Finder and Maker Reversed in The Moviegoer

Finder and Maker Reversed in The Moviegoer

Walker Percy's novel The Moviegoer chronicles a week in the life of stockbroker Binx Bolling, and his eventual marriage with his step-cousin Kate Cutrer. More than that, it sketches Binx's peculiar philosophy, and Kate's equally strange orientation, and their eventual transposition. Binx begins as an enjoyer of reality, a searcher, or finder of relief from tedium, and Kate as a frantic searcher who becomes a maker of crises to relieve her post-modern ennui. But by the end of the novel, their beginning positions are almost reversed, muddled together to form a more healthy relationship.

Both Binx and Kate are self-aware characters in a world of actors, the only ones to realize the inherent falseness, the cliches, in all things. The very characters sound like movie stars' pseudonyms: Binx Bolling, Lyle Lovell, Walter Wade, with their assonance sound all too much like Robert Redford, James Earl Jones, the too-memorable monikers of film stars. Aunt Emily's manservant Mercer is "threading his way between servility and presumption" (p. 17), now one way then the other, with a dignified appearance but "behind the mustache, his face... is not at all devoted but is as sulky as a Pullman porter's." (ibid.) Even Mercer's exaggerated breathing while serving dishes (pp. 156-157) is the act of a stereotypical servant made ridiculous. Binx's biological mother displays "a fondness carefully guarded against the personal, the heartfelt, a fondness deliberately rendered trite." (p. 139) The radio program "I Believe" (p. 95) is a collection of hoary platitudes, and Binx's "pleasant tingling sensation in the groin" afterwards (p. 96) reveals it as nothing but moral masturbation. Binx's Theosop...

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...tion to detail is still there -- "Why is he so yellow?" "He's got hepatitis." (p. 209) But Kate seems healthier, whether through treatment with Merle or association with Binx. And her self-destructive practice of crisis creation seems quelled -- instead, Binx has become her director, her "cinematographer." The care with which they plot out her errand -- what streetcar to ride, where to sit, where to wear her cape jasmine -- is like the close composition of a camera shot, all so that Binx, through his imagination, can keep Kate 'in focus' and sane. He is no longer the passive observer, but the active arranger; she no longer the out-of-control crisis-creator, but an obedient actress looking for direction. Binx has moved on to the true movie-lover's dream: he has become a director.

Works Cited

Percy, Walker. The Moviegoer. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1961.