The Moviegoer

Binx stays in the office beyond his normal closing time to talk with customers and acknowledges the pleasure he takes in making money. The front facade of his office “looks like a miniature bank” (72), and Binx is proud of the message such a traditional building sends to his customers: “The young man you see inside is clearly the soul of integrity” (72). As the sun sets, Binx heads home and he stops at the Tivoli movie theater to say hello to the proprietor of the theater, Mr. Kinsella. These kinds of interactions with the people who run movie theaters give Binx a feeling of security. He explains that, without these conversations, “[i]t is possible to become a ghost and not know whether one is in downtown Loews in Denver or suburban Bijou in Jacksonville” (75). Binx recalls an opportunity he had to go see a movie during a layover in Cincinnati ten years ago; he had a conversation with Mrs. Clara James, the ticket seller, and to this day, “[w]e still exchange Christmas cards” (75).

When Binx arrives home, he sees a letter from his aunt waiting from him. His landlady, Mrs. Schexnaydre, “a vigorous pony-size blond who wears sneakers summer and winter” (76), gives him an article she marked for him in Reader’s Digest. Though he appreciates his landlady’s gesture, he reads the note from his aunt first, which contains words of advice, and then Binx watches television for a few moments before going to pick up Kate.

The reader learns that Binx’s search involves his father. Binx’s father died when Binx was young, so his memories are not enough for Binx to sustain a clear picture of his father. Binx’s search for his own authentic identity is a deeply-emotional one, partly because he lost someone so influential too soon.

Binx’s possessiveness over Sharon is irrational, a sign of his robust fantasy life as well as a moment of foreshadowing. Sharon will likely join the ranks of Binx’s other secretaries as soon as Binx makes his move. In his discussion of his admiration of Sharon, he mentions his admiration of young women in general, which leads the reader to wonder how individualized his attraction to Sharon really is. Her proximity and the fact that she shares a small office space with Binx makes her a convenient love object.

Binx’s need for human connection via the movies reveals a deep irony in his character. Movies are not an empty escapist pursuit for Binx; rather, they are an opportunity for him to feel closer to humanity. On the screen, the actors present a version of life that is sanitized and idealized, which make their experiences palatable and interesting to Binx. He feels welcome into their fictional stories, so welcome that he develops connections to the people who work at the movie houses because they have facilitated his positive experience while watching the movies.

After Binx picks up Kate, they walk to a movie house on the university campus, one that Binx had visited fourteen years earlier. To Binx’s relief, “[n]othing had changed” (79) and the sights and smells of their moviegoing experience was the same as he remembered. He names deliberate revisits to the past like this one “a repetition” (79), defining a successful repetition as “the re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed in order that it, the lapsed time, can be savored of itself and without the usual adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle” (80).

After the movie, Binx reflects on Kate’s state of mind, which seems improved after a visit to Merle Mink, her doctor. When Binx reminisces out loud about his time working in one of the laboratories on campus, Kate asks, “[i]s this part of the repetition?” (81) and then, “[p]art of the search?” (82). The questions irritate Binx, so he tries to explain himself and then he “take[s] care to be no more serious than she” (83). In the streetcar on the way home, Kate “locks her arms around my waist and gives me a kiss on the mouth and watches me with brown eyes gone to discs” (83).

Binx goes home to Gentilly and has a difficult night’s sleep. He explains that he has experienced wakefulness since the war, and he lies in bed, “wakeful and watchful as a sentry, ears tuned to the slightest noise” (84). He gets up at dawn and goes for a walk, and as he admires the expensive homes closer to the lake, he remembers his father’s insomnia and his mother’s tendency to “make a joke” (85) of his father’s sleep experiments; she “put a quietus on his hopes of sleep” (85) by “summing up his doings in a phrase that took the heart out of him” (85). Binx determines that his father’s mistake was actually trying to sleep, so Binx himself does not try: “Instead of trying to sleep, I try to fathom the mystery of this suburb at dawn” (86). He returns home from his walk and takes a nap “in a snug little cul de sac between the garage and the house” (86).

The postman approaches with a letter from Harold Graebner, a friend of Binx’s from the army. The postman is embarrassed to wake up Binx from his nap. The letter contains “a note and a birth announcement” (87), as well as a request that Binx be godfather to Harold’s new baby. The arrival of this letter gives Binx reason to think of the “long, sensitive and articulate letters” (87) he wrote to his Aunt Emily while he was in the army. Binx begins a reply to the letter from Harold, politely refusing the honor of godfather due to his inability to be a “practical Catholic” (88). Binx then tears the letter up.

Binx reflects on what it means to be Jewish and the fact that “all my friends were Jews” (89). He feels Jewish himself, “by instinct” (89), and a recent report from a sociologist claiming, “that a significantly large percentage of solitary moviegoers are Jews” (89) reinforces this feeling. Binx links his identification with Jewish identity to “the possibility of a search” (89); if a man knows what it feels like to be aware of such a possibility, an encounter with a Jew makes him “like Robinson Crusoe seeing the footprint on the beach” (89).

In these very short chapters, Binx and Kate openly discuss his search, as well as the phenomenon of repetitions, which are similar in meaning for Binx as certification. Kate appears to understand Binx’s efforts only superficially, and her shallow questioning annoys Binx, who feels indulged by Kate rather than understood. Kate may be patronizing him intentionally to get a reaction from him, and her later affection towards him may perhaps be intended to smooth over his negative reaction.

Binx’s sleeplessness and his restless behaviors may be an indication that he is living with a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder leftover from his experiences in the war. Binx’s sensitive nature makes him vulnerable to trauma, and the injury he sustained in the war have left marks on both his psyche and his body. As a result of Binx’s temperament and life experiences, he feels a keen sense of isolation that he likens to his understanding of the predicament of Jewish people. Binx’s appropriation of the Jewish experience is also linked to his search for authenticity, identity and, eventually, a feeling of belonging. That Binx compares his experience with alienation to Jews as Ash Wednesday approaches is an indication that he may have more spiritual awareness than his secular interests suggest.

When Binx picks up Sharon in his MG to go to St. Bernard Parish as planned, “she makes it plain that MG or no MG there is to be no monkey business” (90). When they arrive to the meeting with Mr. Sartalamaccia, on the property he wants to buy and that actually belongs to Binx, Mr. Sartalamaccia “becomes the guide to my property and even points out the good features” (90). It turns out that Mr. Sartalamaccia built the lodge that Binx remembers so fondly, not Binx’s father, and the two men discuss building details together while Sharon “stands foursquare, eyes rolled back a little, showing white” (93). Mr. Sartalamaccia suggests that Binx hire him to develop the land and when Binx asks him how much he thinks they can make, Mr. Sartalamaccia offers him fifteen thousand dollars for the land on the spot.

Sharon and Binx leave and drive along the River Road. Binx tries to give Sharon credit for making him extra money by accompanying him to the meeting, and she refuses to accept the credit he offers. Binx goes home, “a sweat and with no thought for her and sick to death with desire” (96).

The weekly Friday lunch meeting takes place today but Carnival is too much of a distraction for much business to take place. Binx talks with his Uncle Jules about a client who wants Uncle Jules to travel to Chicago during Carnival to work. Uncle Jules asks Binx to go instead, “in his gruff way of conferring favors” (98). Binx loathes the idea of travel, saying, “it is no small thing for me to make a trip” (98) because “it is my fortune and misfortune to know how the spirit-presence of a strange place can enrich a man or rob a man but never leave him alone” (99). As a way to entice Binx to feel happier about the trip, Uncle Jules promises him a move to the downtown office upon his return. 

Binx runs into his cousin, Nell, at the entrance to the library after the lunch meeting moments after reflecting on the fact that “[f]or some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead” (99). Binx identifies one exception to this observation: “only the haters seem alive” (100). While Binx is reading a politically-conservative magazine, Nell sees Binx and greets him, excited to share with Binx that her husband “Eddie and [Nell] have re-examined our values and found them pretty darn enduring” (101). Together, they want to give something meaningful back to the world, and this goal makes Nell happy. Binx’s reaction to this announcement is physical: “A rumble has commenced in my descending bowel, heralding a tremendous defecation” (101). As Nell continues talking, Binx wonders: “why does she talk as if she were dead?” (102). Nell asks after Kate, and then they “part laughing and dead” (102).

Sharon proves to be a canny match for Binx, as she appears to understand intuitively that Binx has designs on her. She keeps him at a friendly distance, and though she does maintain her boundaries in her own way, she does not rebuff Binx altogether, a move that keeps Binx hopeful.

Uncle Jules promises Binx that the business trip to Chicago will impact Binx’s professional future in a positive way, but the actual outcome of the trip is vastly different from what Binx and Uncle Jules imagines at this moment. This subtle foreshadowing enhances the emotional weight of what actually happens later in the novel.

The use of humor, though scattered throughout the novel, amongst Binx’s existential ruminations and deeply vulnerable revelations, peaks in Chapter 9, when Binx responds viscerally to Nell’s excessively-earnest talk about personal values. His disgust at what he perceives to be her empty talk of meaningfulness satirizes her whole character and her marriage to Eddie, both of which are just as ridiculous to Binx as her talk of giving back to the world.

As the end of the work day approaches, Binx ponders “the interests of money and love, my love for Sharon” (102). He decides to assign Sharon a work task that will mean longer hours at the office and weekend work, as well as more interaction with him. She agrees to work an hour later today, Friday, and asks to make a phone call that leads to a request: “‘Is it all right for someone to pick me up at five for a few minutes?’” (104). Binx realizes that “it could be useful for me to see what sort of fellow her friend is” (104), and when the friend arrives, Binx “nod[s] at him with the warmest feelings” (104). After the visit, Sharon and Binx work, eating sandwiches and drinking coffee, and, in Binx’s eyes, their relationship with each other becomes one of “two children lost in a summer afternoon who, hardly aware of each other, find a door in a wall and enter an enchanted garden” (106). At seven-thirty in the evening, Binx drives Sharon home, and he “almost violate[s] his resolution and ask[s] Sharon if she will have a drink” (107).

At home, Binx watches television. After a program about a “marshal [who] traps some men in an Indian hogan” (107), he goes to bed and listens to a program on the radio called This I Believe. Over time, Binx has heard two or three hundred people speak on this program, and he “doubt[s] that any other country or any other time in history has produced such thoughtful and high-minded people, especially the women” (108). Another characteristic that Binx observes about the speakers on the radio program is that they all generally “believe in the uniqueness and the dignity of the individual” (109), which makes them all “far from unique themselves” (109). At the end of the program, Binx turns off the radio and lies in bed, “tingling for Sharon and for all my fellow Americans” (110).

Binx wakes up when the phone rings, and while a storm is passing over. Aunt Emily is calling to tell Binx that “something has happened to Kate” (110). Kate has disappeared from a Carnival ball earlier in the evening, but Aunt Emily claims she isn’t worried. She asks Binx to drive Kate home if Kate appears at Binx’s door at any point. She reassures herself and Binx by denying that Kate’s behavior bears any resemblance to that of Otey Ann, “an acquaintance from Feliciana[…]who went crazy and used to break out of the state hospital in Jackson” (112).

At three in the morning, Binx gets up and goes for a walk. He sits in “the shelter outside Mrs. Schexnaydre’s chain link fence” (112), and soon a taxi pulls up and Kate emerges. Binx calls out to her, and “she comes directly over with a lack of surprise, with a dizzy dutiful obedience, which is disquieting” (113). Kate appears to want to share with Binx a revelation, which worries Binx because “[t]hese exalted moments, when she is absolutely certain what course to take for the rest of her life, are often followed by spells of the blackest depression” (114).

Kate reveals to Binx that she has said good-bye to Merle, her doctor, and that she suddenly feels free, “as free as a bird for the first time in my life, twenty-five years old, healthy as a horse, rich as cream, and with the world before me” (115). Binx knows that Kate’s joy is temporary and that she will soon exhaust herself with the effort of “feel[ing] wonderful” (115). He suggests that they stay together at his place from now on. She interprets his suggestion as a proposal of marriage, and she avoids giving him a direct answer. Binx offers to drive them to get some coffee and then take her home, and she accepts, asking Binx to assure her that “[e]verything is going to be all right” (116).