Certified Rotten
by J.D. Connor
“Nowadays, when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him,” wrote Walker Percy in his novel, The Moviegoer. “More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.”
In this way Percy captures the importance of seeing your own world on the big screen. The narrator and his cousin/girlfriend emerge from a screening of Panic in the Streets and she says, “Yes, it is certified now.”
In related news I took the 101 to see Crime 101 at Universal CityWalk. There isn’t enough 101 in Crime 101, the same way there was not enough accounting in The Accountant 2. But there is a bunch of L.A. in Crime 101, and there is a welcome swagger to it in the form of that longstanding chauvinism that assumes that if you care about movies, you should care about the geography of Los Angeles.
Percy’s idea of “certification” is his usual maneuver, in which a bit of existential desperation can be glossed over by what looks like an inevitable surrender to postmodern rootlessness. But his certification has a clock on it—“to live, for a time at least.” He’s sad about this outcome in a way Warhol never would have been. A real postmodernist would revel in it: In the future, Everyone will be Somewhere for 15 minutes.
Keep us breathing fire!
For $3/month you can read this whole post and get our weekdaily newsletter too!