Finder and Maker reversed in The MoviegoerWalker Percy's novel The Moviegoer chronicles a week in the life of stockbroker Binx Bolling and his marriage to his adoptive cousin Kate Cutrer. Furthermore, it outlines Binx's peculiar philosophy, Kate's equally strange orientation, and their eventual transposition. Binx begins as a consumer of reality, a seeker or finder of relief from boredom, and Kate as a frenetic seeker who becomes a crisis creator to relieve her postmodern boredom. But by the end of the novel, their initial positions are almost reversed, blended together to form a healthier relationship. Both Binx and Kate are self-aware characters in a world of actors, the only ones who realize the inherent falsity, the clichés, in all things. The characters themselves seem like pseudonyms of movie stars: Binx Bolling, Lyle Lovell, Walter Wade, with their assonance they resemble Robert Redford, James Earl Jones, the all too memorable nicknames of movie stars. Aunt Emily's servant, Mercer, "works his way through servility and conceit" (p. 17), now one way, now another, with a dignified appearance but "behind the moustache, his face...is not Not at all devout but he's as sulky as a bus porter." (ibid.) Even Mercer's exaggerated breathing while serving dishes (pp. 156-157) is the gesture of a stereotypical servant made ridiculous. Binx's biological mother displays "an affection carefully defended from the personal, sincere, an affection deliberately made banal." (p. 139) The radio show "I Believe" (p. 95) is a collection of old platitudes, and Binx's "pleasant tingling sensation in the groin" afterwards (p. 96) reveals it as nothing else What a moral masturbation. Binx's Theosop......middle of paper......the attention to detail is still there -- "Why is it so yellow?" "He has hepatitis." (p. 209) But Kate seems healthier, both thanks to the treatment with Merle and the association with Binx. And her self-destructive practice of crisis creation seems repressed: instead, Binx has become her director, her "director of photography." The care with which they plan her errand - which tram to take, where to sit, where to wear her jasmine cloak - is like the close-up composition of a photographic shot, all so that Binx, through her imagination, can keep Kate "in focus "and sane. He is no longer the passive observer, but the active arranger; she is no longer the creator of out-of-control crises, but an obedient actor in search of direction. Binx moved on to realize the true cinephile's dream: becoming a director. Works Cited Percy, Walker. The spectator. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1961.