Parks and Wreck
53
sexually charged. As Kasson contends, “the amusement center suspended
conventional situational proprieties” (41). Certain attractions—such as a
pavilion floor equipped with air jets under a metal grating designed propel
women’s skirts upward and the Love Nest, which sent a cart-built-for-two
through a series of unlit and publicly private tunnels—overtly appealed to
patrons’ more pmrient interests. For the purposes of this paper, however, the
roller coaster again stands as the most compelling example, as it aimed to
convert nervous energy into sexual energy. An advertisement for the Cannon
Coaster, which appeared in 1900, invited the prospective rider to
“imagine . . . the excitement, the wild thrill of delight, that you will experience
when you are shot from the cannon’s mouth on to the slide beyond: Will she
throw her arms around your neck and yell? Well, I guess, yes!”'" The roller
coaster refigures the threat of collision as the promise of a more agreeable
collision or even the threat of death with the promise of a “little death.” Under
the auspices of amusement, these “fully embodied subjects” can eagerly
abandon themselves to the kinetic force of the pleasure machines; technological
contingency has been imbued with erotic and restorative potential.
In his 1905 article “Human Need of Coney Island,” Richard La
Gallienne claims that Coney Island
not only knows itself a fake, but . . . it makes so little bones
about the matter. It knows that you know, and it expects you
to pretend to be taken in, as it pretends to think that it is ta king
you in . . . 1 wonder, if perhaps Coney Island . .. does not
regard the public as a big baby in need of a noisy, electriclighted rattle.'^
Perhaps what the price of admission bought was a set of comforting fictions
about mechanized living in the new century—that it was escapable, resistible,
manageable, pleasurable, or even somehow “natural.” Perhaps, in a somewhat
Foucauldian sense, the amusement park was in service of producing pliant and
“docile bodies” rendered all the more efficient and usable upon their return to
work Monday morning. But for its proponents and detractors, its buyers and
sellers alike, turn-of-the-century Coney Island was a social crucible in which a
nervous culture tested the limits of the body in the shadow of the machine. At a
time when Americans began to take play seriously and charge recreation with
the responsibility of remedying the deleterious effects of modern life,
amusement park patrons ignored Beard’s prescription that the neurasthenic seek
“rest and change” in favor of undergoing Coney’s radical new “shock therapy.”
University of Minnesota
Notes
' Quoted in Pilat and Ranson, Sodom by the Sea, 133.
“ “The Work o f Art in the Age o f Mechanical Reproduction” 250.
Chris Kamberbeek