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Roger Rosenblatt discusses America's thrill-seeking tendencies.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Finally tonight, essayist Roger Rosenblatt considers the appeal of amusement parks.
ROGER ROSENBLATT: The accepted explanation for the vast popularity of theme parks and amusement parks is that they provide healthy entertainment within safe, clean environments, plus the multi-million dollar successes of the world Busch Gardens, all the Sea World, the King's Dominion, the Six Flags Great Adventure, and on and on across America and Europe too.
People assume that New York's Coney Island is now a polar waste because it became one in the late 1950's, but for the past 20 years, Coney Island has been back in big business. About 15 million people came here last summer to join all those like myself who came before, who rode the Wonder Wheel and the Cyclone.
Even the side shows are back, with a half-man, half-woman, and the bearded lady sanitized and civilized for post-modern consumption. This is the 90's, after all, and it is said people will only go to amusement parks for good, clean fun. Well, maybe. Places like Disney World are a far cry from the dingy and seamy underworld of Coney Island in the 1950's, as is Coney Island today.
But the appeal of these places, rather than wholesome cleanliness, goes to people's desire to be scared, near scared to death, and to touch something forbidden, to enter a bright and harmless hell. Side shows, of course, are out and out exhibitions of aberration, people who do things that people are not supposed to do, like swallowing fire or swords, and people who do not look the way people are supposed to look.
The main attractions have the same attraction. One speaks of the thrill of riding the roller coaster, but the question within the ride is will you survive? The names given roller coasters make their inner intentions clear: the Mind Eraser, the Tower of Doom, the Loch Ness Monster. The amusement in amusement parks comes in part from the joined extremes of life and death.
Movies have recognized this dual appeal for years, not just in blatant films like "Rollercoaster" in the 1970's, in which a killer deliberately sabotages the ride--or the classic "Freaks" about the hidden of sideshow performers. In the Orson Welles/Rita Hayworth movie "The Lady from Shanghai," the final shootout occurs in a house of mirrors. In Hitchcock's "Rangers on a Train" murder goes round a carousel. In "The Third Man" Orson Welles takes Joseph Cotton up on a Ferris wheel with the intention of plugging him and throwing him off. He changes his mind, but from the height of the wheel wells, as the deadly Harry Lime, look down on the people below as expendable dots.
All these dark associations are located in machinery supposed to elicit joy and squeals of delight. But whoever invented amusement parks knew both sides of squeals, understood that laughter can be mirthless and catch in the throw.
The mind is a sort of theme park and amusement park. It seems the menace in apparently benign objects and enjoys taking itself to the edge of fear or madness, or worse. These parks may be projections of that wild capability, mechanical creations in which we yoke together all that terrifies and pleases us into whips, plunges, spins, leaps, and go carts that go bump in the night.
The best thing about amusement parks is that they are enclosed and one may only go there for a time, unlike the mind. So, in a way, they are safe and clean and fun. But every one of these places comes from somewhere within us--light and dark at once--more than a little dangerous.
We are the sideshow. We are the Cyclone.
I'm Roger Rosenblatt.
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