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Popular Culture Review
spectator of the triumph of American ingenuity over the chaos. But once on the
coaster, the rider tenders her body to the disorienting effects of the ride. As Bill
Brown argues, the function of what he calls ‘‘the pleasure machine” is to “reduce
the self to an agentless sensorium” and produce “the dehumanized, fully
embodied subject, the subject that is all body.”9 The roller coaster distills the
locus of the train passenger’s neurasthenic anxieties and repackages it, in
Brown’s terms, as a “post-panoramic,” “non-linear,” and “repetitive” means of
“intensifying yet framing the time-space compression of modernity” (47).
In this way, the pleasure machine dramatizes the sensory experience of
bodily abandon and impending collision minus the mortal consequences of
impact. In the words of one nineteenth century rider, it offers “all the sensations
of being carried away by a cyclone, without the attendant sacrifice of life and
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 Smashup. 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.10 The 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.”11 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