Catholic Fiction

The Celluloid Void

reviewed by John Murphy 

I love going to the movies. I even flatter myself I’ve acquired over time a connoisseur’s taste for excellence, but the truth is that I don’t always discriminate between high art and low art. Any kind of movie, any kind of genre, will do. The hypnotic experience of sitting in the dark, watching a dream unfold, passively absorbing the flickering montage of images, is in and of itself enough to keep me coming back for more. I’m an addict that way, I suppose.

Cinephiles appreciate the medium’s possibility for transcendent entertainment, but there’s a downside: it’s a vicarious transcendence. You don’t participate in the on-screen action, but sit safely ensconced in the womb of the theater until you emerge blinking into the sunlight after two precious hours of escape.

The theme of non-participation is central to Walker Percy’s National Book Award-winning debut, The Moviegoer. Published in 1960, it has become a keystone work of existential Catholic fiction, owing as much to Albert Camus as it does to Evelyn Waugh. The main character, a kind of twentieth-century Everyman, could be an echo of T.S. Eliot’s prophetic 1925 poem, “The Hollow Men:

Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass

The tone of The Moviegoer’s narrator is indeed dry, quiet, and deliberately devoid of meaning: “I could never make head or tail of God,” the narrator confesses, almost as an afterthought. “The proofs of God’s existence may have been true for all I know, but it didn’t make the slightest difference. If God himself had appeared to me, it would have changed nothing. In fact, I have only to hear the word God and a curtain comes down in my head.” This is a narrator so mired in malaise he can’t muster the mental energy even to be skeptical. He does not rage against God, he simply shrugs his shoulders. As T.S. Eliot warned in the same poem:

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper

Who is this creature, this Hollow Man? He is Jack “Binx” Bolling, a stockbroker living in New Orleans, whose only pleasures in life derive from watching movies and romancing his secretaries. In his own words, “I am a model tenant and a model citizen and take pleasure in doing all that is expected of me.” Binx had once been ambitious, “but there is much to be said for giving up such grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life imaginable, a life without the old longings; selling stocks and bonds and mutual funds; quitting work at five o’clock like everyone else; having a girl and perhaps one day settling down…”

Binx’s attempts to convince himself that his “ordinary life” is tolerable ring hollow. He’s adrift in the crushing normality of an uninspiring existence. There is an undertone of quiet desperation when he writes, “It is a pleasure to carry out the duties of a citizen and to receive in return a receipt or a neat styrene card with one’s name on it certifying, so to speak, one’s right to exist.” Yet there’s a still-burning ember of humanity buried beneath the ashes, however faint.

As the novel begins, Carnival week in New Orleans is kicking off and Binx is ready to embark on “the search,” as he calls it. “The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life…To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.” The enigmatic quote becomes a bit clearer when illuminated by the novel’s epigraph, courtesy of Christian philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard: “The specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair.”

The Moviegoer charts Binx’s growing awareness of his own despair – a character arc mirroring that of Antoine Roquentin in Jean Paul Sartre’s foundational work of Existentialism, Nausea. Percy, steeped in the particular language and atmosphere of Southern America, nonetheless owes an intellectual debt to Europe. In tone and action (or non-action), Binx Bolling’s closest literary equivalent is Merseault, the anti-hero of Camus’ TheStranger. Both protagonists are sunk in unthinking ennui, experiencing life moment-to-moment, despairing of the Big Picture yet unable to pinpoint the exact nature of their despair. Binx watches his life drift by with the passivity of an inveterate moviegoer.

Binx’s detachment is given an appropriately distant treatment by Percy. His matter-of-fact prose style reads like a wry Hemingway. Percy had been a practicing physician when, at the age of forty-six, The Moviegoer became his first published novel. His training as a physician at least partially explains his diagnostic approach to fiction. Percy’s analysis of Binx is tantamount to an autopsy: a thorough dissection of something already dead. He has a doctor’s professional distance and keen, unsentimental eye. His unblinking observations of human behavior border on the cruel in their calculating objectivity. How many books have you read in which the “hero,” knowing that his landlady is out, proceeds to give her dog “a tremendous kick in the ribs and send him yowling”?

Where Percy breaks from his existential European brethren is in his deep-seated Roman Catholicism. The Catholic element is not overt in the novel—it is, in fact, almost subterranean—but the themes of sin, penance, and redemption thread through the narrative. The action of the novel culminates on Ash Wednesday, a holy day that marks the beginning of the Lenten season, a day when man is reminded “that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.” Perhaps this is the intersection of Percy’s existentialism and his Catholicism. Both worldviews contend that man is dust, but Catholicism offers the promise of a life redeemed by Christ, thus becoming a gift from God of incalculable value. In those terms, the drama of life is the interior struggle between good and evil, between the desire to follow Christ and the desire to follow one’s own ephemeral pleasures.

Having committed a mortal sin towards the end of the novel, Binx reflects on his curious indifference towards the act: “Christians talk about the horror of sin, but they have overlooked something. They keep talking as if everyone were a great sinner, when the truth is that nowadays one is hardly up to it. There is very little sin in the depths of malaise.” Binx could be referring to the condition Hannah Arendt termed the “banality of evil”—evil so mundane and everyday it is no longer recognizable as“evil.”

When God—who is life and love—is removed from the equation, then life and love become impossible. That is why Binx, who can’t be bothered by the mere thought of God, is so afraid of vanishing. He does not like to drive cars, for instance, because “Whenever I drive a car, I have the feeling I have become invisible. People on the street cannot see you; they only watch your rear fender until it is out of their way. ”Movies are the means by which Binx confirms his own existence. Movies bestow identity. Binx calls this process “certification.” He explains that “nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will lie there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But 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.”

Being “Somewhere” and being “Someone” informs Binx’s search. Bolling observes another young man’s chance encounter with William Holden, star of celluloid classics like Sunset Boulevard and Bridge on the River Kwai. When Holden pats the fellow’s shoulder in a gesture of camaraderie, Bolling thinks, “the boy has done it! He has won title to his own existence…” Binx has attributed to Holden what Christians attribute to God—the ability to affirm one’s existence. Thus, for Binx, the movie theater has replaced the church as a place of worship. This substitution is at the heart of Binx’s malaise. The cathedral is a place to celebrate humanity redeemed by a God who is Love. A movie theater is a place to escape humanity by watching, without participating, reduced and artificial visions of humanity.

Just as movies are a twentieth century phenomenon, Percy’s novel offers an apt metaphor for the twentieth century’s spiritual malaise. Many of us, myself included, are conditioned by the recurring act of watching film or television – we become spectators of our own lives. The Moviegoer deserves its status as a modern classic because Percy does not spare “modernity.” Nearly fifty years after the publication of this book, the names of the movies and movie stars have changed, but Binx Bolling’s spiritual despair is all too familiar.