The Unsettling of the Moviegoing Maniac Man

Diagnostics on Modernity from Walker Percy, Wendell Berry, C.S. Lewis, and G.K. Chesterton

An intriguing theme appears in the works of a number of twentieth century authors. This theme involves the process of diagnosis—specifically, the diagnosis of a problem unique to modern mankind. The writers Walker Percy, G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, and Wendell Berry (and others) all share a certain common understanding of an illness of the modern age, one that we will call disconnection. However, each writer brings a distinctive approach to the perceived problem and informs the observations of the others. The writers hail from many different decades and different backgrounds within the twentieth century, yet there is a remarkable continuity of thought among them. Our way into this philosophical tradition will be through Walker Percy’s novel, The Moviegoer, published in 1961. We will examine the work and its contribution to the theme of disconnection and how it defines the term, as well as the ways that it agrees with the writings of the other authors in question.

Throughout The Moviegoer, its hero, a young suburban Southerner, Binx Bolling, seeks to escape from what he terms, “the malaise,” a kind of peculiar modern ennui that is not easily defined. At one point, this phenomenon is described more specifically as, “the pain of loss. The world is lost to you, the world and the people in it, and there remains only you and the world and you no more able to be in the world than Banquo’s ghost” (120). Percy does not immediately define the nature of this loss, but it seems to be composed of several parts, and when we put them together, we begin to understand the full meaning of the term.

The first aspect of this loss (which results in the malaise) is a disconnection from place. It is the sense that, when caught up in mundane routines of life and the sameness of artificial environments, “everyone becomes an anyone” (228). Binx and his fiancée Kate are continually afraid of falling through the cracks of time and place to find that they are nobody in no particular place—the world seems filled with an epidemic of depersonalization. Percy, through the voice of Binx, puts it this way, “If I did not talk to the theater owner or the ticket seller, I should be lost, cut loose metaphysically speaking. I should be seeing one copy of a film which might be shown anywhere and at any time. There is a danger of slipping clean out of space and time” (75). The writer and farmer Wendell Berry echoes this idea of dislocation that Percy is exploring and ties it specifically to a lack of connection to the land. “The modern household’s direct destructiveness of the world,” he writes in his nonfiction book The Unsettling of America, “bears a profound relation…to the fundamental moral disconnections for which it also stands. It divorces us from the sources of our bodily life; as a people, we no longer know the earth we come from” (56). The disconnected modern home can be extrapolated to the disconnected modern city like the one Binx inhabits, and Berry tells us that the modern home or city

is a generalization, a product of factory and fashion, an everyplace or a noplace. Modern houses, like airports, are extensions of each other...The modern specialist and/or industrialist in his modern house can probably have no very clear sense of where he is….Geography is defined for him by his house, his office, his commuting route, and the interiors of shopping centers, restaurants, and places of amusement—which is to say that his geography is artificial; he could be anywhere, and he usually is. (56-7)

Binx feels this acutely. It is a significant part of the malaise he suffers from.

But there is more to the modern malaise and the sense of loss than just disconnection from place. There is also the disconnection from things, or more broadly, disconnection from the world. Oftentimes, we cannot see what is right in front of us. Binx is aware of the difficulty a person encounters in fully connecting with and appreciating the world around him, although Binx himself is able to sometimes break through this barrier. An episode from the novel will demonstrate this. Binx has decided to spend a summer doing research in a lab with a friend, Harry Stern, but “then a peculiar thing happened. I became extraordinarily affected by the summer afternoons in the laboratory…I became bewitched by the presence of the building; for minutes at a stretch I sat on the floor and watched the motes rise and fall in the sunlight” (52). But when Binx tries to engage his friend in regards to the wonder of the moment, “[Harry] shrugged and went on with his work. His abode was anywhere…he is no more aware of the mystery which surrounds him than a fish is aware of the water it swims in” (52). Here, we see that Harry is hampered by his obsession with a practical, scientific approach, breaking things down into tiny pieces, to the extent that he doesn’t really see or connect with the world in a meaningful way. Binx, in contrast to Harry, is excessively aware of the world around him. The famous novelist, essayist, and poet, G.K. Chesterton was also keyed into the possibly distancing effect of overly scientific thinking. In his book, Orthodoxy, Chesterton argues,

All the terms used in the science books, “law,” “necessity,” “order,” “tendency,” and so on, are really unintellectual, because they assume an inner synthesis, which we do not possess. The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, “charm,” “spell,” “enchantment.” They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched. The sun shines because it is bewitched. (58)

Binx seems to approach the world with a bit of this Chestertonian wonder, staring for hours at dust in the sunlight, and we gain the impression that both Percy and Chesterton are trying to help the modern reader really see the world, see it new, see it as it is, be astounded by it because it is really worth being astounded by, and begin to live in wonder. Binx even uses the word “wonder” on occasion. He tells us, “It is distracting, and not for five minutes will I be distracted from the wonder” (42). Chesterton says overtly what Percy only implies: that a well-grounded dose of wonder and mystery in our view of the world are integral to happiness. In his essay, “The Maniac” from Orthodoxy, he writes, “Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity” (32). Morbidity, then, may be a component of the malaise that arises from failing to appreciate mystery.

If the theme of disconnection from things or the world seems a bit obscure in The Moviegoer, it is a little easier to spot in Percy’s second novel, The Last Gentleman. In that book, the protagonist, Will Barrett, buys a telescope because “the conviction grew upon him that his very life would be changed if he owned the telescope,” for the device “penetrated to the heart of things” (29). After he buys the telescope, he finds that when he uses it, the object he sees through it seems to become more real and more valuable. “Beyond any doubt, he said to himself, this proves that bricks, as well as other things, or not as accessible as they used to be. Special measures were needed to recover them” (31). In another episode, Barret is at an art gallery, but he finds that he cannot really see the artwork or connect with it until a minor catastrophe—a skylight breaks and falls into the room in a shower of glass—occurs (27-28). So it is clear that part of Percy’s diagnosis of modern people is that they are disconnected from the world around them, especially from the overly familiar.

And of course nothing is more familiar than human nature. Thus the malaise is also made up in part by a disconnection from self or from humanness. In fact, probably the greatest difficulty for both Binx and Will is their existential questioning, their self-distancing and self-analysis, which springs from a disconnection from the self and others. This disconnection within individuals and between individuals finds a metaphor in Binx’s observation that, “For some time now, the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead. It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death…it seems that the conversation is spoken by automatons who have no choice in what they say” (99-100). Here, the imagery of death and the implied loss of free will that these characters are experiencing points toward a fundamental loss or disconnection with what it means to be human, since the ability to choose freely is part of what defines humanity. The world Percy sketches seems filled with depersonalization, the loss of humanness, which is replaced in a kind of desperation by a hollow humanism.

Another way that Percy demonstrates the loss of humanness is when he examines sin. That loss is epitomized by Binx’s observation that people have difficulty even sinning properly: “Christians…keep talking as if everyone were a great sinner, when the truth is that nowadays one is hardly up to it…The highest moment of a malaisian’s life can be that moment when he manages to sin like a proper human” (200). In other words, the goal of regaining one’s humanity has become paramount. Any act—even an act of evil—that is done like “a proper human” is noteworthy.

In his book, The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis wrote extensively about the threat posed to human nature by the dual advancement of philosophical relativity and unmoored applied science. In the eyes of the present writer, there is a link between Lewis’s thought and Percy’s. The disconnection within and between individuals portrayed by Percy may spring in part from a modern desire to control and manipulate nature—through science or other means—as analyzed by Lewis. A few quotations from the latter will prove useful:

I am only making clear what Man's conquest of Nature really means and especially that final stage in the conquest…The final stage is come when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won…But who, precisely, will have won it?...Man's final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man. (58-64)

Lewis warns that the unending march of progress, a term that has certainly become a motto for modernity, has its dangers. The danger is that by questioning and conquering everything we encounter, by always pushing further, by seeking to scientifically dominate, we will eventually question and conquer ourselves and become “disconnected” from human nature itself. The philosophical side of the issue is one that Chesterton articulates brilliantly, and his words are a near mirror to Lewis’s: “That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself…one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought…There is a thought that stops thought” (38). Twenty years after Lewis and fifty years after Chesterton, Walker Percy gives us examples of the end result of attacks on thought and human nature in The Moveigoer and his other novels. Percy’s protagonists wander around desperately searching for something to believe in, including their own humanity. But the trouble is, there’s very little left for them. Binx Bolling intuitively understands the connections between modern thought and science and his own malaise, his own despair. He laments, “A phrase as ‘hopefully awaiting the gradual convergence of the physical sciences and the social sciences’…howls through the Ponchitoula Swamp, the very soul of despair” (191). This convergence of the sciences against humanity is precisely what Lewis and Chesterton warned about.

[Important note: these writers are not anti-science per se, of course. They are only against a certain philosophy of science that steals the mystery from life and tries to explain all things, including the most sublime and mysterious, like human nature itself, through mere chemical reactions, which ends up “de-mystifying” experience in a very harmful way. This scientific approach often includes a desire to dominate or control nature as well.]

The disconnection from place, things, and people form the backbone of the malaise encountered in The Moviegoer. Percy uses this malaise to give fictional form to themes of disconnection that Berry, Lewis, and Chesterton articulate in their work—so much so that a strong parallel exists between their work. Interestingly, Percy is evasive when it comes to prescribing a cure for the malaise. We get the sense by the end of the novel that Binx is getting closer to freedom from it, but exactly how or why remains unspoken—at least directly. It is possible that Binx’s escape to reality and connection is the fruit of catastrophe, just as Will Barret is able to see the paintings in the gallery only after the sky falls in. The catastrophe in question is death, the death of Binx’s half-brother Lonnie, which occurs at the very end of the book. Death has power to divide, but also power to unite, and we see this occur in both The Moviegoer and The Last Gentleman. In the latter work, Will Barret begins to heal only after the death of his fiancée’s brother, Jamie. In The Moviegoer, Kate makes this observation to Binx: “Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?” (81), and Binx himself extends this idea near the end of the book when he muses, “Is it possible that—for a long time I have secretly hoped for the end of the world and believed with Kate and my aunt and Sam Yerger and many other people that only after the end could the few who survive creep out of their holes and discover themselves to be themselves and live as merrily as children among the viny ruins. Is it possible that—it is not too late?” (231).

Here, the epitome of catastrophe, the end of the world, is presented as a means of escape—not from reality but to reality. Percy suggests that only amidst the tears of suffering and the ashes of destruction can a person under the influence of the malaise break free—break free by finally being tied down, connected to place, to things, to other people, to reality. In the viny ruins, all walls have been broken down, all pretenses shattered, all artificiality laid waste. Then is it possible to live, grounded in the real, as merrily and simply as children. And I need not name here what Kingdom belongs to them.

Works Cited

Berry, Wendell. The Unsettling of America. 1986. Counterpoint, 2015.

Chesterton, G.K. Orthodoxy. 1908. Ignatius Press, 1995.

Lewis, C.S. The Abolition of Man. 1943. HarperOne, 2015.

Percy, Walker. The Last Gentleman. 1966. Picador, 1999.

Percy, Walker. The Moviegoer. 1961. Vintage, 1998.