King of the Bingo Game

The movie theater is a fantasy space that symbolizes the protagonist’s dreams and desires. The darkness, the communal yet solitary experience of watching the film with the other theatergoers, the vicarious experience of the film’s story—all these features make the movie theater the perfect setting for a story about the mysteries of chance, identity, and risk.

Just as in the film, the protagonist’s circumstances are life and death, but instead of finding the trapdoor and rescuing the girl, he must battle a larger, more ambiguous foe. He is not a hero in a film, and the outcome of his efforts is not guaranteed to be a success.

The protagonist’s circumstances are overwhelming to the point that he cannot enjoy the theater experience. His hunger makes him sensitive to the smells and sounds of food being eaten by the other moviegoers. When he begins to fantasize about the film turning sexual, his arousal is cut short by an image of urban poverty. He falls asleep to the film’s lulling music, but his dream turns into a nightmare. When he tries to involve himself in the story, his thoughts always circle back to Laura.

Juxtaposing the movie theater setting, which is supposed to enjoyable, with the protagonist’s anxiety reveals his dislocation and underscores the theme of isolation.

“Bank Night” is the Depression-era trend of holding a lottery drawing in a movie theater after a film. The business was a franchise that leased lottery equipment to theaters across the country for weekly drawings. Contestants could register at the ticket window to have their names put on a list for the drawing. Contestants did not have to buy a movie ticket to participate, but many did, and this contributed to the survival of the film industry in an economically uncertain time.

Bank Night allowed participating theaters to circumvent local lottery and gambling laws, bringing in revenue for the theater and income for theater owners and managers. The theater owners who held Bank Nights knew they were operating in a legally gray area, which adds an additional layer of context to “King of the Bingo Game” and provides insight into the character of the man with the microphone, who is the theater’s owner or manager.

A TIME article from January 11, 1937, describes an attempt to ban Bank Night in Chicago in 1936: “Police Commissioner James P. Allman suddenly announced that Bank Night drawings violated a city ordinance, arrested 16 theatre managers, warned 250 more to stop Bank Nights forthwith. Making their arrests during the distribution of prizes, police were roundly booed by Chicago cinema audiences. In one theatre, the winner of a $10 prize had it confiscated as evidence before he could grab it” (“Cinema: Bank Night Bans.” TIME, 11 Jan. 1937).

The scene eerily echoes the events of Ellison’s story, but tellingly, in the real-life version, the theater managers and owners who profit from the scheme are the criminals. The article states that the Bank Night profits of one Chicago theater chain were estimated at $60,000 a week, or $1.2 million by today’s standards.

Each state has different lottery laws, and in some cases, Bank Night was ruled legal, though cities continued to take Bank Night establishments to court for funneling what should have been public funds into the private sector. It goes without saying that the vast majority of theater and franchise owners in the 1930s and 1940s were white. This level of “fixing” puts the question of the bingo game’s fairness into a new light. The corruption goes far beyond the events of one evening and shows how the white establishment consolidates wealth while bending the rules to suit their needs.