Philips, Deborah. "Introduction." Fairground Attractions: A Genealogy of the Pleasure Ground. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012. 1–6. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 27 Sep. 2021.
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Copyright © Deborah Philips 2012. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. Introduction
he pleasure ground is a space devoted to leisure, which seems to offer an Tinfi nite range of possibilities. The contemporary theme park, in its naming and marketing, suggests a limitless world of adventures, where the ‘magic never ends’. The commercial pleasure ground claims to offer an unbounded wealth of narratives and ‘timeless’ stories, but there is actually a strictly limited set of tales that it can tell. It was Walt Disney, in 1955, who fi rst established the practice of grouping carnival attractions into narratively themed areas with the fi rst recognised theme park, Disneyland. The genres of that theming, and the iconography associated with them, were, however, already well established in fairgrounds across Europe and America and in the more institutionalised pleasure grounds of Coney Island, Blackpool and the World’s Fairs (which is where Disney learned his craft). Disney’s global reach means that stories that were once embedded in European culture have come to have an international recognition, as do Disney characters (see Wasko 2001). Despite Disney’s notorious litigiousness, plagiarised versions of Mickey Mouse are to be found in fairgrounds from Beijing to Blackpool to Moscow, just as many of the stories that Mickey enacts were once pirated themselves. An analysis of theme park maps demonstrates that the stories of the theme park, and often the organisation of its space, can be broken down into a fi xed lexicon of genres, which are directly referenced in the naming of the rides and in the theming of the decorations. There is a set of structural regularities that govern the genres of the theme park, which continue to be used in the theming of carousels, roller coasters, dark rides and whole areas of the holiday resort, fairground and theme park, as suggested in the accompanying table (Table I). The table is clearly not a defi nitive list, but it does demonstrate that commercial pleasure grounds share, to a very large degree, a set of attractions that can be categorised into a typology of familiar literary genres. There are, of course, discontinuities and changes, but there is also a strong continuity. These genres are not always distinct; they can converge (most notably, fairy tale, chivalric romance and the Gothic are regularly confl ated into attractions centred on dragons). They may be thrown together, as in the incongruous juxtaposition of the Space Pirate carousel on Brighton Pier. There are certainly geographical and cultural variations, but there is a remarkable consistency in the narrative genres that are employed across the world. As the table demonstrates, not every theme park covers every one of these genres in its named attractions, but there will inevitably be some reference to each of them in the entertainments, the decorations and the merchandise on offer. The Tivoli Gardens does not have an Egyptian attraction, but a number of its rubbish bins are decorated with
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Table I The structural regularities of the theme park
Chivalric Fairy tale Gothic
Tivoli Gardens, 1843, Classic Carousel Flying Carpet Odin Express Copenhagen, Denmark
Disneyland, 1955, King Arthur Fantasy Land Haunted Manor Los Angeles, USA Carousel
Alton Towers, 1980, Merrie England Storybook Gloomy Wood Staffordshire, UK Land
Chessington World Cavalcade Black Forest Transylvania of Adventures, 1987, Chateau Chessington, Kingston upon Thames, UK
Gardaland, 1975, Castello Mago Villaggio degli Fuga da Atlantide Lake Garda, Italy Merlino Elfi
Drayton Manor Park, Dragon Roller Toy Ride The Haunting 1949, Staffordshire, UK Coaster
Thorpe Park, 1979, Carousel Octopus Wicked Witches Surrey, UK Kingdom Garden Haunt
Legoland, 1968, Billund, Dragon Knight’s Fairy Tale Wild Woods Denmark Castle Brook
Blackpool Pleasure Beach, Veteran Carousel Alice’s Ghost Train 1896, Blackpool, UK Wonderland
Las Vegas, USA Excalibur Circus Circus
hieroglyphs, obelisks and sphinxes. Las Vegas guests might not choose to stay in a haunted hotel (and there is no such themed casino), but the ghosts and vampires of the Gothic are regularly to be found in the spectacles of the Strip. These genres each represent a ‘utopic space’, in Louis Marin’s term; each offers the possibility that things could be other, that there is a possibility of a return to a golden age of Camelot of imperial adventure or that there could be a golden tomorrow that will be provided by science and technology. The carnival
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Treasure Egyptomania Explorers Science fi ction Western Islands
Camel Train Nautilus Galley Ships
The Temple of Adventureland Tomorrow land Frontier Land Pirates Peril (Discoveryland, of the Paris) Caribbean
Forbidden Congo River Black Hole Runaway Pirate Ship Valley Rapids Mine Train
Forbidden Safari Skyway Professor Burp’s Calamity Smugglers Kingdom Bubbleworks Canyon Cove
La Valle dei Re Safari Space Lab Colorado I Corsari Africano
Adventure Skyfl yer Cowboy Town Pirate Cove Safari
Nemesis Fungle Safari Time Voyagers Thunder River Fantasy Reef Inferno
Explorers Space Tower Goldwash Pirate Falls Institute
River Caves Flying Machines Gold Mine Pirate Ride
Luxor Tropicana Stratosphere Golden Treasure Nugget Island
draws on a utopianism that is based in nostalgia and also on an optimism for the future. The categories that Richard Dyer has cited as necessary to the ‘utopian sensibility’ of entertainment are all very evident in the theme park: energy, abundance, intensity, transparency, community. These may be in illusory forms (the ‘community’ of Main Street, USA is entirely fi ctional), but they are still claimed. Dyer rightly argues that the forms of utopianism found in popular
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entertainments cannot be dismissed as the escapism of false consciousness and, importantly, resist any universalising principle for the narratives of entertainment:
[T]he categories of the utopian sensibility are related to specifi c inadequacies in society … It is not just left-overs from history, it is not just what show business, or ‘they’ force on the rest of us, it is not simply the expression of eternal needs – it responds to real needs created by society . (Dyer, p. 24)
Those ‘left-overs from history’, however, may be seen as more important than Dyer suggests here. The utopias of the theme park are both a search for new possibilities and a celebration of past cultural glories. The utopian fantasies of other worlds, of travel, adventure, romance and wealth, come out of a specifi c set of historical conjunctures; the commercial pleasure ground is an eighteenth-century phenomenon, a site at which developments in technology, imperial expansion and commerce come together. The dream of colonising new spaces, articulated in the stories of science fi ction, tales of adventurer explorers and seafaring triumph, belongs to that moment. The narratives of the exotic and of the world order found in the popular spectacle of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were underpinned by a belief in Empire and an absolute faith in technological progress. The ‘postmodern’ collage of the contemporary theme park in fact does nothing to uncouple those stories of the justice of imperial domination and technophilia – it only serves to confi rm them and to swathe them in a haze of nostalgic ‘heritage’. There is a clear historical logic that can account for the cultural potency and persistence of each of these genres. The concern of this book is to recognise the key stages in the transition of these stories and images. There is a set of processes that each genre has to survive in order to become one of the structuring narratives of the popular imagination. Popular culture consistently draws on narratives and iconography that have already proved to be successful and which have survived a series of stages. Each genre has a basis in folk history and in an oral tradition; therefore, these stories are popular in the sense that they belong to everyone and can never be entirely owned nor authenticated. These stories take on a wider circulation when printed in ballad sheets and in chapbooks; they are then illustrated, with stock woodcuts whose elements are repeated to become the signifi ers of a genre. The images associated with each genre are reproduced in spectacles such as dioramas and panoramas, and become fi xtures of popular entertainment at fairgrounds and carnivals. There is often a showman (and it has been invariably men) who takes the genre off the printed page or painted scenery and turns it into moving spectacle. The circus man and engineer Giovanni Belzoni unfurled his mummies as popular entertainment, Sir Walter Scott did not only write the chivalric romance but he also built it in his Abbotsford House, Buffalo Bill took cowboys and Indians across America and Europe. The popular success of particular stories is taken
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up in theatre and in the iconography reproduced in the sets and costumes. These images are then circulated to a wider public, who may never have seen or read the original, through toy theatre sets and magazine illustrations. As the genres become more familiar they are parodied and performed in Harlequinades and pantomime. It is once a genre is thus securely embedded in the popular imagination that it is taken up by ‘high culture’ – the Romantics worked with the Gothic, and in The Vampyre and Frankenstein , reworked folk legends to create two of the most enduring icons of the genre. These popular genres also fi nd their way into opera and ballet; Puccini developed his own versions of Eygytomania in Aïda and the Western in The Girl of the Golden West . Early cinema took up stories that had proved successful in the theatre. The fi lm pioneers Georges Méliès and Thomas Edison were themselves showmen; both had backgrounds in spectacle and entertainment. Hollywood took over the same sets of genre and iconography, and as television threatened cinema in the 1950s, so cinema looked to the spectacular to distinguish itself. And imagery that had once wowed the crowds at panoramas and dioramas worked once again for fi lm. A charting of the cultural history of popular genres and icons demonstrates that there has always been a fl uid relationship between the ‘highbrow’ and the popular. Opera, ballet and the visual arts regularly draw on popular forms, and popular culture will (eventually) borrow from the avant-garde (see Leslie, 2002) – ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture are not binary categories, for each draws upon and is enriched by the other. If anything, I hope that this book demonstrates that the ‘vulgar’ worlds of the chapbook, of music hall, Butlins, Blackpool, Coney Island and Disneyland are not so far removed from the frame of ‘high art’ and aesthetics as is often supposed. In a 1990 essay Pierre Bourdieu set up a sociological distinction between the ‘sphere of legitimacy’ and the ‘sphere of the arbitrary’ (Bourdieu 1990: 96). The sphere of legitimacy is designated by academics in the humanities, who decree what is ‘good’ culturally and what is not, as the legislators for what belongs in the realm of high culture. The sphere of the arbitrary, however, is defi ned by what Bourdieu describes as ‘non-legitimate authorities’; these non-legitimate authorities include marketing, journalism and advertising. That is, the sphere of the arbitrary is commercial, commodifi ed and irredeemably vulgar – and so Blackpool, Coney Island, Disneyland and theme parks belong, culturally, fi rmly in the sphere of the arbitrary. However, an engagement with and a historical understanding of the stories that the carnival has to tell destabilises what Bourdieu has termed a ‘Hierarchy of Legitimacies’ and demonstrates the extent to which the legitimate and the arbitrary can converge. This book is a diachronic study of the shifts and patterns that are common to the popular iterations of these genres. I am very aware that any one of these chapters could have been a book in itself; each of these genres has a wealth of material addressing their formation at a particular historical moment. What
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these more historically specifi c accounts cannot do, however (while they may be more thorough and more attentive to nuance and contradiction than the outlines developed here), is to trace the development of a set of stories and iconography and so come to recognise the extent to which that set is constantly reproduced in each new medium. It is through making the links across genres, across historical periods and across media that it becomes possible to ‘describe and analyse phenomena of continuity, return and repetition’ (Foucault 2001: 172). From chapbooks and dioramas to digital gaming and theme parks, the genres and icons of the popular imagination have a stubborn persistence.
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