The Soul of The Moviegoer

As always, spoilers lie ahead, so read on at your own informative peril!

The titular moviegoer of Walker Percy’s 1961 debut novel is John Bickerson Bolling, known to some as Jack and to others as Binx.  Binx, who narrates the novel in the first person, describes himself as a moviegoer, and he applies the descriptor to others throughout the novel, such as his half-brother, Lonnie.  Most interestingly, he applies it to a man on a bus.  Binx is riding from a business conference in Chicago to his home in New Orleans when he meets a man he calls a “romantic” with a well modeled but diminutive head.  Binx finally says of him: “He is a moviegoer, though of course he does not go to the movies.”

Welcome to the world of Binx Bolling.  Binx is a philosopher who is constantly seeking order in the world around him.  At 29 years of age, Binx works as a stock and bond broker for his uncle’s brokerage firm, but while he has made a good portion of money and has a well-to-do family to fall back on, he is trying to find his way in the world.  And the world, to our overwrought narrator, is dark and troublesome. It is the way that the narrator and his view of the world come into focus that makes The Moviegoer such a captivating and interesting novel.

I have praised again and again the art of the first person narration in this collection of blog posts, and Percy does everything right in revealing his character.  In the opening section, Binx seems like a pleasant young gentleman who enjoys mass transit to cars and watching movies in out-of-the-way theaters to parties and social gatherings.  He has a brief conversation with the owner of the theater and seems to enjoy making contact with his fellow human beings.  But as the story unfolds we come to learn that these habits are more of a pathological way of dealing with the world than originating in some country charm.  What Binx fears more than anything else is becoming an Anyone who is Anywhere or a No one who is Nowhere.  It was at a theater

that I first discovered place and time, tasted it like okra.  It was during a re-release 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 Cliff 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?

So now he uses movies and the theaters they play in to ground himself in the particulars of the here and now.    As he says shortly after, “All movies smell of a neighborhood and a season.”  He cannot watch a movie until he makes contact with someone who works there and learns something of his or her life, at which point the viewing becomes a particular experience, anchored and unrepeatable, and Binx is safely Binx and Binx alone in this particular spot and only in this particular spot.  It is such a fantastic character trait, made all the more fantastic in his use of movies, which can play anywhere at any time!  I would think that Binx would be attracted to live performances that are by their very nature un-repeatable.  If anyone knows why movies, I would be much obliged to hear why!

Binx is a veteran of the Korean War, and it is unclear whether the war played any part in the shaping of his fears and concerns.  His cousin Kate has her own existential crisis that mirrors Binx’s, and she has not been to war.  But since Kate and Binx share no blood, there is clearly no suggestion that genetics is responsible.  The answer, of course, and the reason we find Binx and Kate to be interesting centers, is that their existential crises of personhood are tied to the modern world, the same world Kate’s stepmother bemoans as changing for the worse at all times. The thing at stake for both Kate and Binx (and by extension for all of us) is how can we be the person we are or should be with all the pressure to be the person we ought to be?  Is there even an actual “me” or “you”?  Kate’s approach is to run from trap to trap, as Binx observes, to corner herself and to flee again.  Binx attempts to set up a world that is structured and labeled and philosophized to a point of comprehension.  He delights in creating terms like “search,” “rotation,” “certification,” and “doubling.”  We see the height of his need of structure when he arrives in Chicago near the end of the novel, haunted by the “genie-soul” of the city.  He needs to understand the place he is in or be conquered by it:   

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.

Percy paints Binx’s desperation and vulnerability so beautifully that we are simultaneously invited to identify with Binx’s fear and allowed to see it for what it is.  By letting us see directly through Binx’s eyes and feel his very thoughts through the first person narration, we are granted a kind of double vision, seeing the world as Binx’s sees it superimposed over our own understanding of the world.

As I have said in other blog posts, any good first-person story is first and foremost about the character of the narrator.  Binx is both solid and vulnerable, intelligent and broken, fighting and enduring.  There is enough beauty in the characters and the world to make up for the horrible moments of racism, sexism, and homophobia that crop up without warning, and I would gladly recommend the novel to anyone who enjoys a first-person story with a philosophical and psychological flavor.  It is a short and powerful book that continues to grow on me as I think about all the little moments I noted in my margins.