Popular Culture Review Vol. 19, No. 1, Winter 2008 | Page 124

120 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