The Moviegoer: Finishing up

I finished reading The Moviegoer last week, but you know how it is with me and posting in a timely fashion.

As I noted in my last Moviegoer post, what struck me at the end were how the most real moments for Binx, the times when he's most engaged with real life and interacting in the present, are the least cinematic. The epilogue has no big wedding, no dramatic death-bed scene, no big moments of victory or defeat or theatricality. In the end, there's a touching mundanity to seeing a day in the life of Binx, and there's a humanity at the end that's lacking in the grand analysis and detachment of the first chapter. At the end, I actually liked him. He was just a clever conceit in search of a situation at the beginning of the book, but by the end I recognized him. Someone who has to take charge in the midst of family crisis, to reassure the younger siblings, to support a needy loved one while remaining cheerful and calm? Yeah, I've known guys like that. Heck, I've been that person. That rang true to me, in a way that some of Binx's earlier attitudes didn't. That's Binx living life, as opposed to observing it from Gentilly.

And I gave more credence to Binx's habit of analysis once he proved he was capable of human interaction. Binx's grieving twin sisters are described as sobbing at an impending death, and yet being secretly proud that they're old enough to understand the tragedy. A famous French actor of a few hundred years ago was reported to have remarked, even in the midst of his immediate grief over his father's death, that he needed to remember this emotion so that he could use it on stage.  I think that's fair. Unlike the characters in the movies Binx watches, who are swept along with one grand passion at a time, a person in the midst of grief can joke, laugh, stir a pot, discuss the news, and cry, all in the same moment. Life doesn't stop to let people die in a tranquil void. There are still bills to pay, children to tend, and streetcars to be conquered.

...

I'll tell you how I knew that Binx's mother was a character that Percy found sympathetic: he is elegant in his account of her hay fever. As someone who suffers from sinus afflictions myself (during this changing weather my face blocks up almost solid around 8pm each evening), it's clear to me that Percy could have been very satirical in describing Anna's constant snuffing and nose blowing, and yet he describes it musically, making it an almost endearing trait. That did more than anything else to endear Percy to me.

The Moviegoer, Part III

Watching Mr. Walker Percy at work in The Moviegoer, I'm noticing that the most real scenes, where Binx is on the spot, forced to improvise or to listen thoroughly to the other person, are the least cinematic. And so we get to Kate and Binx on the train to Chicago, in what must be the least filmable love scene ever (if it can be called a love scene) ever. Binx is concerned, wary, headachy, and not following well Kate's changes of mood and topic. She's drugged and desperately trying to work up some desire by referencing, rather obliquely, a pornographic cartoon featuring Tillie the Toiler and Mac. (I would have had no idea what she was talking about if it weren't that this cartoon was included in the title of Matthew Lickona's panel presentation for the Walker Percy Conference:  "Tillie and Mac and Belly to Back: Percy and Pornography, from The Moviegoer to The Thanatos Syndrome".)

The resulting encounter is actively anti-cinematic, if by cinematic one means the sort of quasi-melodramatic movies that Binx has been watching throughout the book. Though they have sex, it's a anxious touch-and-go struggle. Binx knows how important it is that he perform at this moment when an increasingly fragile Kate has thrown herself at him; what Kate is striving for is not the sexual act but the release and peace that follows, but the faint lure of the porno-comic can't compensate for the reality of the situation. Desire and ability can be fleeting at the best of times, as anyone knows who's suddenly listened for little padding footsteps in the hall outside the door that might not have been locked. In the case of Binx and Kate, almost all things (including their own bodies) are conspiring against them, and it's a minor miracle that they're able to finish up at all.

What's interesting is that Binx, who was able to channel a movie persona so successfully when he was trying to seduce his secretary, is unable to put on a role here even when Kate keeps trying to make him play some part in her own fantasy. This interaction is too fraught with peril to Kate for Binx to be anyone but himself with her.

The Moviegoer, Part II

Binx is interesting, and I probably would have thought him real deep if I'd read The Moviegoer as a teenager, but now what stands out is that he isn't nearly as perceptive as he thinks he is.

It seems like Binx can't get a handle on who he his until he has a handle on the kind of person his father was. Problem is, he seems incapable of twisting the jewel to see how the facets interact with one another. He thinks his mother and his aunt don't know who his father was because they emphasize different aspects of his character, but instead of trying to meld the "student prince" and the "ironic young dude" and the "overwrought" man into a single personality, he'd prefer to think that everyone has made "an emblem" of the man. Binx listens, but he does not hear -- though that's fitting, since he feels like that's the problem with everyone else.

He's a fairly astute observer of externals, but he lacks that spark of caritas that allows a man to fully engage with his fellow humans. He hasn't grown out of an adolescent snark; he just expresses himself more literately. He can ascribe motives and objectives, but he can't find the essential humanity behind the actions of those he observes. If he were an writer, he'd be a second-rate Robinson Davies: all slice 'n dice, but without Davies' sympathy for his characters.

Do I sound harsh on Binx? I think he's directionless to the point of stupor (how can he choose a direction until he knows what he's searching for?), but I tell you what, Lickona was right: He's not passive when it comes to the ladies. I like him a lot when he's trying to seduce his secretary. He's planning, scheming, strategizing -- he's ACTING, in the technical sense of the word. He determines his objective, he stages his scenario, he varies his tactics. He responds to the other in the scene and makes her respond to him.  Of course he's playing a scene, like William Holden in the movies, and yet the thrill of having a scene to play animates him. Maybe it's because then he knows what he's searching for, even if it's a secondary objective.

And note that when he's in an open-ended scene, or a conversation where there's no clear goal, he withdraws into analyzing.

Look: I can't really engage with Kate. Percy seems to prefer these emotionally fragile heroines, but I like his more robust ladies. Example: Margot from Lancelot. (My favorite line from Lancelot is a description of Margot: "Her face was if anything more soft-eyed and voluptuous, as only a thirty-two-year-old woman can be voluptuous.") Margot is vibrant and loveable, even if she's also a sleazy adulterer. And come to that, Lancelot's problem is that he can't reconcile these two facets of his wife... but now we're discussing a different novel. So: Kate. She's bristly and unknowable and suffering from a serious depression, and I can be remotely sympathetic, but she's triggering my Binx-like remote observation tendencies.

Now you want the real heroine, the woman at the heart of the book (I say, being only halfway through)? It's Binx's mother, Anna. Hoo, I love dat woman, cher! She's buried a husband and two beloved older sons, and she still retains a strength and charm and vitality that Binx either lacks or chooses not to engage.  I want to know this lady. I want to talk to her and live next door to her and watch her fish from the dock in the early sunlight and see how she handles her six remaining younger children from her second marriage. Binx may feel like she's put up a veneer of ordinariness, but I think she's just strong and funny and what his father needed to snap him out of himself. Binx need a girl just like the girl who married dear old Dad.

Duval, Lonnie, Donice, Clairain, Mathilde, Therese, Jean-Paul: if I had read this book as a teenager, I think one of my children would bear one of these names now. Maybe I need to work a Clairain or Mathilde into the rotation here.

Reading The Moviegoer

Darwin and I are heading down to New Orleans in a few weeks to attend the Inaugural Conference of the Walker Percy Center for Writing and Publishing.  The theme of the conference is "The Moviegoer at Fifty", and the panelists include such familiar names as Matthew Lickona and other members of the Korrectiv crew, Dorian Speed, Betty Duffy, and Amy Welborn.  An example of a panel:

11) Moviegoers Reading The Moviegoer
Rebecca Baker / What One Has to Do with the Other: A Semiotic Reading of The Moviegoer
Elizabeth Duffy, Dorian Speed, & Amy Welborn / Following William Holden on Twitter
Matthew Luter /The (Fictional) Character Projected Upon the Page: The Moviegoer and the Semiotics of the Celebrity Self

I'm looking forward to the presentation without the word "semiotic" in the title.

This is going to be a doozy of trip, starting with riding 13 hours to New Orleans with Betty Duffy. Everyone's staying in the same charming hotel, and with Darwin and Lickona leading the pack, the carousing will be epic.

The only thing left to do is to actually read The Moviegoer.

But I'm on it, friends.  My copy arrived today, and so I'm going to live blog The Moviegoer (or at least transcribe my reactions as I go -- I'm taking notes).

Passivity
So we meet Binx -- I know that's his name because the back of the book told me so, although he's first addressed as Jack. He seems essentially passive. None of his actions, at the beginning, are positive. Everything's a response: his civic duty, his work, his movie watching. He's so lacking in drive that he can't be bothered to take his car places. At least at the movies, passivity is the proper response.


Drama: choices and change
One can read The Moviegoer in terms of cinema, but I'm remembering taking Acting class in college. Drama, we learned, springs from change, and Binx isn't there yet. Even staring at his pile of stuff, he's still analyzing, and the drama is still waiting for the inciting incident.

When there's drama between two people who know each other well, the confrontation usually takes two forms: either "You always do that" or "You've never done that before." Binx is definitely in a "you always do that" phase at the beginning.


YouTube
His reaction to watching movies reminded me of a phenomenon I've pondered lately: the decline of creativity in the age of YouTube. Time was, when my siblings and I would get together, we would go into creative overdrive: singing, playing games, throwing together skits, being involved. Now it seems like we huddle over the computer and watch YouTube videos. There's creativity there, but it's not ours. We're passive.

Watching a movie takes a certain pre-determined investment of time, but YouTube videos are pernicious because they're short. It feels like there's no time commitment because look, this one's only two minutes long! Then you stretch out your cramped legs and compressed spine and realize that everyone's been crouched in front of the screen for two hours.

Holden as peculiarly real
The thing is, it's not enough just to be near William Holden, because everyone on the street is near him. It's not enough to be spoken to by him. He has to approve you. And the approval is key not just because you yourself think he's great, but because everyone else acknowledges his greatness. Which is why the boy can't be perked up simply by the affection of his new wife. She's fine, of course, but no one else cares. But everyone cares about William Holden,

I think Binx is being disingenuous. I bet he wouldn't mind if William Holden spoke to him as well.