has been gone from the house a long time. One can imagine their leaving almost as soon as Hazel left for military service. He did not stay in touch, nor did they with him, and therefore he has no idea what happened or where they have gone. His world has wholly vanished. In the novel, O’Connor tells us that Hazel sleeps the night through on the kitchen room floor. In the film, Huston shows Hazel gazing at the family cemetery where his grandfather, the preacher, lies buried—the preacher whose memory haunts him throughout the film. Whatever it is that happened to Hazel in the war, along with the disappearance of the world of his family and his childhood, clearly contributes to the new religion he goes to spread in Taulkinham.

O’Connor intensifies the atmosphere of change in the novel with descriptions of commercialism and technology (the potato peeler salesman, the movie theaters), sexual looseness, false prophets, and images of apes, monkeys, mummies, and zoo animals. Why the references to animals and monkeys? One of the concerns of the novel is the question of the nature of man without a spiritual existence. The soul, O’Connor might argue, is what distinguishes the human world from the animal world. When Enoch Emery enters the zoo and looks suspiciously at various animals, especially the chimpanzee, he is looking in a sense at reflections of himself. In the modern world, governed by science, belief in scientific theories such as evolution, which argue for the interconnections of the animal and human worlds, these images have a specific meaning. Enoch’s fascination with the mummy, which actually once was (presumably) a human being, builds this theme. His donning of the gorilla costume at the end of the novel is its culmination.

John Huston’s adaptation moves the time of the story from the late 1940s to around 1970. Rather than returning from the Second World War, Hazel is returning from Vietnam. Thus, we can if we wish see him as a wounded war veteran (shades of Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country) trying to cope and adjust to his life back from the war. But Huston is faithful, or largely so, to the text of the novel. Just as in the novel, with a slightly altered sequence of events, Hazel comes home, visits his abandoned family homestead, and recognizes that the world where he once lived has disappeared. Because of his insistence on fidelity to O’Connor’s text, the themes of change in the novel remain in the film, though in fact the South of the film has already largely undergone the changes that had been underway when the novel was published in 1952. By modernizing the story, Huston forfeits a certain degree of authenticity. In the film, it is not so much the changed world that Hazel must cope with as it is the modern city, and all the evils and temptations that it offers. Hazel goes to the big city because there is nowhere else for him to go, but also to preach the new religion, the Church of Christ without Christ. By re-dating the story, Huston forfeits some of the logic and sense that lay behind O’Connor’s portraitures of Hazel and Enoch and of the other characters as well. In the long run, this does not much affect the film, which succeeds in large part because of Huston’s skill as a director and his insistence on presenting in the film the tone, characters, and themes of O’Connor’s novel, pretty much using the same terms with which she presented them.

Huston succeeds in modernizing most aspects of the novel, but there are a few exceptions. Mrs. Leora Watts charges $4.00 for a night of pleasure in her bed. Even given that it is Leora, $4 seems a small charge for 1970. Also, the car that Hazel buys (in the novel, we are told that it is an Essex, an automobile that was manufactured in America between 1918 and 1932) looks as if it could have been a jalopy in 1952, not to mention 1970.

O’Connor presents in Wise Blood three different but related avenues to belief in the modern world. Huston’s film preserves these, but because it leaves out details, especially about Enoch Emery and Onnie Jay Holy, the distinctions are blurred. In Huston’s film, Hazel Motes is clearly the main character, with Enoch as a kind of sidekick who moves in and out of the film, disappearing permanently in the gorilla costume towards the end. In the novel, O’Connor parallels Hazel and Enoch. Although not of equal importance (Hazel is, because of his nature, the ultimate focus of the story) they are of more nearly equal importance.

Huston’s film obscures the religious themes in the novel without removing them. One can recognize O’Connor’s themes and concerns in his film because he has been so careful in adopting the novel. Yet the differences between Hazel and Enoch are much clearer, and more thoroughly outlined and explained in the novel than in the film. Huston’s characters in Wise Blood are country folk come to the city in search of whatever adventure or opportunity might be there, but they are also deeply in search of meaning, a way of understanding and explaining the world that has changed unexpectedly on them. For O’Connor, in addition to that theme, there is the additional theme of the nature of faith and belief in the modern world. She presents that theme far more clearly in her novel than Huston does in his film, because Huston has chosen a slightly different emphasis.

Why is Huston’s film a successful adaptation? First, it’s clear that the screenwriter Benedict Fitzgerald understood and appreciated the novel. He made a few major changes, such as changing the action of the film from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, downplaying the character of Enoch and leaving out several scenes such as one at the swimming pool near the zoo, but for the most part he retained the important characters, setting, themes, images, and moods. Fitzgerald has written screenplays for only a few films. In addition to Wise Blood, he contributed to the screenplay for The Passion of the Christ, a 1998 television version of Moby Dick , and a 1994 television version of Heart of Darkness. His involvement in The Passion evinces a willingness to deal with close to the bone religious content, and that willingness is I think a key to the success he had with O’Connor’s novel. She was a religious novelist, and her novel Wise Blood is dealing with concerns about the state of religious faith in the modern world. Fitzgerald does not veer away from that subject matter, although he and Huston do seem to simplify and perhaps to obscure some of the themes O’Connor was exploring.

Huston himself was a lapsed Irish Catholic. He brought that background to bear in his adaptation of Joyce’s The Dead. He may have been able to view O’Connor’s novel through the same theological lens that she did, or at least he may have been able to understand her perspective. In the film, Huston plays the role of Hazel Mote’s grandfather. He comports himself well in that minor role, which he fills with an apparent relish.

The script is a minimalist kind of effort. It follows O’Connor’s own dialogue fairly closely, though some lines are altered or moved from one character in the novel to another in the film. But for the most part it is O’Connor’s dialogue that the film employs.

The film’s setting is well chosen. Much of the film was shot in Macon, Georgia, and if you visit that city even today you can recognize areas that the film portrayed. The setting provides much local color of a sort that is suited for the story—movie theaters, crosswalks, churches, run-down boarding houses.

I have always had to give thought to the question of whether the musical tune that Huston chose for his theme is appropriate—“The Tennessee Waltz.” There is a sentimentality to the tune that threatens at a few moments to infest the film, but instead it has the effect of encouraging the viewer to see Hazel with a bit more empathy and sympathy the viewer would otherwise feel. On one occasion bluegrass music turns a scene with Enoch Emery almost into slapstick comedy—this is when he is stealing the mummy from the “Mvsevm.” The film makes Enoch out to be more of a clown than the novel does, and it does not fully investigate the nature of his obsession with the money. In general, however, the “Tennessee Waltz” theme invests the film’s treatment of its characters with a sympathy and humanism that one might be tempted to argue is missing in O’Connor’s novels. O’Connor was very effective at portraying characters but not especially willing to show them any sympathy. Witness the fate of the family at the end of “A Good Man is Hard to Find” or even of Hazel Motes’ fate at the end of her novel.

Huston himself excelled as a director of literary adaptations. One of my favorite by him is the 1957 version of Moby Dick. The film is marred by poor special effects, but it has a genuine intelligence in its treatment of the story, and a respect for the story itself. Huston apparently felt the story was worth telling because it was a good story, and his treatment of Melville’s novel, as well as of O’Connor’s, reflects that respect. Another successful adaptation is his 1986 film The Dead, adapted from the story by James Joyce, the last story in his book Dubliners.

Huston in the film uses mostly minor actors, some of them amateurs. Harry Dean Stanton and Ned Beatty are the major names in the film, though Dourif was emerging as a known actor after his rolls in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and W. W. and the Dixie Dance Kings. None of these three was an acting phenomenon, a celebrity, so there is no actor in the film whose celebrity overwhelms the acting and the story. The part of Onnie Jay Holy is the kind of role at which Beatty excels. Dourif was not a major actor at the time of the film. In particular the roles of Sabbath Lily and of the boarding house keeper (played by Atlanta actress Mary Nell Santacroce) were excellent. (The film strips away the deceit and underhandedness of the boarding house keeper in the novel. The film’s house lady is more sympathetic, less devious than her counterpart in the novel). The casting allowed the actors in this film to inhabit their roles in a transparent way, so that they became the roles they played—they were not celebrities playing their roles. This is an argument in favor of casting unknowns or little knowns in film roles—so that their public personae do not run away with their parts.

Wise Blood is an excellent novel. It improves with each reading. By sticking close to the text of the novel, the movie was able to exploit and appropriate its strengths. The film is distinctive for the same reasons as the novel. It effectively projects O’Connor’s vision of the modern South, even though it is set two decades later than her novel. Wise Blood is one of a number of remarkable films made during the 1970s, one of the two great decades in American cinema, the other being the 1930s.

The fact that this film is not available on DVD is most unfortunate!