The Moviegoer
In Signposts in a Strange Land, Walker Percy describes the modern American as “the anonymous consumer who is lost to himself,” yet suggests that anxiety may be “the call of the self to the self… the discovery of the possibility of freedom to become a self” (255). Percy’s novel The Moviegoer dramatizes this existential crisis through Binx Bolling, a disillusioned Korean War veteran living in Gentilly, a “non-place” echoing Percy’s own Covington. Gentilly’s emptiness mirrors Binx’s alienation: as he withdraws from authentic relationships and drifts through casual affairs, he becomes a metaphysical “non-place” himself—an “Anybody, Anywhere.”
Percy prefaces the novel with Kierkegaard’s line: “the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair.” Binx’s irony lies in his blindness to his own malaise; he scorns others for their “everydayness” while embodying it himself. Yet through small awakenings—moments of perception, memory, and art—he begins a “search” for a more authentic way of being.
Movies form the heart of Binx’s search. They offer both escape and revelation: “I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie… What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine… and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man” (7). Film grants him a horizontal kind of knowledge—an awareness rooted in the particular—rather than the abstract, vertical knowledge of science. Where scientific inquiry deals with what is “generally true,” art, Percy writes, “holds what is uniquely true” (218). In movies, Binx glimpses the singularity of human experience that restores meaning to his own.
Binx’s malaise, “the pain of loss… you no more able to be in the world than Banquo’s ghost” (120), stems from this separation between self and world. His home in Elysian Fields—a boulevard that “runs an undistinguished course from river to lake”—becomes a metaphor for his spiritual vacancy. Yet when he rediscovers wonder, even in a wallet or a dung beetle, the ordinary world becomes luminous again. “To become aware of the possibility of the search,” he writes, “is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair” (13).
The horizontal search—embodied in wandering, watching, and seeing—roots Binx in time and place. Movies, he says, can even “certify” a neighborhood: “if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere” (63). Art thus transforms the “non-place” into a place, the anonymous into the particular.
Tragedy and near-death experiences also pierce everydayness. After a car accident, Binx feels his malaise momentarily dissolve; Kate, his kindred spirit in despair, notes that “only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real” (81). Both find authenticity in moments when life’s fragility becomes visible.
By the novel’s end, Binx confronts the emptiness of his evasions. Returning to Gentilly, he sees Elysian Fields as “trim and pretty on the outside but evil-smelling within” (228)—a metaphor for his own self-deception. Yet his decision to marry Kate and pursue medicine suggests not resignation but renewal. He reenters the world as an individual who can love, contribute, and perceive.
Percy’s The Moviegoer ultimately answers his own diagnosis of modern malaise. Through art, perception, and participation, Binx Bolling transforms from a man lost “anywhere” into a self rooted “somewhere.” His awakening—born of movies, memory, and mortality—reveals that authenticity begins not in escape but in attention: in the act of seeing the world, and oneself, anew.