Misinterpreting The Moviegoer

	In 1961 Walker Percy published his first novel, The
Moviegoer. It was largely ignored at first by reviewers until it
won the National Book Award the next year, beating out such
literary powerhouses as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and J.D.
Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. But once critical attention was
turned toward this short novel, many commentators were led into
false interpretations of The Moviegoer through their
pigeonholing of the novelist. 
	Many critics categorized Percy as a Southern writer,
simply because he had grown up in Mississippi and had set the
majority of the novel in a suburb of New Orleans. It is true
that, with his later novels, Percy definitely acknowledged his
debt to other Southern writers. However, Percy resented such a
categorization of The Moviegoer. The novel, Percy felt, was more
universal than simply speaking to the people of the region it
was set in. He felt it could just as easily have been set in a
suburb of any city other than New Orleans. The search inherent
to the novel’s center was not a “Southern” theme; it was a human
theme.
	Percy has often been called a “Catholic writer,” and some
critics have attempted to pawn the author’s own religious
beliefs off on all of his characters. But this statement is hard
to rectify with some of the action of the novel, including the
main character’s (Binx Bolling) carousing with women. In fact,
early in the novel Binx himself states that he is in search of
something undefinable to him. It might be God, but then again it
might not. This search for meaning is slightly contradictory
with some critics’ thoughts on what a “Catholic writer” is
exactly.
	That being said, it would be wrong to state that Percy
swings completely the other way with his novel. Percy has
admitted many times that he is a great admirer of the European
existentialist philosophers and authors. The Moviegoer has often
been compared thematically with Camus’ The Stranger, and the
epigraph of Percy’s novel is from Kierkegaard. Thus, due to this
influence, many critics have interpreted the work in that vein
alone, emphasizing the elements of existential philosophy that
Binx spouts in the text.
	In truth the novel probably falls somewhere in between the
two extremes, taking elements from both approaches to combine
into one narrative about a man in search of something, a means
to define himself. It is neither one nor the other, since one
cannot stand without the other. Instead it is a healthy mixture
of existential beliefs and religion, a juxtaposition of the two
diametrically opposed ideas that come together in the main
character Binx Bolling.
	Often the critics’ misinterpretation of this novel seem to
emanate from Walker Percy himself. Over the years since The
Moviegoer was first published, he has given many interviews to
the media, in which he discusses his intentions with the novel.
He has also lectured at several colleges, here in the United
States as well as in Europe, on the novel’s themes. Perhaps many
critics took too closely to Percy’s own interpretation of the
novel. Sometimes in these interviews Percy is very contradictory
about his intentions, and at others he outlines themes that he
never truly addresses in the novel. Sometimes his intent and the
actual text do not coincide, and it is left up to the critics
who took heed in Percy’s words to fill in the gaps.
	And perhaps the misinterpretation of the novel actually
arises from the narrator and protagonist himself, Binx Bolling.
Binx himself is very contradictory at times, saying one thing
and doing another. He out and out lies to the reader at certain
points in the novel. Binx Bolling is in actuality perhaps the
most untrustworthy narrator since Nick Carraway told the story
of Jay Gatsby, and therein lies the problem.
	The Moviegoer centers upon Binx Bolling and his search for
himself. The novel takes place in the week leading up to Ash
Wednesday, which just so happens to be Binx’s thirtieth
birthday. As this day grows near Binx feels as if he is finally
growing into his manhood, becoming a true adult after years of
aimless meandering through life. Now, on the eve of this change,
he feels as if he has no direction and begins to search for
meaning.
	This time period in which Binx’s search takes place has
particular religious significance. The Biblical account of
Jesus’ religious quest begins as he reached the age of thirty,
and he is only able to undertake his father’s calling after he
wanders in the desert and faces down temptation. Binx too has a
period of temptation before his “true life” can begin, and this
period happens to coincide with the time of Mardi Gras, full of
revelry and Dionysian excess. In many ways Binx is also
following in his father’s footsteps, a statement which shall be
made more clear later in this paper.
	The desert Binx chooses to wander through while trying to
avoid temptation is the suburb of Gentilly. It is on the
outskirts of the main city of New Orleans, a veritable wasteland
devoid of people, open and empty. Throughout the novel Binx
reads a travelogue on the Arabian Desert, and many of its
descriptive passages in fact parallel with Binx’s own
surrounding in this suburb. 
	Binx had at one point lived near the French Quarter of New
Orleans but had eventually tired of the type of people known to
frequent the area, the hip partygoers immersed in frivolity.
Occasionally while living in New Orleans, Binx would become so
incensed with some relevant issue of the day that he would write
furious letters to the editor of the newspaper. Then when
nothing would come of his outburst, he would sink into a deep
depression. Binx has moved to his desert Gentilly in the hopes
of maintaining his anonymity, blending in with his surroundings
and becoming a wasteland himself.
	Or, so he says. Binx’s actions, however, do not quite
coincide with what he says are his beliefs. Binx claims to long
for anonymity, to yearn to be alone in his suburb. But at every
possible opportunity, he reaches out to those around him, in the
hopes of making contact with another human being. In one passage
Binx mentions how much he hates to drive his car, because people
cease to think of him as a human being. He is merely a part of
the larger machine to them. He rides the bus instead as much as
possible, for the sole purpose of being around people and making
contact with them.
	Binx also discusses one of his peculiar habits in going to
the movies, an essential part of Binx’s search. Whenever he goes
to a film, he must talk to the people that work there, the
manager or the girl at the ticket booth. He claims that he
engages in this behavior because he wants to solidify the
moviegoing, make it a real experience that happened to him
rather than something than Anyone could do at Anytime. In
reality, Binx wants to talk to people, because he feels like he
is alone in the world.
	Binx Bolling claims to want to avoid people, because he
sees their everydayness as a form of death. They are so engulfed
in the humdrum qualities of life that they are not really living
anymore, Binx says. Binx himself realizes that his own life has
no meaning and therefore does not want to be dragged down along
with everybody else in the drudgery that he perceives everyday
existence to be.
	But it is when Binx confronts someone enveloped in these
moments of everydayness that Binx’s observant eye often focuses
on some unique quirk about the person. He is able to catch a
glimpse of the person’s miniscule peculiarities, the things that
make the person real and alive, that saves them from death.
Early in the novel Binx meets his cousin Eddie on the street.
They have a rather boring conversation, mostly filled with
small-talk comments on life in general and never getting into
specifics. Binx repeats the phrase “I will!” several times
throughout the conversation, and many of his other replies are
equally curt, displaying his displeasure at having to engage in
such a humdrum activity.
	But throughout the conversation, Binx describes for the
reader Eddie’s actions, illuminating for us a little piece of
light in Eddie’s life. Eddie, as he talks, repeatedly smacks a
newspaper, which he has folded up in one hand, against his leg.
He performs this action subconsciously without any real
knowledge of what he is doing. He does not even feel the impact
upon his leg. Similarly, Binx almost subconsciously notices this
behavior and calls it to our attention. Eddie’s nervous tick
becomes more interesting for the reader, and for Binx, than the
actual conversation.
	Similarly, Binx meets Eddie’s wife Nell later in the
novel. She too engages him in some rather idle chit-chat. In
this passage of the novel, Binx focuses, instead of on his
partner in conversation, on himself. Throughout the conversation
Binx is trying to keep from passing gas in front of this woman.
It becomes all-consuming for him, his awareness of his own
bowels. Binx uses this idea to say that they both are dead
inside, but in reality Binx has focused on a very human part of
himself, rather than the arid conversation.
	Often, however, Binx’s longing to connect with others
beyond the superficial leads him into fantasy. Early in the
novel while on a bus, he sees an attractive woman sitting across
the aisle from him, and he begins to imagine a whole life for
her. He creates a stereotype in his mind of what she must be
like, based on her appearance alone, and then  he places her on
a pedestal too high for him to reach. He essentially cuts off
his own means of connecting with this woman in a meaningful way,
because he imagines that it would be impossible to talk to her. 
	In the same vein, Binx meets up with a young man on a
train late in the novel while traveling from Chicago back home
to New Orleans. The young man is reading a book of poetry, and
Binx again presumes to know exactly what this boy’s life is
like. He calls the young man a hopeless romantic, an evaluation
simply based on the title of the book he reads. This time Binx
does attempt to talk to the young man, but when the boy is
reticent, Binx assumes that it means the boy is afraid that he
is a homosexual. He overlooks the fact that the boy may simply
want to be left alone.
	And in his evaluation of this boy, Binx scoffs at the
poetry he reads. He says that there is no point in reading such
trash, that any avenue it would lead down toward meaning is a
dead-end. Binx calls the boy’s search hopeless, despite its
striking similarity to his own search for life’s meaning. 
	Also early in the novel, Binx speaks to Mercer, his Aunt
Emily’s servant. Mercer too is a person that Binx thinks he has
all figured out. He interprets simple comments the man makes as
snide, and he assumes that the man is working some elaborate
trick to lower Binx’s self-esteem, kicking him when he is down.
Mercer too is onto the search, in his own way. He reads
self-help books, the titles of which Binx disparages. 
	It is in this contradiction that Binx’s chief problem
lies. On the one hand Binx more than anything else in the world
wants to be unique. He cannot tolerate people who are ordinary.
Yet he himself cannot make the simplest decisions about his
everyday life. He lets Consumer Reports magazine decide for him
what he should buy. 
	On the other hand Binx believes that everyone else in the
world is just like him. He often assumes that the courses of
action that seem most reasonable to him are viewed in the same
way by everyone else. He passes his thoughts on life onto
others, and we have no choice but to believe him. At times he
claims to have the world all figured out, when this is clearly
not the case. And at others he denies any sort of knowledge on
how the world works.
	While in Chicago Binx again tries to reach out to someone,
despite his repeated comments about wanting to be left alone.
Even though he is in town purely on business, Binx skips out on
the convention he is supposed to be attending and goes to visit
an old army buddy, Howard, who saved his life during the war.
Exactly how he did this is never fully explained, so we are left
again to wonder if Binx is not merely exaggerating and making
something big out of a very insignificant event.
	Speculation aside, it is clear here that Binx yearns for a
type of connection with other people in visiting his old friend.
Their relationship is flimsy at best, based loosely on these
events that occurred over ten years ago. Binx glamorizes
Howard’s life in his own mind, even though Binx himself is
engaged in the same occupation and just as affluent if not more
so. 
	The one thing Binx is missing that his friend Howard has
is a sense of family. Howard is married and has a newborn son,
for whom Binx is asked to be godfather. Binx is urged by this
scene of what he imagines to be pure bliss to reach out to form
a family of his own, in essence merely imitating his friend in
an attempt at happiness and not searching out what would be best
for him.
	This search that Binx is on in fact does have its origins
in Binx’s own dissolved family. The novel begins with a
description of the death of Binx’s older brother Scott when Binx
was a very young man. Scott is in essence a non-entity in the
novel, never himself having a presence except in death. And upon
his death, Binx and Aunt Emily go for a walk in which she tries
her best to explain to him what has happened. She tells him that
he must act like a soldier, a comment that clearly delineates
her philosophy of stoicism and emotional detachment from life. 
	Binx’s father was also onto the search, just as Binx is
now. Binx’s chief memories of his father include accounts of his
insomnia. Late at night he would get up from bed and go for
walks, trying to commune with nature. When he returned he would
often sleep on the porch to be that much closer to the world
outside. Before he was married, Binx’s father experienced the
wanderlust and roamed around Europe in an attempt to find
himself.
	We are left to assume that he never did. Binx’s father
enlisted in the Canadian Air Force during World War II and was
actually killed before the U.S. even entered the war. When he
died he carried a copy of A Shropshire Lad in his pocket. It
seems that Binx’s own father was too a hopeless romantic; it
could also be interpreted that Binx’s father longed for death
and intended to die in combat.
	Binx appears to have inherited his father’s
disillusionment, but it could also be clearly tied to his lack
of a mother figure. When his father died, Binx’s mother left him
with his Aunt Emily to be raised and she moved away to be a
nurse at a hospital in Biloxi. She remarried and eventually had
six other children with her new husband. 
	But Binx does not comprehend his loss of family and its
ties to his search. He believes that its origins lie in his war
experiences. Yet his brush with death is an event that he
relates to the reader with such calmness that is hard not to
think that he might be again exaggerating the seriousness of
what occurred.
	Like his father, Binx begins to see death in a way as a
release from mediocrity. He never actively seeks his own demise,
but he is not exactly careful to avoid it either. Midway through
the novel Binx and his secretary Sharon get into an awful car
wreck, purely because Binx was not being very cautious. And
rather than recognize the severity of what has happened, Binx
uses the opportunity to flirt with Sharon while she bandages his
wounds.
	Binx’s dalliances with the various women in his life
sometimes detract from the search itself, which is tied very
clearly into the moviegoing he engages in. This metaphor of
moviegoing as part of the search is essential to the
understanding of the novel and of Binx himself. Binx uses his
moviegoing as an attempt to realize the purpose of his life,
because it is the only way he knows how. However, this outlet is
clearly only leading him deeper into fantasy.
	Binx often describes the people around him by comparison
to movie actors, a technique that one critic thought might
alienate some readers who would miss the pop culture references
to actors like John Wayne and Gregory Peck. He himself he
frequently describes as if he were the romantic lead in a film,
usually choosing Rory Calhoun as his object of imitation. Binx
fails to live up to this ideal he sets for himself, though, and
it only serves to drive him further into despair.
	At one point Binx describes how he feels about the movies,
again applying his philosophy on the subject to the whole world.
He is in a movie theater watching a film, when he realizes that
the movie must have been shot right outside the theater. The
fact that the neighborhood outside has appeared in a movie makes
it real to him, a process he calls certification. Now, because
it has been in a movie, this place has a right to be; its
existence is justified.
	Binx also describes this idea in an early scene in which
he runs into movie actor William Holden on the street. Binx
himself does not interact with the celebrity, only watches while
others do and comments in his mind. When a young honeymooning
couple, who Binx for some reason assumes are not having a good
time, give Holden a light for his cigarette and strike up a
brief conversation with him, their lives are enlightened. Their
existence is justified, even though in reality the conversation
they have is of no more importance than the boring conversations
Binx himself has with Nell and Eddie.
	Binx realizes though that moviegoing as a method for
searching is quite empty. He describes a typical scene in a
film, in which a man might get amnesia and have his world turned
upside down. But then he settles down, finds a job and a girl,
becomes mediocre again, in Binx’s opinion. Binx realizes that
there must be more to the search than this.
	He is finally led down the path of true learning by his
younger step-brother Lonnie, a devout Catholic, crippled and
dying of cancer, who is also attuned to the power of moviegoing.
Lonnie leads Binx to see that the search should be more than
vertical, that is, it should entail more than finding your
meaning within your own soul. It should be a horizontal search,
one that places you firmly in the world.
	Yet even after realizing this point, Binx engages in
distractions from his search, affairs with his various
secretaries. He fondly recalls a brief affair in the past with
his secretary Linda, all the while talking about it in the
present tense, as if it were still ongoing. He romanticizes
these relationships he has, declares that the girl hug upon his
every word until finally he could take no more and had to get
rid of her.
	Binx’s current secretary Sharon is at times described in
very unflattering terms. She is really quite plain, but he
imagines her to be incredibly beautiful, almost forcing himself
to fall in love with her. In reality his feelings are mere lust,
which he relishes more in than the actual consummation. With
Sharon, just when it looks like they might be consumed with
passion, something interrupts them, leading the reader to
believe that the case might be similar with his previous
conquests.
	Binx’s true love interest in the novel is his cousin Kate.
She is the Sue to his Jude, a like-minded woman who also feels
the despair of her humdrum life. Both are equally mentally
unstable, engaging in fantasies and having drastic mood swings
from happy to angry to depressed all in one scene. She, however,
has actually made attempts on her life, and Aunt Emily has asked
Binx to be involved with her, to essentially keep her occupied
and out of trouble.
	In the course of the novel, Kate and Binx come closer
together, realizing their underlying connection. She too is onto
the search; she understands his moviegoing. However, she still
cannot find an outlet for her own search for identity, and when
she goes with Binx to the convention in Chicago she repeatedly
take painkillers to deaden her feelings. In the midst of her
stupor, she attempts to seduce Binx, but he again cannot
consummate a relationship. He is impotent.
	But now that his attempt at engaging in carnal delights
has failed, Binx begins to feel that Kate might be the answer to
his problems. She would not trouble him with sexual desire as he
has been so distracted by his secretaries, and so he believes
she would be a stable person with whom to build the type of
relationship he imagines Howard has. So in the end of the novel,
they return to New Orleans on Ash Wednesday, Binx’s thirtieth
birthday, and they decide to get married as an answer to their
problems.
	In the epilogue we are shown the result of that marriage
weeks after the fact. At this point it is important to note that
the next religious holiday of great significance after Ash
Wednesday is Easter, and that the epilogue is in many ways
intended as a rebirth for the characters. However, despite the
fact that many critics see the epilogue as filled with hope for
Binx and his new life, it is in reality far from hopeful. The
rebirth is empty.
	Binx and Kate have married, but their relationship is
anything but a solution to their problem. It is clearly a
passionless marriage, and Binx’s conversations with Kate are as
devoid of meaning as his earlier chit-chat with Nell. Kate is
dependent upon Binx for her survival. She needs him to be
thinking of her at all times. The novel closes with her running
an errand for Binx, but only after he repeatedly gives her the
directions of what he must do. He also has to reassure her
constantly that he will be thinking of her the entire time she
is gone, non-stop. It is as if, without knowing she is Binx’s
thoughts, Kate feels her existence is not justified.
	Binx has left his profession as stockbroker and decided to
become a doctor. He has left behind the empty pursuit of money,
and is now in medical school, trying to help people. But while
this is admittedly a noble pursuit, it is not a choice he made
on his own. His Aunt Emily has always wanted him to become a
doctor, and while his interest in helping people is genuine, his
outlet for this goal has been chosen for him. Much like his
emulation of Howard’s life, this choice of profession was not
one that he came to himself.
	In the epilogue, Binx attends Lonnie’s funeral and
attempts to console his other step-siblings. When they begin to
cry, Binx tells them Lonnie wouldn’t want that, essentially
telling them to act like little soldiers, as Aunt Emily told him
years before. They ask him if Lonnie will be able to walk in
heaven. Binx plainly tells them he will. Many critics believe
that this scene shows that Binx has actually accepted God, but
Percy himself has said that he intended the ending to be
ambiguous. It can be clearly interpreted that Binx is merely
telling the children what he thinks they need to hear, and
doesn’t believe a bit of it himself.
	In the epilogue Binx’s search has been totally abandoned.
He no longer goes to movies. He is living a life of mediocrity
and trying to pretend that he is happy. But there is every
indication that the despair he felt throughout the novel will
someday return, leaving him even more empty than before. Many
critics would like this novel to end in hope, but these critics
are merely grasping at straws, bending the novel to fit their
misinterpretation of it. 
	The final scene of The Moviegoer illustrates strongly the
misrepresentation among literary critics that has continued
since the novel was published in 1961. The failure of the
protagonist to reach a meaningful conclusion to his search
simply serves to remind readers that finding meaning in life is
not a simple task, to be set upon through fantasy indulgence or
by taking the easy path provided for you. You must find your own
way, a simple point that, had Binx Bolling ever realized it,
would have led the book to the hopeful ending that most critics
wish it had.
	

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