How Movies Make the World Feel More Real
The Moviegoer is an exploration of the search for meaning and the disconnect between a well-crafted world and the real one.
Every member of a free society must find their own source of meaning to decide how they wish to live. That ongoing search is a welcome distraction from everyday routine, but the absence of an answer can be a painful ache in an otherwise comfortable life.
The Moviegoer follows one person who spends much of his time drifting between his day-to-day responsibilities, to the extent that he fulfills them, only to find meaning in film. Binx Bolling identifies what it is about movies that feel more real than the casual sex he spends much of his time having:
“The movies are onto the search, but they screw it up. The search always ends in despair. They like to show a fellow coming to himself in a strange place—but what does he do? He takes up with the local librarian, sets about proving to the local children what a nice fellow he is, and settles down with a vengeance. In two weeks time he is so sunk in everydayness that he might just as well be dead.”
Bolling sees characters in movies who settle down into that same life as the kind of tragedy he seeks to escape when he enters the theater. There’s a higher lesson to be learned from great films that is designed to move us. That sensation of glimpsing some greater truth about what it means to be alive is absent from the hum-drum of day-to-day living.
It’s not just high-level meaning Bolling finds in movies. Ordinary places matter more when they’re featured in film, too.
Movies Make the World More Real
Bolling moves from the tragedy of movie characters settling into the kinds of lives he hopes to escape and notices how movies change the way places featured in the films are percieved in the real world. He expounds on the change during a movie he sees with his cousin:
“Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live 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.”
Movies give ordinary places the significance of celebrity. They become part of the tapestry of meaning that great films weave for their audiences. By becoming a part of a greater, more meaningful whole, a building takes on the same significance in real life as it did in the movie.
Art elevates ordinary sights that we may be used to walking past in our daze. Bolling’s tragedy is that he can’t find that same meaning in the intimate relationships he’s having outside of the movie theater that he does in a well-packaged story.
Even worse, he’d be recognzied as a member of high culture despite his shortcomings with the people he’s becoming close to then casting aside. There’s no point for finding meaning for him beyond the neverending search for it.
Anyone Can Create Meaning
Near the novel’s end, Bolling gets into a fight with his aunt. She laments the decline of morality in society, and leads up to this startling observation:
”What is new is that in our time liars and thieves and whores and adulterers wish also to be congratulated and are congratulated by the great public, if their confession is sufficiently psychological or strikes a sufficiently heartfelt and authentic note of sincerity.”
The Moviegoer was published in 1961, well before podcasts brought any and all perspectives to mass audiences. The era of mass media had long since begun, which made anyone with a compelling story a potentailly captivating subject of a story that could reach millions.
The search for “something” authentic hasn’t gone away and the absense of an answer isn’t a product of a particularly decadent society. Meaning-making is a constant challenge that chaplains, therapists, and politicians attempt to overcome for the people who place trust in them.
It’s easy to look back at an event from decades ago and place it into a grand arc of history. Placing our morning dog walk or dead end job into the same place is far more difficult. But anyone with a compelling answer to “what are we doing here” can gain an audience today, regardless of their morals.
We had better hope we pay attention to the right people.