Popular Culture Review Vol. 18, No. 2, Summer 2007 | Page 54

50 Popular Culture Review and a crucial component of the cultural work of the amusement park was to mediate the increasingly anxious relationship between the human and the mechanical. If the daily transactions with the machine mandated by industrial labor threatened to ‘‘mechanicalize the workman,” as Henry Potter contended in The North American Review in 1897,"^ the turn to mechanized leisure could potentially further erode the boundaries between work and play as well as between man and machine. Indeed, for some later cultural theorists, leisure time and leisure space become mere extensions of work time and work space; work essentially devours play. According to Benjamin, ‘‘what the Fun Fair achieves with its Dodgem cars and other similar amusements is nothing but a taste of the drill to which the unskilled laborer is subjected in the factory.”^ For Horkheimer and Adorno as well, “amusement. . . is the prolongation of work . . . what happens at work, in the factory, or in the office can only be escaped from by approximation to it in one’s leisure time.”^ In service of rescuing the worker from the gloomier implications of these theoretical trajectories, we might attempt to salvage the more liberatory effects of play in order to locate an “amused” agent whose engagement with park technology renders the industrial world more readily navigable. After all, the fundamental mode of the amusement park is a sort of comic relief via disorientation, as contraptions that appear functional prove dysfunctional and technologies ostensibly speeding out of control are very much in it. In the words of one fin de siecle journalist, “Coney Island is only another name for TopsyTurvydom,”^ its anarchic veneer offers the fantasy of inverted relations and “fluid new possibilities.” The amusement park was littered with trick chairs and trick benches that in John Kasson’s words “mocked the world of productive devices by being intentionally counterproductive, systematically frustrating those who would expect them to fulfill their apparent functions.”^ A certain degree of counterproductivity is embedded in the very logic of the “ride” as well; having arrived at precisely the same spot from which she departed, the rider gains nothing beyond the raw sensory experience of the ride. If amusement is doomed to repeat the rhythms of mechanized labor, perhaps it is repetition with a difference, or even, as Kasson suggests, a transformative “parody of urban experience.” The injection of mechanization into recreation is homeopathic rather than toxic, a dose of industrial grade hair of the dog. In the popular contemporary discourse surrounding the initial decades of Coney Island, however, the threat posed to the park patrons’ abstract humanity was superseded by the more immediate and legible threat to his nervous well-being and general corporeal integrity. The attendant ironies of a weekend getaway to Coney Island were not lost on Rollin Lynde Harrt, whose caustic critique of the amusement park in The Atlantic Monthly in 1907 asks, what more ludicrous and what more sad than the spectacle of vast hordes of people rushing to the Oceanside, to escape the city’s din and crowds and nervous strain, and . .. courting worse din, denser crowds, and an infinitely more devastating