A Wild Carnival Ride: Theme Park Art: A Look at the Visual Impact & Appeal of Amusement Park Attractions
How do theme parks and carnivals hook thrill-seekers into throwing money at 3-minute rides? The obvious answer is by selling glamour, illusion and sensationalism. Fantasies play on the orgiastic release of death and sex. Rides and images flirt with obstacles like gravity, danger and the law, yet remain safely confined within protected boundaries. It’s a tradition extending back past Greco-Roman world.
Excess, Defiance, Liberation and Rapture: a Human Response to the Hopelessness of Death
Carnival is derived from the Latin carne and valle, literally “meat goodbye”. Before refrigeration, everybody ate up and shared (sacrificed) their stores at festivals like Saturnalia, Lupercalia, and later, Twelfth Night or Mardi Gras/Carnivale. The Black Plague introduced masks with herb-stuffed protuberances believed to prevent the disease, but masks also hid identities and, in 14th-century Venice, gave citizens anonymous respite from rigid, socially prescribed roles. Pent-up tensions were released with Dionysian fervour. Lent brought abstinence and repentance in the season of deprivation and rebirth.
Similarly, theme parks create the artificial experience of danger and death, showing Original Art and then release the rider who survives not only intact and alive, but physically and emotionally charged, simulating religious ecstasy.
How Design, Craftsmanship and Art Can Creating the Illusory Sense of Physical Vitality, Invincibility and Immortality
Intense colours and loud music generate drama and heighten reality. The dull mundane seemingly becomes something extraordinary. Glamour, the means by which the imagination is co-opted, is of transcendence into heaven worlds where there are no restrictions.
Loud sounds mask certain serious noises, such as someone being sick. Bass rhythms or raps mimic throbbing heartbeats and the pulsing of blood through veins. Electric guitar and synthesizer riffs mimic squeals of excitement and laughter, and generate the desire to participate and share in the fun.
Bright, flashing lights are syncopated to music and mimic the flash of neural signals.
Fast, jerky, unpredictable movements simulate loss of control, wild energy, danger and potential of death. These, in turn, stimulate instinct, reaction and physiological response in the release of adrenaline and endorphins.
The jewel-box set design and enclosures illicit a subconscious sense of safety, as do buckles, straps, and rollbars. Legally imposed standards reinforce this framework. The participant is reassured that no one will get seriously hurt or die, even when this belief is fallacious such as with the Mindbender rollercoaster tragedy.
Rides are calibrated to stop before the physiological effects of excitement wear off, and thus become associated only with peak experience.
Representational imagery, in paintings, sculptures and ornamentation are blatantly provocative and venal.
Photos of PNE Playland in Hastings Park, Vancouver, BC Demonstrate How Designs Pander to Specific Fantasies
- Scantily clad men and women and popular sports heroes sex up the backdrop of Crazy Beach. The inclusive treatment of servile, worshipping cartoon animals send the message that even “ugly runts and defeated weaklings” can have fun there, too; no one is beaten up or rejected.
- Gladiators once subdued wild animals with their physical prowess. Gladiator: the Ride doesn’t.
- Breakdance neither breakdances nor breaks speed/stunting laws like its billboard suggests. Nor does it attract suspicious policemen.
- The antique merry-go-round must appeal to parents of small children. Benign images reflect familiar countryside and heritage, when the pace was slower and gentler.
Carnival rides and attractions represent the epitome of kitsch. Yet, setting aside their commercialism, and the modernist dogma which equates populism with kitsch, it’s worthwhile admiring them for vibrancy and liberating effects. People leave refreshed and invigorated, ready to begin anew. Not bad for a sideshow.
