MOVIES AND EXISTENCE: WALKER PERCY’S NOVEL “THE MOVIEGOER”

October 3, 2009 at 3:41 pm | Posted in Art, Books, Film, Literary, Philosophy | Leave a comment

The Moviegoer

1961

Walker Percy (May 28, 1916 – May 10, 1990) was an American Southern author whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. Percy is best known for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans, Louisiana, the first of which, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1962. He devoted his literary life to the exploration of “the dislocation of man in the modern age.”

The dazzling novel established Walker Percy as one of the major voices in Southern literature.

This elegantly written account of a young man’s search for signs of purpose in the universe is one of the great existential texts of the postwar era and is really funny besides. Binx Bolling, inveterate cinemaphile, contemplative rake and man of the periphery, tries hedonism and tries doing the right thing, but ultimately finds redemption (or at least the prospect of it)…

The Moviegoer is Binx Bolling, a young New Orleans stockbroker who surveys the world with the detached gaze of a Bourbon Street dandy even as he yearns for a spiritual redemption he cannot bring himself to believe in. On the eve of his thirtieth birthday, he occupies himself dallying with his secretaries and going to movies, which provide him with the “treasurable moments” absent from his real life. But one fateful Mardi Gras, Binx embarks on a hare-brained quest that outrages his family, endangers his fragile cousin Kate, and sends him reeling through the chaos of New Orleans‘ French Quarter. The Moviegoer is a genuine American classic.

Walker Percy’s award-winning novel, The Moviegoer, portrays John “Jack” Bolling “Binx” as a young man. Jack lives in a suburb of New Orleans called Gentilly where he works as a successful bond salesman and makes frequent visits to see his Aunt Emily. His mother lives on the Gulf Coast with her new husband and now Jack has six half siblings. The book covers one week of Jack’s life. In the beginning, Aunt Emily’s stepdaughter, Kate, has numerous issues involving heavy drinking and suicide attempts, so Emily asks Jack to speak with her about her problems. He does as he’s told, and the growing relationship between the two cousins-by-marriage reveals an edgier, more intractable side of Jack, and ends up outfitting the book’s conclusion.

For Binx, his conflict of heart lies in what his Aunt, who wishes him back to medical school tells him, and how he naturally wants to act based on what his mother tells him. Jack’s Aunt Emily is a stoic, outspoken character who believes in principles, duty, and dedication to the common values in the late fifties. Near the end of the book, Kate and Jack are on a train to Chicago. As he does throughout the entire novel, Jack digresses to himself about sin, thinking, “Christians talk about the horror of sin, but they have overlooked something. They keep talking as if everyone were a great sinner, when the truth is that nowadays one is hardly up to it. There is very little sin in the depths of the malaise. The highest moment of a malaisian’s life can be that moment when he manages to sin like a proper human.

Sometimes when Jack veers off, its not merely about his opinions, but also about the world surrounding him, and parts of our social or cultural environment we may not have noticed had it not been pointed out to us. For example, Jack says, “Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real…

The Fear of Being “Anybody from Anywhere”

Though Aunt Emily wants to make a smart, rich, Christian young man out of Jack, he in turn wants something else. Binx was fascinated with the enigma and seemingly invalidity of Christianity, despite what his Aunt taught him. In pursuing this aspect of his personality, Binx adapted certain beliefs about life, his main being his fear of being “Anybody from Anywhere”.

In the beginning of the novel, Kate and Jack see a movie in which a brief shot of the neighborhood in which Jack lives is on screen. Jack explains, “She refers to a phenomenon of movie-going which I have called certification. Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More thank likely He will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere” . This issue comes up again when Jack and Kate exit the train in Chicago. He complains about the port, saying, “Every place of arrival should have a booth set up and manned by an ordinary person whose task it is to greet strangers and give them a little trophy of local space-time stuff—tell them of his difficulties in high school and put a pinch of soil in their pockets—in order to insure that the stranger shall not become an Anyone.”

The fact that life requires certification by a movie only underscores the unreality of life that Binx, and the alienated modern man, find themselves stumbling through.

I lived in my room as an Anyone living Anywhere

Binx Bolling Looks for Himself Through Books and Movies

“Until recent years, I read only “fundamental” books, that is, key books on key subjects, such as War and Peace, the novel of novels; A Study of History, the solution of the problem of time; Schroedinger’s What is Life?, Einstein’s The Universe as I see It, and such. During those years I stood outside the universe and sought to understand it. I lived in my room as an Anyone living Anywhere and read fundamental books and only for diversion took walks around the neighborhood and saw an occasional movie. Certtainly it did not matter to me where I was when I read such a book as The Expanding Universe. The greatest success of this enterprise, which I call my vertical search, came one night when I sat in a hotel room in Birmingham and read a book called The Chemistry of Life. When I finished it, it seemed to me that the main goals of my search were reached or were in principle reachable, whereupon I went out and saw a movie called It Happened One Night which was itself very good. A memorable night. The only difficulty was that though the universe had been disposed of, I myself was left over. There I lay in my hotel room with my search over yet still obliged to draw one breath and then the next. But now I have undertaken a different kind of search, a horizontal search. As a consequence, what takes place in my room is less important. What is important is what I shall find when I leave my room and wander in the neighborhood. Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.”

From a book with the title The Moviegoer, one might expect a number of movies to be mentioned. Below are some of the ones of to note: