The Self and the Screened World: Walker Percy's The Moviegoer

Abstract

Because cinema is made of the world (photography is always denotative) a phenomenology of cinema is also a phenomenology of being in the world. Percy frames the novel with two relationships that have the most immediate effect on Binx's relation to the world and his sense of self;one is with his (truly) alienated cousin Kate, who has been under psychiatric treatment since witnessing the death of her fiancée;the other is with his half-brother Lonnie Smith, whose selfless love for Binx transforms Binx by breaking through his self-isolation and engendering an authentic engagement with the world of others. "4 Binx lives at Kierkegaard's aesthetic stage, similar to Marcel's mere "recording apparatus";he lacks Marcel's ingathering. [...]Binx perceives the loss of the world as the world's receding from him;that is, the world has lost itself. The world is neither affected, nor diminished, nor stands in need of translation or interpretation. [...]the world of the film is carried through time and space before us, without our action (which is another barrier between us and the world of the film;anyone who has ever leaned to one side in a theater seat to see around a corner or a door in a film has experienced this phenomenon).