Wise Blood
John Huston (1979)
Wise Blood was one of the first films I remember seeing when I moved to London in 1980. I wrote some notes about it at the time, starting by acknowledging that I’d not read the Flannery O’Connor material on which John Huston’s picture is based with a François Mauriac quote that the biggest problem for the intelligent religious believer is the unintelligent people who share her or his beliefs. Since I saw the movie on its original release, I’ve read Flannery O’Connor and I now wonder where I got the Mauriac maxim from: I can’t find anything online to back it up. Returning to the film this month, I find one thing that, thirty-five years on, hasn’t changed. I don’t like Huston’s Wise Blood and think it was (and remains) overrated. The main reasons for that negative opinion are also unchanged. They derive from the large difference in the worldviews of O’Connor (I knew a bit about her Roman Catholicism, even though I didn’t know her fiction, in 1980) and Huston – and the implications of that difference for this dramatisation of the novel.
My old notes include some references to contemporary, almost wholly admiring reviews of the film and what these said about Flannery O’Connor’s perspective. One reviewer alluded to her ‘anti-theology’; another called the novel Wise Blood a blend of ‘Southern Gothic, fervent Catholicism and surrealistic wit’; a third suggested that O’Connor saw the brand of luridly commercialised Christian fundamentalism preached in the American Bible Belt as a grotesque caricature of ‘true religion’. Alan Brien, in the Sunday Times, took the view that O’Connor admired Hazel Motes, the protagonist of Wise Blood. Recently demobbed, Hazel returns to his home town, which offers no future for him, and takes a train to the nearest city. (In the novel, the city is Taulkinham, Tennessee. Huston filmed Wise Blood in and around Macon, Georgia, close to Baldwin County, from where O’Connor hailed.) Hazel (Brad Dourif) fights desperately against the persistence of his past, and the sense of guilt and sin with which he was branded by his evangelist grandfather (Huston in a cameo appearance). Hazel begins to preach his own gospel – the gospel of ‘the Church of Truth Without Christ’. He says that ‘a new Jesus’ is needed, one that’s ‘all man and no Christ’.
Alan Brien suggested that Flannery O’Connor saw a courageous, fundamentally religious pilgrimage in Hazel’s attempts to erase Christ from his mind. In both book and film, Hazel is certainly more obsessed with theology than are any of the professedly and more conventionally religious characters he encounters. The spiritual effects of Protestant faith are, compared with the financial benefits it can deliver for those who peddle it, of little importance to the Bible Belt hucksters in Wise Blood – men like Hoover Shoates (Ned Beatty) or Asa Hawks (Harry Dean Stanton), who pretends to be blind as part of the sales pitch that exhorts potential customers to see the light. With the possible exception of Hawks’s daughter Sabbath Lily (Amy Wright), none of the characters but Hazel Motes has been deeply scarred by faith. The charlatans lack, as much as moral integrity, consciousness of wrongdoing. Hazel, who wants to get rid of religion, is deeply attached to it: O’Connor presents his campaign as pathologically sincere.
Wise Blood was showing this month as part of BFI’s ‘Southern Gothic’ season and the programme note comprised an extract from Scott Hammen’s biography of John Huston, including this description of her novel’s themes by Flannery O’Connor:
‘The religion of the South is a do-it-yourself religion, something which I, as a Catholic, find painful and touching and grimly comic. It’s full of unconscious pride that lands [Southern religion’s adherents] in all sorts of ridiculous religious predicaments. They have nothing to correct their practical heresies and so they work them out dramatically.’
O’Connor’s perspective on Hazel Motes seems to have been more complex than Alan Brien implied but he wasn’t wholly wrong about Hazel’s creator’s ‘admiration’. In a bizarre way, Hazel, in the context of the Bible Belt, calls to mind the line in T S Eliot’s The Family Reunion: ‘In a world of fugitives, the person taking the opposite direction will appear to run away’. The Catholic novelist, in satirising in Wise Blood the distortions to which religious faith is susceptible, was also wrestling with the definition of the believer’s problem that, rightly or wrongly, I attributed to François Mauriac. Flannery O’Connor shows compassion for Hazel Motes, forced to spend his childhood in the crude, terrorising theatre of Southern Christian fundamentalism. She succeeds in making his predicament ‘painful and touching and grimly comic’. This isn’t true of Huston’s film, in which nearly all the people, including Hazel, are shown as merely benighted. There’s little sense of a pilgrim’s regress, of Hazel’s proceeding through macabre Stations of the Cross into darkness. The screenplay was written by Benedict Fitzgerald, whose father Robert was a poet and critic and Flannery O’Connor’s literary executor. I don’t know how much, if any, conflict there was between Fitzgerald’s adaptation and John Huston’s interpretation of the material. What is clear is that, since Huston was an atheist, he didn’t see either Hazel Motes or Christianity in the way that Flannery O’Connor did. Whereas she juxtaposes and explores social and personal religious distortions, Huston lumps them together, as the effects of religion’s inevitably pernicious influence. As a result, his version of Wise Blood comes across not as a critique of a particular kind of Christianity but – since there’s no better religion in evidence than the Bible Belt version – as a more broadly anti-religious tract. This is what Huston was aiming for (see below) but ditching the novel’s underlying theological perspective without replacing it has another and more problematic consequence. The absence in the film of any non-faith-based philosophy (other than Hazel’s desperate invention), and of any human beings who aren’t stupid, makes Huston seem as much a misanthrope as a scourge of religion.
An important difference between the novel and the film is when the story is set. In O’Connor’s book (published in 1952), Hazel Motes is coming home from service in World War II. (It was his war experiences that led to the loss of Hazel’s belief in God.) In the film, he returns in military uniform but the look of the streets and the people in them suggest the 1970s (and that naturally suggests Vietnam as the place where Hazel was a soldier). John Huston no doubt wanted to make the point that the Bible Belt hadn’t moved with the decades: there’s no updating of the main characters and Hazel wears the same, unusual preaching garb and hat that he wears in the book. Yet, because the physical environment and the local residents whom Huston used as extras had altered, the city on the screen has a more secular atmosphere than it might have had more than thirty years previously. The film’s palette (the cinematographer was Gerry Fisher) favours earth tones – greens, greys, muddy browns – and there isn’t much sense of epidemic religiosity. The people who gather in the street to watch the anti-religious Hazel and the religious salesmen preach appear dully uncomprehending. It’s a community that certainly looks in need of some kind of redemption. Huston’s intention may be to illustrate the mind-numbing effects of religion but the effect is rather to imply that the towns of the American South are a fertile breeding ground for fundamentalist belief because their citizens are congenitally dim-witted. (Fans of the film may see it as a ‘delicious’ joke but the same implication comes through in the opening credits, presented as a series of local street signs, with Huston’s forename, which appears several times, always misspelt ‘Jhon’.)
What Flannery O’Connor saw as a confounded distortion of religious faith, Huston presents as typical of it. In an interview with Time Out when Wise Blood was first released in Britain, Huston said that hoped to make religious believers aware of his own belief that all religion is ‘a voodoo’. He may have succeeded in that aim but it’s doubtful if the resulting ‘awareness’ led to many believers reappraising their beliefs. The widespread critical feting of Wise Blood reflects much more the benefits for a film-maker of preaching to the converted. Even in 1979 (which also saw the release of Monty Python’s Life of Brian), it puzzled me, given the continuing decline of faith in Europe and North America, that there was still such an anxious appetite for lampoons of religion. (Today, even though the decline has accelerated, it’s easier to understand why this appetite has increased: religious belief has, rightly or wrongly, become more closely identified with political extremism.) John Huston appears to take the view in Wise Blood that, because he’s describing a culture in which religion is fundamental(ist), all the ills of that culture – racism, for example – can be blamed on its religious aspect but the story includes bad behaviour that can’t be explained in this way. The laidback malice of a traffic cop, for example, is nothing to do with religious belief in either a conventional or a perverted form. The episode featuring this character is taken from the book but Huston’s and Flannery O’Connor’s moral world orders are poles apart: what the policeman does in the film is gratuitously nasty. More important, Huston’s lack of interest in religion and, consequently, in the protagonist of Wise Blood, results in his fudging the question of whether or not Hazel Motes is an aberration.
Hazel’s odd appearance makes him look, in 1970s America, as much a time traveller as a preacher – but how is he distinct, other than sartorially, from the other characters? Huston doesn’t engage with the question of how, if all the people in the story grew up in the same socio-religious culture, religion has imprinted itself on Hazel’s mind so uniquely. Flannery O’Connor conceived and described the character of Hazel as a moral exemplar – an illustration of how far away (what she saw as) DIY religion could take you from (what she saw as) true religion. Huston is simply shrugging his shoulders and asking, ‘What else can you expect if people are religious?’ He isn’t, unlike, say, Luis Buñuel, inveighing against religion as a social and political tyranny. Buñuel, for all his supposed anarchism, shows the injurious effects of organised religious authority on community in a way that Huston doesn’t here.
The tone of Wise Blood darkens only in the final sequences of Hazel’s self-mortification. For most of the film, the register is one of relaxed contempt, reinforced by the accompanying bluegrass banjo music (arranged by Alex North). To counterbalance his own insouciance, Huston either allows or encourages Brad Dourif to give a monotonously intense lead performance. One or two of the people in minor roles, such as the actor who plays a car salesman, have a quasi-documentary strength but the better-known members of the cast, with the honourable exception of Ned Beatty, emphasise too strongly how hopeless or corrupted their characters are. William Hickey, who plays another preacher, cuts a very striking figure although, like Dourif, he also looks somewhat anachronistic. The ending of Wise Blood on screen is more ambiguous than the novel about whether Hazel Motes has died. Hazel blinds himself, puts sharp stones in his shoes, wraps barbed wire round his chest. When Mrs Flood (Mary Nell Santacroce), the landlady of the boarding house where he rents a room, says that she’ll look after Hazel only if he agrees to marry her, he walks out into a thunderstorm. It’s clear in the book that, when Hazel’s body is found, three days later, and returned to the boarding house by the police, it’s a corpse – and that Mrs Flood is deluded in continuing to talk to him. Huston prefers to show Hazel destroying himself without confirming his physical death.
The memorable title is explained by Enoch Emery, a teenager who’s come to the city, where he works as a zookeeper, after being kicked out of his home by an abusive father. Enoch believes that he has ‘wise blood’ – an innate sense of where he wants to get to next in life that means he has no need of spiritual guidance. Although Hazel rebuffs him, repeatedly and cruelly, Enoch is anxious to be his friend. Dan Shor, who plays Enoch, is also trying too hard to be ingratiating although he’s remarkable to watch whenever Enoch breaks into a run, as he does several times. The handling of the subplot involving Enoch and Gonga the Giant Jungle Monarch, an animal movie star, is perfunctory. (Gonga’s new film is opening in the city and the gorilla himself is appearing there as part of the promotion. The childlike Enoch is in the queue to shake Gonga’s hand, and when he realises that Gonga is a man dressed as a gorilla, he plans to steal and wear the costume, and does so.) John Huston was quoted in the Time Out interview as finding the story of Wise Blood ‘terribly funny and terrible’ but most of the humour he’s put on the screen is terrible only in the weakly pejorative sense of the word. I saw the film at an Everyman cinema in 1980 and noticed that the audience laughed mostly at the Deep South accents, cars being rammed, and Enoch in the stolen gorilla costume inadvertently scaring a couple of old age pensioners. It was exactly the same at BFI in 2015. I wonder what it’s like to be able enjoy Wise Blood as if it were The Dukes of Hazzard then congratulate yourself on having partaken of a coruscating religious satire.
17 May 2015