Walker Percy — “The Moviegoer”
One of my favorite authors is Walker Percy. My friend Richard Rumble forwards this item below, perhaps explaining one reason why I like Percy — he loved movies:
His admirers often relish his moviegoing as a sign of his easygoing nature. But for Percy himself the movies were a complex escape. Afternoons, when he generally went to the movies, were for him times of anomie and even despair — times “which ought to be the best of times,’ he later explained, “but are, often as not, times when places, people, things, green leaves seem to be strangely diminished and devalued.” The movies served as an ideal contrast. Percy found them more intense, more real, than everyday life, and full of searchers like himself. “For a lot of people,” he remarked some years later, the movies “provide important moments, maybe the only point in the day, or even the week, when someone (a cowboy, a detective, a crook) is heard asking what life is all about, asking what is worth fighting for — or asking if anything is worth fighting for.”
Percy himself singled out a different activity as the heart of his college life. He recalled that he spent college “rocking on the porch of the SAE house and going to the movies in the afternoon”; he reported that he “sat on the porch for four years, drinking and observing the scene.” The porch suited his search and his developing sense of himself. It was like the pantry in Uncle Will’s house, where Harry Stack Sullivan had situated himself — an in-between place, with heavy traffic but no single purpose, where one was free to watch and listen and think. There on the porch, Percy found (as the hero of Lancelot remarks) “the narrower the view, the more you can see.” There he found that he could take in real life in concentrated form, as if it were a movie.
(pp. 78–79 of “The Life You Save May Be Your Own — An American Pilgrimage” by Paul Elie)
Stands to reason, I guess, that my favorite Percy book is “The Moviegoer”. Here’s an extract of the Wikipedia plot summary:
The Moviegoer tells the story of Binx Bolling, a young stockbroker in post-war New Orleans. The decline of Southern traditions, the problems of his family and his traumatic experiences in the Korean War have left him alienated from his own life. He daydreams constantly, has trouble engaging in lasting relationships, and finds more meaning and immediacy in movies and books than in his own routine life.
The loose plot of the novel follows Binx as he embarks on an undefined “search,” wandering around New Orleans, Chicago and the Gulf Coast reflecting philosophically on small episodes and interactions. He is constantly challenged to define himself in relation to friends, family, lovers, and career despite his urge to remain vague and open to possibility.
I guess you could call the novel an ‘existential’ story. Here’s a representative quote:
Today is my thirtieth birthday and I sit on the ocean wave in the schoolyard and wait for Kate and think of nothing. Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies — my only talent — smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall — on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire.
Yet amidst the meaninglessness of it all, the Protagonist Binx Bolling has movies:
The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives…
In conversations, casual or formal, I find myself constantly quoting movies, referencing movie scenes. Fair to say that movies are one of my most central points of connection to ‘reality.’
How about you? What do movies mean to you?