Having recently finished Ian Nathan’s biographical work on the famous Spanish filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro, I couldn’t help but note the overlap between Percy’s Bink Bolling and Del Toro’s own storied history. Boiling is a man caught between the devout dogmatism of his mother’s side and the cynicism and skepticism of his father’s side, finding himself bound to this “search” for truth and meaning in a world where the concept of God has been thrown into turmoil and confusion. A search that sustains itself through his love and fondness for the movies, and which mires itself in the tensions of conflicting expectations, the insistence of his aunt, whom chides him for wasting his life in menial tasks when he should be living up to his greatness by going to medical school, and the insistence of his step-cousin, which throws such meaning-making constructs into an existential crisis. For Del Toro this tension was his love for art versus the demands and expectations of the hollywood machine, a tension born from his childhood caught between the hard Catholic Grandma and the skepticism of his father. For him, it was his mother who disrupted this tension and gave him a way forward.
Perhaps the two stories, one biographical and the other fictional, are asking similar questions with similar conclusions. For Bolling, the search is something that colonizes your life, leaving you to wrestle with the idea of escaping the reality of the meaningless and mundanity, which has its own sense of comfort, versus the idea of succumbing to it. The only thing he seems to know is that to not be searching is to settle into a kind of despair, comforting or not. To be awakened to some new truth or awareness in the midst of this despair is to find onesself in the search. For Del Toro the search is the storytelling.
Perhaps the search, which is arguably the true protagonist in this story, can be summed up in this line:
“Does a scientifically minded person become a romantic because he is a leftover from his own science?” (p76)
It’s a fascinating question, as it seems to dig underneath the essential quandry- how is it that we can reduce the world to scientific terms without losing the knower in the process? Perhaps it is the very fact that knowledge seems to need the knower that forces our search to be recast through a different lens. After all, isn’t this what the emergence of the romantics reflects on a historical front? A seeming disillusionment with the world they were handed from the rationalist fervor of the enlightenment?
Or there are the reflections on repetition and time. As Boiling muses,
“There was this also: a secret sense of wonder about the enduring… The enduring is something that must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.” (p69)
And yet, the measure of time by way of repitition, by way of enduring, also awakens us to another quandry- the existential crisis. What does this repitition give us clarity of? A world of meaning? Or a world of meaningless? What flows from this for Boiling are questions like the following:
“Do you think it is possible for a person to make a single mistake- not do something wrong, you understand, but make a miscalculation- and ruin his life?… I mean after all. Couldn’t a person be miserable because he got one thing wrong and never learned otherwise- because the thing he got wrong was of such a nature that he could not be told because the telling itself got it wrong?” (p99)
Which, as The Moviegoer suggests, plays into that uniform answer that the world seems to want to provide- an appeal to happiness as the aim and ends of life. This is what throws Boiling straight back into the crisis. How can this be? Does happiness come through achieving that which will make one happy, or through the basic acceptance that life is in fact miserable? Does it hinge on that which we do or do not know, or is it even a knowable or true thing at all? Which of course plays into the pressures and expectations pushing in on Boilings life from the outside, thus emerging through the life he experiences on the inside. What, in the end, is this search for, and can it even be named. To name it, Boiling suggests, is to no longer be searching and thus be given back to despair.
And yet this world must be knowable for the knower to make any sense at all. Why would one search if it could not be known? Perhaps it is simply the restleness of the knower that is most necessary evidence of truth. This comes through vividly when Boiling expresses his inner fears for realtionship-
“How good to think that there are reasons and that if I am silent, it means I am hiding something. And how proud I am when I do find secret reasons for you, your own favorite reasons. But what if there is nothing? That is what I’ve been afraid of until now- being found out to be concealing nothing at all.”
This fear isn’t contained to his reasons to love another. It flows out and intersects with the whole of life. It can be spoken to existence itself. What is that nothing? That nothing could be conflicting motivations. Motivations that betray what we thought was an honest search. It could be bias. It could be disguising fear or apathy or indecision or failure or weakness. It could be the betraying of the fact that we are not who we see ourselves to be, and indeed what that could mean for our existence. Or it could betray the truth that there isn’t actually anything true to search for at all, just the reality of social structures that hold us in its grip along with the demands they place on us to construct our place in it. Better to give ourselves to the ordinary than to be deluded by false promises.
Or… perhaps the sheer presence of that restlessness is what awakens us to truly be free of the constraints of those scrutures. Perhaps it is in the mundane where we find the truth of God. How often does the search assume that we are searching for something new, something constructed from our need for grand revelations or achievements. How often do we assume that our starting point is a world without God, and that God must be revealed in a way that that suggets the thing one is searching for is somehow not already present. Which of course creates an illogical conundrum. Here Boiling arrives at this illuminating space:
“Starting point for search: It no longer avails to start with creatures and prove God. Yet it is impossible to rule God out. The only possible starting point: the strange fact of ones invincible apathy- that if the proofs were proved and God presented himself, nothing would be changed, Here is the strangest fact of all.”
The Stories of my Life 