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Popular Culture Review
limb” (quoted in Brown 46). The more morbid elements of the pleasure derived
from the machine seem inextricably bound to turn of the century popular
culture’s curious appetite for staged disaster, as evidenced by W.G. Crush’s
county fair demonstrations of head-on train collisions and Edison’s 1904 film
The Railroad Smashiip. In fact, one of the earliest incarnations of the roller
coaster, the “Leap-Frog Railway,” made its kinship to such entertainments quite
explicit. The ride sent two cars “each filled with as many as forty people, toward
one another on the same set of tracks,” only to send one car up a set of curved
rails over the roof of the other car at the last second.T he roller coaster operates
in a manner that resonates with Benjamin’s discussion of the work of film (and
notably the amusement park was a venue for the screening of early films), as
“technology has subjected the human sensorium to a complex kind of training”
wherein “perception in the form of shocks [is] established as a formal
principle.”^^ Having simulated the effects of technology gone haywire,
amusement as recreation reconstitutes the modem subject as adequately
conditioned to confront the commotion of modernity.
The roller coaster did not have sole dominion over the amusement
park’s fascination with disaster, which also materialized in the staging of live
reenactments of a number of natural catastrophes, including the eruption of
Mount Vesuvius, Pennsylvania’s Johnstown Flood, and even a spectacle called
“Fire and Flames,” for which a four-story building was set ablaze and actors
playing building residents leapt out of windows into safety nets. As Kasson
points out, the staging of these events activates “a horrible delight in the
apprehension that devastating tragedy had both historically and
contemporaneously intruded suddenly in daily affairs, even in modern
technological America” (72). In juxtaposing natural and mechanical disasters
and christening coasters with names like “The Cyclone,” Coney Island effaces
the border between nature and the machine within its walls. In so doing, the
amusement park arguably “naturalizes” technological failure and asserts its
inevitability while simultaneously assuaging the fear of its implications by
granting park patrons “the inestimable advantage of allowing them to emerge
from the performance unharmed” (Kasson 72). For Brown, “disaster [becomes]
the privileged mode for effecting the recreational sublime,” as “the serial
reproduction of disastrous destruction marks the moment when the amusement
industry routinizes the aleatory” (118). In situating the pleasure machine next to
Vesuvius, the amusement park constructs a historical narrative of catastrophe
that reminds the amused subject that disaster and contingency are nothing new
and that although mechanical catastrophe is ever-present as possibility, it is
nothing to be nervous about.
As suggested by Coney Island’s provocative nickname, “Sodom by the
Sea,” the park could promise the recuperation of the enervated body by way of a
calculated sexual coding which infused amusement with a carnival spirit and
disaster (as the biblical allusion indicates) with a sort of eschatological glee. As
the buckles burst on Victorian decorum, recreational space became increasingly