The Moviegoer: Walker Percy's great novel blurs, complicates and poeticizes the American dream life

Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, first published in 1961 and set in New Orleans, begins with protagonist Binx Bolling visiting his aunt. She gives him some bad news, and his internal response to this is conveyed to us, unencumbered by what would seem to be required exposition, through his first-person narration:

“She squeezed me tighter than ever. ‘Scotty is dead. Now it’s up to you. It’s going to be difficult for you but I know you’re going to act like a soldier.’ This was true. I could easily act like a solider. Was that all I had to do?

“It reminds me of a movie I saw last month out by Lake Pontchartrain…”

No information about who Scotty even is gets in the way of this, and the description of the experience of going to the movie near Lake Pontchartrain is much longer and more evocative—more important—than Binx’s grave meeting with the family member to which he’s closest. The unnamed movie is about an amnesiac who loses his whole life as it once was, but then starts a new one which actually seems pretty good. But Binx is just as interested in recalling his conversation with the proprietor of the cinema afterwards, because Binx, avid moviegoer that he is, cannot even enter a theatre until he knows something about the theatre itself or the people who operate it. Like a guy who can’t eat in a restaurant until he’s shook hands with the cooks, his experience of the movies is obsessively holistic, not a plunge into the fictive world on screen but a sought-after sense of awareness that can only be summoned up by taking in both the movie and his place within it as viewer:

“…it was here in Tivoli that I first discovered place and time, tasted it like okra. It was during a rerelease of Red River a couple of years ago that I became aware of the first faint stirrings of curiosity about the particular seat I sat in, the lady in the ticket booth… As Montgomery Clift was whipping John Wayne in a fist fight, an absurd scene, I made a mark on my seat arm with my thumbnail. Where, I wondered, will this particular piece of wood be twenty years from now, 543 years from now?”

There’s another fascinating moment where Binx describes going to a screening of Panic in the Streets, which was filmed on location in New Orleans, and recognizing the very street outside the theatre on screen. This experience grants Binx’s home place a sense of “certification.” By seeing a movie which shows his neighbourhood, it becomes possible “to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.”

I’d first heard of The Moviegoer while reading The Ongoing Moment, Geoff Dyer’s wonderfully associative book about photography published just a few years ago. Dyer proposes that Binx sees the world, specifically its objects, as though through William Eggleston’s camera, citing a moment in The Moviegoer where Binx is getting dressed one morning and is arrested by a sudden awareness of the objects he’s placing in his pockets. As a Southerner approaching his 30th birthday, a man whose sole talent, by his own admittance, is making money—or as he puts it, “selling mutual funds to widows and dagos”—a man who even when speaking to the reader in this private, interior voice, describes himself, rather hilariously, as someone deeply pleased by acts of perfect conformity, Binx’s sole access to his soul’s true yearnings arises only from such moments as the ones in the theatre in Tivoli or when he fills his pockets with items, moments during which some hidden light is cast upon the mundane, filling it with some glowing presence. These moments, he tells us, remind him of something he calls “the search,” something that first struck him when he was injured years ago somewhere in “the Orient,” something which “anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.” An everydayness Binx, in his schizophrenic manner, is carefully cultivating.

This tension between perfecting conformity and feeling the grip of “the search” reminded me not of a movie but of another book… about movies. James Harvey’s Movie Love in the Fifties, a somewhat loghorrretic but in many ways deeply satisfying study of precisely what the title implies, draws us into the psychology of the postwar American dream life, where the props of reality took on more cinematic qualities. He describes military training in the 50s this way:
“…the traditional sort of ‘war games’ they put us through in basic training, with gas masks and bayonets and live ammo going off just above our heads, felt like some historical re-enactment, as unreal as playing cowboys and Indians again…”

Harvey zeroes in on the strange dialogue between the faux-optimism of postwar ideology and the movies, American movies, the ostensible propagandic vehicles of this ideology.

Binx, presumably, given this un-articulated experience in “the Orient,” has actually been a solider, yet it’s revealing that he reassures us that for his aunt he can “act like a soldier.” Did the movies teach him how? I finally got around to reading The Moviegoer this past week because I thought it would be a good thing to read while in the thick of the Toronto International Film Festival, where I annually immerse myself in what is surely an unhealthy deluge of movies. It’s interesting, then, to find Percy’s book, so exacting in its invoking of sense of place—far ahead of the academic study of the phenomena—is very much about the way that movies are not just escapism, nor, obviously, just a source of knowledge and understanding of self and the world, but are somehow both at once. There are moments in the novel when Binx makes it sound like he goes to the movies to idle away the hours between work, dating his secretaries or socializing pleasantly with his family. Yet it seems that the movies in their subliminal way are cumulatively conspiring against such pacification—they are thrusting him back into “the search.” And for this reason, The Moviegoer may just be required reading for all of us addicted to the hovering rectangle of light.