Edward Hopper's "New York Movie"

We can have our pick of seats. Though the movie's already moving, the theater's almost an empty shell. All we can see on our side of the room is one man and one woman— as neat, respectable, and distinct as the empty chairs that come between them. But distinctions do not surprise, fresh as we are from sullen street and subway where lonelinesses crowded about us like unquiet memories that may have loved us once or known our love. Here we are an accidental fellowship, sheltering from the city's obscure bereavements to face a screened, imaginary living, as if it were a destination we were moving toward. Leaning to our right and suspended before us is a bored, smartly uniformed usherette. Staring beyond her lighted corner, she finds a reverie that moves through and beyond the shine of the silver screening. But we can see what she will never see— that she's the star of Hopper's scene. For the artist she's a play of light, and a play of light is all about her. Whether the future she is dreaming is the future she will have we have no way of knowing. Whatever it will prove to be it has already been. The usherette Hopper saw might now be seventy, hunched before a Hitachi in an old home or a home for the old. She might be dreaming now a New York movie, Fred Astaire dancing and kissing Ginger Rogers, who high kicks across New York City skylines, raising possibilities that time has served to lower. We are watching the usherette, and the subtle shadows her boredom makes across her not-quite- impassive face beneath the three red-shaded lamps and beside the stairs that lead, somehow, to dark streets that go on and on and on. But we are no safer here than she. Despite the semblance of luxury— gilt edges, red plush, and patterned carpet—this is no palace, and we do not reign here, except in dreams. This picture tells us much about various textures of lighted air, but at the center Hopper has placed a slab of darkness and an empty chair.