Hazel Motes and The Hunger
Putting Flannery O'Connor and Contrapoints in dialogue
Flannery O’Connor brings to life with Wise Blood a world in which deep set eyes aren’t just deep set, they’re “passages to somewhere.” The stars aren’t static like pinprick holes in a colorless sky; they’re “moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole order of the universe and would take all time to complete.” You can only perceive their motion if you travel far enough from the marquee lights, which are “so bright that the moon, moving overhead with a small procession of clouds behind it, look[s] pale and insignificant.” And that procession is comprised not of mere clouds, but of “long silver streaks” of “scaffolding” forming part of the vast cosmic construction work. Under the polluted mixture of celestial and artificial light, the card tables from which businessmen sell potato peelers on the street appear as fallen altars.
The universe, in other words, is for O’Connor very much alive, an animate creation that implies a Creator, from whom flows a terrifyingly real moral order. Her protagonist, Hazel Motes, is a young man who — even after he blinds himself — has a face with a “peculiar pushing look, as if it were going forward after something it could just distinguish in the distance.” Hazel is the grandson of a fiery preacher from Eastrod, Tennessee, who had “Jesus hidden in his head like a stinger.” As a young boy Hazel was haunted by the death of his grandfather; at the viewing, he imagined his grandfather’s elbow shooting into the crack of his casket to keep them from shutting it on him. But shut it they did, and by the time Hazel was drafted to fight in World War II, they had done the same to the caskets of his two younger brothers, his father, and his mother.
Even having lost all his closest family members, he didn’t give in to despair. Hazel maintained a fiery religious devotion and commitment to his hometown. He “would’ve shot his foot” rather than go off to war except that he had a “strong confidence in his power to resist evil.” He wanted to “stay in Eastrod with his two eyes open, and his hands always handling the familiar thing, his feet on the known track, and his tongue not too loose.” He had a “deep black wordless conviction that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.” He went along with the draft only because he “trusted himself to get back in a few months, uncorrupted.” Instead, “he was gone four years.”
His friends in the army mocked his religion, mocked him for refusing to come along to the brothel, mocked the very idea that he had a soul to corrupt. When the war was through Hazel had been worn down by the mockery and by loneliness. He came back to Tennessee with a different “deep black wordless conviction” — that he had no soul, that the misery he felt overseas was mere homesickness and had “nothing to do with Jesus.” Following his new conviction back to his childhood home, he found that “there was nothing [t]here but the skeleton of a house.” Death had taken his family, the war had taken his soul, and time had taken his home. Off to the city he went, with a preacher-like suit on his back and a void in his heart, resolved to spread a new, godless faith: The Church Without Christ.
He got to Taulkinham in the evening and “as soon as he stepped off the train, he began to see signs and lights,” most of which were “electric and moved up and down or blinked frantically.” He finds his way to a bathroom, enters a stall with a snake drawn on it, and discovers a secret advertisement for “Mrs. Leora Watts… the friendliest bed in town!” That “Leora” is a name with Hebrew roots meaning something like “I have light,” that Hazel finds her immediately after walking down a row of flashy electric advertisements, and that “Watts” are a unit of electrical power, can hardly be coincidental. O’Connor’s intent here is the same as in calling gray cars “rat-colored,” in noting that marquee lights make the moon look insignificant, and in naming the landlady who can’t understand why a sane person wouldn’t want to enjoy himself “Mrs. Flood.” She is warning her readers of the corrupting influence of the advanced industrial secular society that she saw emerging in post-war America.
Shortly after sleeping with Mrs. Watts for the second time — and (not-so-subtly) bumping his preacher-like hat on the electric light bulb above her bed — Hazel awakes so early that the sky is devoid of natural light, and he has a fresh but firm resolve to go buy a car. He goes and buys a dilapidated “rat-colored machine” and before long he’s standing on its hood preaching the gospel of the Church Without Christ. After spending some weeks failing to convert the residents of Taulkinham to his church, Hazel murders a man who’s been hired by a rival to imitate him, doing so by running him over with his car. This is a crime carried out in perhaps the most iconic symbol of American industrialism — one the color of disease-carrying vermin, no less — by a man infected with a godless worldview that seems inseparable from the car he stood on to preach it. Hazel told one stranger that “nobody with a good car needed to worry about anything,” and boasted to another, “I told you this car would get me anywhere I wanted to go.” The latter replied, ominously, “some things’ll get some folks somewheres.”
After the murder, Hazel tries to flee to a new city, but a police officer pulls him over. He says he doesn’t like Hazel’s face and pushes the rat-colored car over an embankment into an agrarian landscape, sending a cow galloping and pieces of the car scattering. Hazel barely reacts, walks back to town, and blinds himself. The Church Without Christ is a failure, his car is destroyed, and he’s left with a burning spiritual void. It’s this void that explains his characteristic “peculiar pushing look.” Hazel explained the look himself, earlier, in a fight with his suitor, Sabbath Hawkes. She screams at him, “I knew when I first seen you, you were mean and evil… I seen you wouldn’t never have no fun or let anybody else because you didn’t want nothing but Jesus!” Hazel shouts back, “I don’t want nothing but the truth!”
He yearns for the truth at the heart of creation, the blueprint of the vast construction project, so Mrs. Flood isn’t far off when she pictures all of time and space inside his head. Except his head is much too small to contain creation, which is why Hazel — blind and unemployed, collecting welfare checks — tells her that he can’t preach anymore because he doesn’t have time. He spends every moment grasping for fragments of the mind of God. And though Hazel denies Jesus to his dying day, denies the very idea of sin, he never can shake a sense of shame for things Jesus would consider sins.
After he blinded himself, Hazel would take walks on the few blocks near Mrs. Flood’s boarding house that he knew by heart. He always walked with a limp, and eventually Mrs. Flood figured out why:
She was cleaning his room and happened to knock over his extra pair of shoes. She picked them up and looked into them as if she thought she might find something hidden there. The bottoms of them were lined with gravel and broken glass and pieces of small stone. She spilled this out and sifted it through her fingers, looking for a glitter that might mean something valuable, but she saw that what she had in her hand was trash that anybody could pick up in the alley. She stood for some time, holding the shoes, and finally she put them back under the cot. In a few days she examined them again and they were lined with fresh rocks. Who’s he doing this for? she asked herself. What’s he getting out of doing it? Every now and then she would have an intimation of something hidden near her but out of her reach. “Mr. Motes,” she said that day, when he was in her kitchen eating his dinner, “what do you walk on rocks for?”
“To pay,” he said in a harsh voice.
“Pay for what?”
“It don’t make any difference for what,” he said. “I’m paying.”
As fall turned to winter, Hazel caught influenza and grew too weak to walk. One day while caring for him, Mrs. Flood learned that, though he could no longer walk on rocks, he’d found a new way to make himself pay:
She came earlier than usual one morning and found him asleep, breathing heavily. The old shirt he wore to sleep in was open down the front and showed three strands of barbed wire, wrapped around his chest. She retreated backwards to the door and then she dropped the tray. “Mr. Motes,” she said in a thick voice, “what do you do these things for? It’s not natural.”
He pulled himself up.
“What’s the wire around you for? It’s not natural,” she repeated.
After a second he began to unbutton the shirt. “It’s natural,” he said.
“Well, it’s not normal. It’s like one of them gory stories, it’s something that people have quit doing—like boiling in oil or being a saint or walling up cats,” she said. “There’s no reason for it. People have quit doing it.”
“They ain’t quit doing it as long as I’m doing it,” he said.
Hazel had shouted from the hood of his car that “there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from and no Redemption because there was no Fall and no Judgment because there wasn’t the first two. Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar.” But for a man who spent his short life arguing against the existence of sins, Hazel sure was haunted by his. All the women in his life — Leora Watts, Sabbath Hawkes, Mrs. Flood — seemed to think there was little more to living than worldly pleasure. Hazel Motes resented them all because in spite of himself he cared not for the things of this world. He yearned for eternal truths that would explain the order of the cosmos and the purpose of his existence within it.
Almost eight decades after Hazel Motes blinded himself amid an increasingly hedonistic society, people still “ain’t quit doing it.” Not that anyone is walking on rocks or sleeping draped in barbed wire, though if they were, we’d never know. In the age of the internet we tend to punish ourselves in ways less bodily. But however Motes’ modern counterparts make themselves pay, it’s clear that some among us have kept right on yearning for answers to fundamental existential questions. Case in point: Contrapoints, aka Natalie Wynn, academic philosopher turned video essayist extraordinaire.
Many of Wynn’s videos are introspective ruminations on the awkward, painful, and irony-steeped journey she’s taken to lesbian transwomanhood: Built like a man but feeling like a woman, wondering if feeling like a woman meant being attracted to men, conforming her body to the image of a woman, coming to terms with being a trans woman who loves women, having to respond to doubts cast by herself and others: if you came all this way only to love women, did you really need to come all this way? Having struggled so profoundly to recover a sense of self and to understand its implications for erotic/romantic desire, Wynn was well-situated to conduct a uniquely modern inquiry into the nature of love. Her latest video is precisely that, offered up to an audience of millions as a “casual reminder that there’s a hunger in your soul no pleasure of the flesh can satisfy.” At nearly an hour long and only the first part of a series, the production is anything but casual, and it renders the label “video essay” unworthy. It’s one-woman cyber-theatre that’s equal parts introspection, cultural analysis, and philosophy, the haunting implications of which are only somewhat cushioned by comedic relief and intricate makeup, costume, and set design.
The video opens on the set of The Freedom Pod, a fictional podcast studio. In the center is the host, Jackie Jackson, an airhead caricature of a libertarian dressed in Statue of Liberty garb who — when she’s not ranting nonsensically about cancel culture, bemoaning the decline of civility, or singing the praises of American exceptionalism — is washing down Flaming Hot Doritos with Red Bull, Starbucks, or beer from a keg. On the right is Virginia Lamm, a finger-wagging evangelical Christian, and on the left is Justine Tableau, an atheist socialist girl-boss who, we learn, is a lesbian transgender woman. The latter is clearly modelled on Wynn, but all three are played by her, and for the first dozen minutes or so, one starts to wonder whether Wynn has simply constructed an artificial debate platform for the socialist girl-boss version of herself to destroy ridiculous conservative strawmen, anti-Ben Shapiro style. Then, we learn that Virginia Lamm is herself a lesbian who left behind a life of “homosexual sin,” alcoholism, and cocaine addiction for a life of devotion to Christ. From that moment forward, the audience is treated to the kind of nuanced exploration of ideas that we’ve come to expect from Wynn.
The middle third of “The Hunger” is spiritual combat masquerading as discourse between Justine and Virginia. Virginia gets the ball rolling with the claim that “addiction and sexual brokenness are two heads of the same serpent, symptoms of the same cultural leprosy” – the absence of Christ. In her view, people who identify as trans, like Justine, and people who abuse substances, are trying in vain to fill a spiritual void that only Christ can fill. When Virginia suggests that “gender confused children should have the right to access reparative therapy,” Justine claps back:
Reparative therapy? You mean handing over children to exorcists for years of torture? What a terrible wound of self-disgust to inflict on young people, telling them they’re broken and polluted and they need God to make them whole. You people are selling the cure to a sickness you created.
And with this assertion, the battles lines have been drawn. Virginia believes that gender dysphoria and sexual deviancy are misguided cries for Christ’s transformative love. Justine believes that the brokenness is an illusion, that people like her could lead fulfilling romantic lives, but that people like Virginia instill in them an unshakeable sense of shame for straying from God’s will. Virginia dominates the first half of the dialogue, with her scripture-based diatribes evoking only irony-steeped shitpost-style commentary from Justine. She says she “used to be a homosexual” before she was saved by Jesus:
I love the Lord, who does not command me to be straight. He commands me to be holy. Fear not, you will no longer live in shame, for your Creator will be your husband… My old self was crucified with Christ on the cross. It is no longer I who lives, but Christ who lives in me.
She makes the case that “gay is just a feeling,” that homosexual temptation is the same as any other, like wrath. Just as no one who is tempted by wrath identifies as “wrathful,” there’s no need for those tempted by same-sex lust to identify as “gay.” Virginia knows this firsthand because she once lost in the struggle to that temptation, but now she’s overcome it. She had a poor relationship with her mother growing up; when she left home, she became addicted to alcohol, pornography, lusting after women, and “hype” (monetized YouTube-speak for cocaine). She even started to inject testosterone, having come under a spell of gender dysphoria. She couldn’t quit her life of sin until she had her heart broken by the woman she loved. She had run into the arms of that woman to escape the terrible void she felt inside, to satiate her hunger for wholeness. But this earthly love proved fleeting, and before long she was again “cast into the outer darkness,” a part of her having been ripped away, left to face her brokenness alone. She found her way out of this darkness after attending church with her mom, where beautiful women were singing in heavenly voices: “what can wash away my sin? What can make me whole again? Nothing but the blood of Jesus, that washes white as snow.” Virginia says:
I felt this tingling all over my body. For the first time I heard the voice of God. Not the words of the hymn, but the voice of the Father speaking directly to me. In that moment, I was transfigured by the Holy Spirit. I was cleansed, I was healed. I was delivered, I was sanctified. I was redeemed. My guilty stains were washed away and I exchanged my brokenness and pain for his loving grace.
Justine continually interjects with snarky comments. Of Virginia’s heartbreak, Justine asks, “What was she, a Capricorn?” Virginia replies that no, she was a Sagittarius. “Well, there’s your problem. Next time, maybe try a water sign.” But Virginia isn’t entertained. It’s not funny to her because she’s “glimpsed the Gates of Hell, where unrepentant souls endure the horrors of sin, away from God, shut out from grace, tormented by unyielding guilt and shame.”
Eventually Justine puts aside the snark for long enough to critique Virginia seriously. She asserts that Virginia is personally immoderate in love and immoderate with substances. Accordingly, Virginia needs God as father figure to set rules for her because she can’t control herself. Justine tells her, “you amputate half your own soul and you call it sin and shame. Well, that’s my definition of ‘sexual brokenness.’” Virginia asks if she really thinks that the “urge to fornicate is half the soul,” but Justine isn’t derailed by the bad-faith line of questioning:
No, Virginia, that’s not what I think. What I think is that you have a vulgar, cracker-barrel understanding of human sexuality… What do you think erotic love is a desire for? … Erotic love is not aimless pleasure-seeking. It’s a longing for connection, for recognition, for wholeness; to traverse the lonely void that separates us from each other, to liberate repressed energy, to feel alive. Love is not the flesh, it’s not temptation, it’s nothing like the urge to punch someone in the face. It’s nothing like being an alcoholic. It’s not a craving. It’s a yearning. The desire for union with our other half.”
Virginia declares that only Christ’s love can satiate this yearning, that “there’s a hunger in your soul no pleasure of the flesh can satisfy,” and that, citing Psalm 63, only with God’s love can you be “fully satisfied, as in the richest of foods.” In response, Justine declares that God’s mind is more expansive than Virginia’s, and that with or without her approval, Justine will always be the way she is — namely, a lesbian transgender woman. To live any other way would be not virtuous but dishonest. Virginia retorts that she’s found fellowship in the Church and peace in the palm of God’s hand. Has Justine found fellowship in the “LGBT2A$ community?” she asks. No, Justine says, of course not, because “it’s a bunch of wounded people wounding each other.” Virginia goes in for the kill:
So… you’re alone, you’re far from God’s grace, you have no catgirl gf. Can you honestly say you’re happy? That you’re fulfilled? That you have purpose? That you have hope?
And with this series of questions, we get a change of scenery. The Freedom Pod studio gives way to Justine’s bathroom, where she’s taking a bath later that night. She gets a text from her mom that reads, “Hi Justin [her birthname]… we are still praying for you… hope to see you at Christmas this year.” She tries to check her ex’s Twitter, but she’s been blocked. Enter Lucifer, aka “Lucy,” the video’s final character, also played by Wynn. The entrance to the bathroom is a hallway separated from the tub by a wall of glass block windows, through which light shines but images are blurred. It’s backlit, from right to left, by a series of neon lights: blue, then purple, then pink, then red, the last of which emerges from behind the wall. We see Lucy’s figure pass through blue, purple, pink — an array signaling gender dysphoria — and then we get a clear shot of her at the end of the hallway, shrouded in an ominous red glow.
Justine is sitting there, freshly reminded of her family dysfunction and her heartbreak, in what Lucy terms the “tub of sadness.” And it’s worth noting that when Justine appears on The Freedom Pod, she does so to defend the very legitimacy of her sense of self. When Jackie proposes a centrist compromise, she says that sure, Justine should be allowed to do “whatever sick shit” she wants, but just leave children out of it — implying that her very identity is a corrupting influence. Justine isn’t just a participant in the culture war, her being is its subject. This adds a layer of moral fatigue to the family dysfunction and heartbreak.
It’s against this backdrop that Lucy offers to help. She has “potions” that “can help with anything. Depression, anxiety, insomnia, pain, boredom, failure, shame.” The word “shame” evokes a sigh from Justine. Lucy seizes on it: “Shame? Is it the shame?”
Well yeah, there’s the shame. There’s always gonna be the shame. There’s the heartbreak, the loneliness, the self-loathing… I’m a parched land, Luce. I’ve got the hunger, the emptiness inside.
At first Lucy suggests a dose of “hype” to boost her mood, but Justine isn’t feeling it. She doesn’t want to be energized; she just wants “the pain to stop.” So Lucy suggests “void,” aka insert-your-favorite-opioid-here:
One drop of this and all the pain will melt away. The aches of the body, the agitation of desire, the sting of heartbreak, boredom, grief, and shame… all of that will fade away under a warm blanket of serenity and love.
Justine sees the dark path Lucy is leading her down, and she resists. But Lucy is persistent. “You’d really rather sit there in your little tub of sadness all alone?” Lucy points out that Justine is “choosing to feel bad when with just one drop of void, [she] could be in bliss.” And she asserts that she’s not going anywhere, she’s going to stay right by Justine’s side, reminding her of this choice, continually, forever. Justine still doesn’t give in, saying, “Look, I’m a smart person, and I’m not going to let you turn me into some sort of pathetic junkie.”
Pathetic? Is it pathetic to feel good? I look at you and I see someone who feels bad. And to me, that’s pathetic.
Justine relents. “Just give me the goddamn void.” She takes a small dose and her surroundings blur as unmitigated relief comes over her face. Heavenly music starts to play. The tub of sadness turns into an ocean. For a moment, she is one with infinity. She is made whole. The brokenness is healed, the shame dissipates, the hunger is satiated. But only for a moment.
Justine wakes up the next morning to the ding of her iPhone. She’s being cancelled for platforming “racist transphobe J*ckie J*ckson.” Family dysfunction, heartbreak, moral fatigue… and now ostracization by the community of people who can best relate to the first three. By engaging with Jackie and Virginia, Justine created the possibility of progress. Appearing on the podcast was a virtuous act. She is being punished for her virtue — the truest form of punishment. This pain is too much for her to bear, so she cries out to Lucy, begging for another drop of void. Even Lucy — Satan incarnate — is disappointed. She was hoping she’d get the chance to tempt Justine all over again. Lucy calls her an “easy little void slut.”
Justine takes another drop and fades into oblivion. We see a montage of her taking void and fading, taking void and fading. The scene is set to Bach played by a pianist with purple void-stained fingers. One drop turns to five. She soaks in the tub of sadness and her face sinks beneath the surface. The music stops and the screen goes black. She thrashes to life and gasps for air. “That was dumb. Ha. [let’s out a sob] Shit… I need to quit… I’ll quit after one. more. drop.” She takes one more drop, and when she wakes, she says:
Alright, that’s it, I’m quitting. I quit. It’s just a simple matter of giving up the only thing that makes me feel like life is worth living. How hard could that be?
She goes into a feverish, zombie-like state of withdrawal. Lucy lies on the bed next to her. Justine frantically pleas for the void. “Lucy, Lucy wake up. Lucy! Lucy!! Lucy I want the void. Wake up Lucy! Lucy wake up!” Again the music stops and the screen goes black. Then: fire crackles as Justine makes love to Lucy. The video ends with “to be continued” plastered over an image of the bed, half-occupied by Lucy’s costume, half-empty, Justine nowhere in sight.
The worlds of Wise Blood and “The Hunger” are both radically different and hauntingly similar. Wynn exchanges O’Connor’s rat-colored cars for rainbow-colored crosses. The marquee lights are now neon signs that say “it’s five o’clock somewhere” and “Margaritaville.” Wynn’s characters preach from a podcast studio, not the hood of a car on the sidewalk. There’s no moon in the sky because, well, there’s no sky at all — everything takes place indoors and all the light is artificial. Hazel Motes inhabits a fairly minimalistic landscape, by modern standards, and is tempted only by carnal lust, wrath, and pride; Wynn’s characters are swimming in material temptations — junk food, alcohol, pornography, cigarettes, cocaine, heroin, sex.
And yet, in “The Hunger,” we’re really just farther along the dark path Wise Blood warns us against. O’Connor was sensing early trouble in post-war America, as an advanced industrial secular society started to take shape. We’re now living in a post-industrial era — the age of the internet — and society is more secular than ever. Even the Right, which is traditionally the home of evangelical conservatives like Virginia Lamm, is increasingly secular. All the differences between Wise Blood and “The Hunger” are the product of an underlying similarity: at the core of both is an existential yearning that was once but no longer is satiated by the worship of Christ. For all that’s changed between 1952 and 2022, our spiritual stalemate has not.
Mrs. Flood, the landlady who can’t see why a sane person wouldn’t want to enjoy himself, is a precursor to Jackie, who can’t see why we won’t just all get along, and who can’t stop gorging on Doritos and beer. There’s so much pleasure to be had in twenty-first century America, if only the Virginia Lamms and Justine Tableaus of the world would learn to have it. Hazel Motes seems like a precursor to Justine, who similarly rejects Christian doctrine but can’t shake a soul-crushing sense of shame. Hazel yearns to know the mind of God; Justine yearns for wholeness. She tries to convince herself that this yearning is just erotic desire, that she can fulfill it with romance. But, overwhelmed by heartbreak and loneliness and shame, she can’t maintain this belief.
The fact is that no matter how much she disbelieves the details of Virginia’s doctrine, she finds its conclusions difficult to resist. Divine love does sound superior to erotic love. She does feel broken and incomplete, wracked with shame and longing for wholeness. But she can’t allow herself to accept divine love. Doing so would make her feel like a phony. Instead, she self-consciously lets the devil in, implying that, absent a fulfilling relationship with God or lover, a relationship with opioids is the next best thing. And with this we see why Hazel Motes is not truly a precursor to Justine.
Nothing was enough to satiate Hazel’s spiritual yearnings. He had sex with Mrs. Watts and with Sabbath Hawkes, but he did so in a futile attempt to prove to himself that he really did reject Christ. He never got much enjoyment out of it. It never filled him with anything except contempt for the women he slept with. It never made him feel whole. Justine wants the pain to stop and looks to heroin as a last resort. Hazel didn’t have opioids as a last resort, but surely he could’ve drank himself into oblivion if he so desired. Except he didn’t want the pain to stop. Or, at least, he wouldn’t entertain the idea that he deserved an end to his pain. His yearning for union with God was too strong; he could accept no false substitutes.
Hazel, then, is a precursor to Natalie Wynn, of whom Justine is but a pale imitation. One is left with the impression that Wynn has suffered through the drama of temptation and shame that Justine acts out, has found relief nowhere, and has created “The Hunger” as another step on her journey toward wholeness. She can’t accept Christ’s love, can’t hold onto erotic love, can’t numb the shame and brokenness away. But she, like Hazel Motes, also cannot stop searching. To really search, one must deny distractions, refuse refuge in earthly pleasures. Searching, then, is itself a form of punishment — of payment. Hazel stuck out like a sore thumb in post-war America because, as Mrs. Flood put it, he kept making himself pay after other people “quit doing it.”
With “The Hunger,” Natalie Wynn has given a contemporary restatement to Hazel’s reply:
They ain’t quit doing it as long as I’m doing it.
In perhaps the most secular society in human history, Wynn hasn’t stopped searching – and I, for one, am eager to see what she finds.
