- Within Our Gates, shot partly in Chicago in 1919, played at the Music Box on Saturday.
Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer (1961) is one of my favorite novels, even though its antihero, Binx Bolling, represents cinephilia at its worst. Cynical, socially detached, and incapable of experiencing deep emotion outside of the cinema, he ought to be studied by every self-proclaimed movie-lover as a model of what not to be. Every few years I reread the book in a sort-of aesthete’s Yom Kippur, to remind myself of the bad behavior that chronic moviegoing can ferment but cannot excuse. (I periodically rewatch Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore for the same reason.)
That said, Percy’s novel contains some of the best insights into movie watching of any book I know. Consider, for instance, this passage where Bolling describes the pleasure of seeing his neighborhood used as the setting for a major motion picture:
