Finally, a Movie of “The Moviegoer”?

Should Anthony Weiner, who moved to the front of the long-form pack with Mad Men, make a feature film of Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer? 

This tart, meditative post about the novel on the Paris Review Daily – where I went the other day for a dose of Dante – makes a connection, obvious to me now that it has been made, between the visual style and moral anomie of the AMC series and the visual style and moral anomie of the novel.   Don Draper, like Binx Bolling, is “a man deeply ambivalent about life in a gray flannel suit," and "Draper has also been known to take refuge in an afternoon matinee.”

Rumors that the novel is going into development surface periodically, as do the rumors about John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces.  

Now’s the time for this brilliant, prescient novel to get the film it deserves.   

• 26 October 2013
• #media commentary#anthony weiner
• 1