Movie Theater as a Site of Violence I
I began to feel conspicuous, ill at ease, out of place. It was the white folks’ world and they resented me just standing in it. I crossed the street and went into Loew’s just to get out of sight. Chester Himes, If He Hollers, Let Him Go 79The movie theater may not at first seem to stand out as a notable setting in the texts featured in this chapter. However, the image of the movie theater recurs as a place in the imagined network of public spaces included in accounts and fictional stories about the so-called “Zoot Suit Riots.” Names of movie theaters repeatedly appear in reports from 1943 published in newspapers and national magazines, such as Time and Life, as well as in later sociological and fictional representations of the event. While in most of these writings the movie theater is mentioned only in passing, this section will position the movie theater at the center of these events, proposing connections between cinematic spectatorship and racial violence. Another reason behind this intervention is to interrupt how the history of movie theaters is framed. While other parts of this dissertation are concerned with commercial repurposing of space, this chapter suggests reconceiving the official histories of twentieth century movie palaces and houses that sustain a sentimental and nostalgic image of previous eras of American moviegoing. The following stories foreground the contradictions and entanglements that characterized cinematic spectatorship for ethnic-racialized subjects in American urban cities, specifically focusing on Mexican and Black Americans during the 1940s.
While this project’s main focus is on Mexican Americans, Los Angeles was home to diverse racial and ethnic populations during this era. In this section, I will highlight excerpts from Chester Himes’ If He Hollers, Let Him Go that depict a racialized experience of tension, a “feeling out of place,” in wartime Los Angeles’ public places – this site of dislocation and relocation being specifically set in a Loew’s movie theater. Cinematic and literary examples presented throughout this chapter explore how the event of the Zoot Suit Riots is retold and discursively reconstructed in these representations. This section addresses the disruptive effects of this historical event, specifically as it reshaped the intimacy of spectatorship experienced within the movie theater.
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- Pachuco Goes to the Movies Veronica Paredes