Finder and Maker Reversed in The Moviegoer Essay -- Moviegoer Essays P

Finder and Maker Reversed in The Moviegoer  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   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 tin gling sensation in the groin" afterwards (p. 96) reveals it as nothing but moral masturbation. Binx's Theosop... ...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.