Earlier today, Prince of Petworth published something that is—even by that site’s loose definition—incredibly alarmist. A reader submitted a lengthy recap of a bizarre evening at Landmark E Street Cinema where a screening of the documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry was interrupted by a woman who darted in and out of the theater in what the reader found to be a suspicious fashion.
He writes:
About a hour into the movie, a woman came into our darkened theater, and went the opposite side of the room from the door, squatted down, and manipulated something in a large bag. She then stood up, placed the bag into an empty seat next to where we were sitting and quickly ran out of the theater. Then, a minute later, she re-entered the theater, retrieved the the bag again, went back to the side wall, manipulated something inside the bag again, and then replaced the bag again in the seat next to us. She then ran out of the theater for the second time.
The Prince of Petworth reader, who also submitted his missive to DCist, goes on to write that left the screening room to notify a theater manager of the disturbance. But the response—theater staff stood outside the auditorium waiting for the woman to claim her bag—was unsatisfactory to the reader, who then began to wonder if the bag contained a bomb.
“So I re-entered the theater and told my partner we needed to leave immediately,” he writes.
After leaving, the man was met outside the theater by a manager and the woman, who he describes as being of Asian extraction. He then writes that he aborted his 911 call and instead approached the manager and the woman directly. However, his own methods were far from civil.
“You have got to be the stupidest person in the world for what you did,” the man recalls saying. He flung the insult, he writes, because the sight of a person rummaging around in a darkened theater brought to light the July 20 shooting spree at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colo. that left 12 people dead and dozens more injured.
But calling someone stupid and accusing the theater’s manager of not caring about customers’ safety was not welcomed as a civil dispute. The writer says he eventually walked away.
Still, that is far from the most bizarre detail of this diatribe. The writer at one point even wonders if E Street Cinema was infiltrated by Chinese intelligence agents. The artist Ai Weiwei is one of the most prominent critics of the People’s Republic of China, and the film documents a two-year span in Ai’s life that saw him brutalized by police and imprisoned for nearly three months.
The ethnicity of the woman who dashed in and out of the theater was apparently enough for the Prince of Petworth reader to fear her actions were a Chinese espionage plot: “It also concerned me that the owner of the bag was an Asian woman and I could not help but wonder if this was someone sent by the Chinese government to sabotage this film on its opening day in Washington, D.C.”
China has one of the largest intelligence apparatuses in the world and, not surprisingly, the United States is one of the countries where its operations are one of the most robust. Agents of the Ministry of State Security use as cover China’s diplomatic missions, the more than 10,000 Chinese college students who study here, as well as some 2,700 annual visiting delegations, according to GlobalSecurity.org.
However, China’s intelligence targets tend to be government bureaus, research facilities, high-tech industries and its own citizens who are monitored for signs of dissent. Movie theaters do not appear to be a high priority, and Stephanie Kagan, a publicist for Landmark Theatres, said it is “far-fetched” to think that E Street Cinema is being targeted by foreign spies.
Additionally, Kagan said that despite the unhappy patron’s protestations, Landmark is mindful of its customers’ safety. Among the measures it takes, just as other movie theaters do, is sending its ushers to periodically check on screenings in progress.
