Traveling Spectators explores the way three cinematic landscapes—Indian Country, the South, and the inner city—evoke particular American cultures and become sources of entertainment for American viewers. These viewers implicitly accept a popular form of multiculturalism as an essential quality of their nation. I argue that from the mid-1970s through the 1990s, Hollywood films used place and travel relations as a way to represent the easy access to (and mobility between) cultures implied in multiculturalism. The different ways that popular films suggest that their viewers approach and situate themselves within these domestic landscapes can be classified on a continuum from touristic to dwelling spectatorship. The touristic point of view emphasizes the overt display of cultural otherness through visual spectacle, while the dwelling point of view conjures an emotional feeling of being “at home.” Capitalizing on the inherent ability of cinema to simulate both motion and immersion into a virtual world, these two modes invoke emotional-geographic experiences of familiarity or foreignness, and both contribute to the way the nation's diversity is mapped.

Indian Country is the original American site of cinematic tourism, a narrative frequently acted out by a white male protagonist who visits and flirts with going native, only to leave—thus keeping the cultural landscape admired but within firm boundaries. While the South has been seen as both “noble” and “savage” through similar touristic eyes, popular Southern films of the late twentieth century largely replace this discourse with a dwelling point of view that portrays the South as a source of roots for culturally-adrift white Americans. In the 1970s, the inner city became the nation's metaphoric frontier; however, at the height of popular multiculturalism in the early 1990s, African American-directed “hood” films merge the touristic spectacle of difference with an experience of dwelling in the inner city through identification with young African American protagonists. The imaginative movements of such spectator positions create a virtual map of American diversity that compares Native, African, and white American landscapes, and turns geographical variety into a source of entertainment and pride in national identity.