LITERATURE

THE UNLIKELIEST ART TWINS IN THE WORLD

Hipster Director Martin McDonagh and Flannery O'Connor believe in a quite interesting God

By Zonghao Mo

Look at what that movie character is reading

We tend to think in differences, both big, small, and in-between, and this goes for artists, countries, people, everything. And so, we can miss connections that are sometimes staring us right in the face. On the surface, there could be no greater distance than that between Martin McDonagh and Flannery O’Connor. He’s a cosmopolitan Londoner, married to the equally cosmopolitan Phoebe Waller-Bridge and O’Connor was a hyper-religious Southerner from deep rural Georgia. You won’t find these two at the same party, but there are more than a few, fascinating connections between them, and they have to do with how they understand God and Man.

McDonagh was raised Roman Catholic, but left the church at a young age. He was born on 26 March, 1970 and brought up in London. He is a successful playwright, screenwriter, producer, and director. He began his film career in 1998 with an Oscar-winning short that would later become In Bruges. He wrote, directed, and produced Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri in 2017. O’Connor was born on March 25, 1925, in Savannah, Georgia. She was what people sometimes call a Southern regional writer who mastered a kind of gothic, sardonic, religious style. Her writing is a reflection of her Roman Catholic faith and her stories frequently examine questions of morality and ethics. One of her most famous works is her short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” which McDonagh references in his movie, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

A Wicked Sense of Humor

So, what do we mean by a connection? Well, we’re really talking about an affinity with one and other, a way of looking at the world that’s quite similar. And I would say a way of understanding the idea of God or the presence of God in everyday life. O’Connor’s God is faithful to people if they are faithful to him. She believes God is present in all aspects of a person’s life, no matter how distant or strange; she believes God will help anyone; she believes God will grace anyone with his presence. While studying in graduate school, O’Connor kept a diary in which she talked to God. It is a striking document and was reprinted in The New Yorker magazine. It’s impossible to quote all the great lines in full, but I want to give you a taste of what the writing is like:

My dear God, how stupid we people are until You give us something. Even in praying it is You who have to pray in us. I would like to write a beautiful prayer but I have nothing to do it from. There is a whole sensible world around me that I should be able to turn to Your praise, but I cannot do it. Yet at some insipid moment when I may possibly be thinking of floor wax or pigeon eggs, the opening of a beautiful prayer may come up from my subconscious and lead me to write something exalted. I am not a philosopher or I could understand these things.

Her faithfulness in God is almost shocking. We used to say we could not do what God tells us not to do. If we do there is no salvation. Because she treats God with more than respect and believes in his love and the possibility that he can redeem her, she sees him as kind and gentle. But only if a person is willing. She opens her heart to God; she tries to talk to God and hopes she can get a response from God, which is grace, though she knows or believes that she is unworthy of his time. Her respect for God and the workings of the universe are humble and respectful. She is also, which is obvious to anyone who reads her, completely and totally funny: floor wax? Pigeon eggs? Who else but O’Connor would put those two items together in a prayer? As a Daily Beast critic put it, “Her piety alone, however ardent it was, isn’t enough to distinguish her. They reveal an altogether vulnerable, fallible person with ambition, passion, and doubt.”

She's seen God's work and she's laughing

For O’Connor, art is not something separate from God, but the very springing of God’s goodness into the world:

The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural, and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal ways of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.

Her personality is close to her beliefs. It is extreme faith that happens to be quite funny. It makes her style so different from others as nothing escapes her vision from disability, race, crime, religion, or sanity. She uses the strongest, most obvious, most blatant way to relate her beliefs or to encounter her God. It’s about getting her readers to understand where she stands in the world in relation to God and where the reader might stand as well.

Yes, he is

In her short story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (1953), O'Connor demonstrates a vision of belief that is close to extraordinary in its violence and in its grace. “A Good Man” is about a grandmother who travels with her son’s family and argues with them about where they’re going to go on vacation. They meet an escaped convict, the Misfit, who is somewhat of a folk hero. When the Misfit and his accomplices kill the Grandmother’s family and then her, she begs for the Misfit to pray with her. This is a rather shocking display of Christian values. And the question is: what is a writer as devout as O’Connor doing?

Well, as I said before, her vision of Christianity is extreme. Everything is unexpected. For instance, the grandmother suffers what she doesn’t expect, first on a minor level (the bad vacation) and then in a cosmic one (the death of her family and then her). She prefers to go to East Tennessee but she needs to follow her son’s family; she remembers the wrong location and it leads to her meeting the Misfit; her family members getting killed by Misfit and her ultimate confrontation with the Misfit. What’s fascinating is her reaction when talking to Misfit reflects her personality, which is that she suddenly sees a world full of grace and goodness. From O’Connor’s point of view, she is saved by the Misfit because she is suffering and she cannot stop it. The only way for her to stop her suffering is to die, which is an extreme form of grace. It’s as if the extreme nature of the Grandmother–she is self-centered, racist, and selfish. It’s O’Connor’s cosmic joke that the only one who can save her is a psychopath who doesn’t even understand that he is doing God’s work.

The Misfit’s name is a wonderful O’Connor touch. One could say that Christ is the biggest misfit of all. The Misfit is not a good man and he is not a bad man. In the end, he is a kind of God capable of giving grace to the grandmother. And he might be the only “being” in the world vicious enough to break through her idiocy. When the grandmother prays to the Misfit, she touches his shoulder and says, "Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children!" The Misfit saves her by shooting her three times, which we might interpret as one for the father, one for the son, and one for the holy ghost.

For O'Connor and McDonagh the Trinity is crucial

The symbolism of the trinity also appears in Martin McDonagh's Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. McDonagh has clearly read O'Connor carefully and has mimicked the structure of "A Good Man is Hard to Find." In McDonagh's version of the story, Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand) rents three billboards that advertise the grim facts of her daughter Angela's rape and murder and, most importantly, the fact that no one has been arrested. Dixon (Sam Rockwell), the snippy and cunning police officer of the town, prevents Mildred from using the billboards to accuse Bill Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) of the crimes.

Mildred keeps accusing Willoughby and engaging in crazy behavior to get her way, going so far as to burn down the police station. Her behavior is a violent reaction to her suffering. Moreover, as we know from O'Connor, suffering brings grace and insight. When Dixon is beaten by a suspect, he uses the DNA from his wound to identify the real killer and rapist. Dixon's behavior touches Mildred. Furthermore, she forgives him. This is akin to "A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” when the grandmother receives grace from the Misfit.

Burn it down!

Not only does Mildred find grace at the end, but Dixon also receives a small amount of grace of his own. Dixon is a lazy and violent person. He assaults Red Welby, the man who sells the three billboards to Mildred. He arrests Mildred's friend and refuses her bail. Dixon does what he thinks is right to maintain his justice. However, his behavior is not related to justice. When he does find justice, it is because he suffers for the salvation of someone else. At the movie's end, he sits in Mildred's car, and they experience a kind of hope and grace.

McDonagh is O'Connor's spiritual double

It is Willoughby, though, who is the symbolic center of this story. He does what he can to help Mildred and Dixon and then dies needlessly. And his death becomes a symbol of salvation for the other characters. It is obvious that McDonagh sees the world as O’Connor does and that the trinity has incredible symbolic truth for them: the Misfit’s three shots and the three billboards.They aren’t at all alike, but grace brings Flannery O'Connor and Martin McDonagh together. They know that everyone must suffer in order to be saved. Their lessons are powerful and unique and a challenge to believers and non-believers alike.

©Zonghao Mo and the CCA Arts Review