...This imagining of a future is where the downtrodden Americans found their escapism, and nowhere can this be more clearly seen than in the increasingly popular and developing world of the American movie – Hopper’s chosen setting for his painting. Just as Clark sees the café-concerts as representative of Parisian society in the 1880s, we can see the cinema as 1930s New York’s equivalent. The anxiety of the period manifested itself in the growing popularity of horror movies in the ‘30s, much like the blood and violence found in the pages of pulp fiction novels. People found a sense of catharsis in stories of people worse off than themselves, as well as a brief distraction from their own misery...