Binx and Kate: Finder and Maker Reversed

Walker Percy's novel The Moviegoer chronicles a week in the life of stockbroker Binx Bolling, and his eventual marriage with his step-cousin Kate Cutrer. More than that, it sketches Binx's peculiar philosophy, and Kate's equally strange orientation, and their eventual transposition. Binx begins as an enjoyer of reality, a searcher, or finder of relief from tedium, and Kate as a frantic searcher who becomes a maker of crises to relieve her post-modern ennui. But by the end of the novel, their beginning positions are almost reversed, muddled together to form a more healthy relationship.

Both Binx and Kate are self-aware characters in a world of actors, the only ones to realize the inherent falseness, the cliches, in all things. The very characters sound like movie stars' pseudonyms: Binx Bolling, Lyle Lovell, Walter Wade, with their assonance sound all too much like Robert Redford, James Earl Jones, the too-memorable monikers of film stars. Aunt Emily's manservant Mercer is "threading his way between servility and presumption" (p. 17), now one way then the other, with a dignified appearance but "behind the mustache, his face... is not at all devoted but is as sulky as a Pullman porter's." (ibid.) Even Mercer's exaggerated breathing while serving dishes (pp. 156-157) is the act of a stereotypical servant made ridiculous. Binx's biological mother displays "a fondness carefully guarded against the personal, the heartfelt, a fondness deliberately rendered trite." (p. 139) The radio program "I Believe" (p. 95) is a collection of hoary platitudes, and Binx's "pleasant tingling sensation in the groin" afterwards (p. 96) reveals it as nothing but moral masturbation. Binx's Theosophist aunts make all the world into thespians: through reincarnation, the soul is like an actor playing many parts. Even Binx's father is said to have died at Crete, "in the wine dark sea" (p. 20) -- a cliche as old as Homer.

Where Binx and Kate differ is in their responses to this world. Binx is content to glide through life: he "managed to go to college four years without acquiring a single honor" (p. 31) and his aunt Emily tries to summarize his behavior, saying that "one finding oneself in one of life's critical situations need not after all respond in one of the traditional ways. No. One may simply default. Pass. Do as one pleases, shrug, turn on one's heel and leave. Exit." (p. 193) This diagnosis is not strictly true -- after all, Binx spends some time making another "moviegoer" (p. 120), his crippled cousin Lonnie, happy (pp. 142-6). But he does pass through life as a "selfish" observer, and his family makes it easy for him -- as an eight-year-old, he is told to "act like a soldier" (p. 2) (obey orders unquestioningly and without emotion?), and when family troubles with Kate break out he is instructed to "show up, knowing nothing, come looking for her and fetch her down to dinner" (p. 152). His is an act of innocence, of inactivity, a gathering of information.

Yet he takes pleasure in the very act of observing, and it is thus that he escapes ennui, "the malaise." Binx has a pathological need for information: about the movie theaters he attends and their employees, about whatever city he visits (such as Chicago, where he longs for a source of information so that "the stranger shall not become an Anyone" (p. 177)). The descriptions he relays to the reader have an uncanny eye for the slightest details, such as the salesman's white socks and athlete's foot on the bus (p. 191). It is as though Binx the moviegoer anchors his reality by appreciating all the details of the "cinematography" and "set design," wanting to know all the construction rationales, the blocking, the props, and so on.

Kate is locked into the same world, and recognizes Binx as a kindred spirit -- "You're like me, but worse. Much worse." (p. 36) But Kate takes the opposite tack from Binx: instead of avoiding ennui by searching for chance events ("certifications" and "repetitions" and "rotations") and delighting in observation, she creates her own crises to jar the world out of its rut -- "she unfailingly turns everything she touches to horror." (p. 54) Indeed, she insists early on "have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?" (p. 70), and later that "I didn't want to die -- not at that moment. I only wanted to -- break out, or off, off dead center...." (p. 159) The car accident with Lyle Lovell broke the world open for her, and she goes on creating and enjoying crises: the time she "slipped on the hearth and fell into the fire" (p. 158), whether because she was "so nervous" or as an escape from "dreading" (ibid.); the "six or eight capsules" she swallows to throw her relatives into a panic over her apparent suicide attempt; her practice of picking at her thumb until it bleeds; even breaking off her engagement with Walter.

Percy's epilogue, however, shows us a rather different couple after Binx and Kate marry. Binx, who has spoken so volubly of his own philosophical categories and quests, is suddenly and extraordinarily reticent about his "search," and we wonder if he will "make an end" (p. 208) of it, too, for he nowhere in these last pages mentions moviegoing. The deadpan, "grisly" attention to detail is still there -- "Why is he so yellow?" "He's got hepatitis." (p. 209) But Kate seems healthier, whether through treatment with Merle or association with Binx. And her self-destructive practice of crisis creation seems quelled -- instead, Binx has become her director, her "cinematographer." The care with which they plot out her errand -- what streetcar to ride, where to sit, where to wear her cape jasmine -- is like the close composition of a camera shot, all so that Binx, through his imagination, can keep Kate 'in focus' and sane. He is no longer the passive observer, but the active arranger; she no longer the out-of-control crisis-creator, but an obedient actress looking for direction. Binx has moved on to the true movie-lover's dream: he has become a director.