Angle On: Lost In The Funhouse
A Tour of a Few of the Most Memorable Movie Theme Parks (+ A Little Celebration)
Thanks for sticking around during the long silence since my last post, and if you’re new here, thanks for stopping by.
Recently, the literary magazine Boulevard published a short story of mine, “Minor Repairs to Smile Dragon.” The first draft of this story was written early in 2022, so it’s been a longish road toward getting it out in the world. As writers and all creatives know, rejection (and the self-questioning that comes with it) is a near constant presence at any level (I just recently finished reading an annotated version of Jordan Peele’s screenplay for “Get Out,” which echoes this sentiment and so much more…but more on that in a later post). One of the reasons I came to substack was to make a space to write simply for the joy of writing, rather than seeking permission or allowance, but having a piece accepted and published is something to celebrate, and I wanted to take a moment to do that here (I encourage you to celebrate a recent achievement of your own, creative or otherwise, in the comments).
Here is an audio version (yes, that’s me reading) of the story, which you can also read by picking up a copy of Boulevard:
I don’t, however, want to merely self-promote. Instead, I thought it would be interesting to take a closer look at where my story, and in particular the idea for its setting, came from. “Minor Repairs” takes place at an imaginary children’s theme park. A children’s theme park in the wake of an apocalyptic event, to be exact. While I mostly drew from a place here in northern California called Happy Hollow to construct my park, I also had a number of literary inspirations (George Saunders’ early work, Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!, and, of course, Ray Bradbury). But, as is often the case, mostly what was rattling around in my head were a number of scenes from movies I love.
So, in the spirit of Angle On, here are some theme park scenes that are, for me, truly memorable.
Some are frightening, some funny, and some a little heartbreaking (or some mixture of the three). I don’t know if my own story gets close to evoking any of those feelings, but I do know that—for whatever reason—each of these moments hold a particularly sticky place in my mind. Maybe it’s that these places, which are built explicitly for enjoyment, can so easily produce in us feelings of fear or queasiness. Places that act as stand-ins for memory, poised on the brink of collapse, where the line between danger and whimsy feels incredibly thin and where, more often than not, the painted plywood veneer of fantasy fails to hide something darker lurking just beneath.
Us - dir. Jordan Peele, 2019
Seeing as I’m writing this from the East Bay, it seems only appropriate to shout out the opening sequence from Jordan Peele’s second film, Us, which is memorably set at the boardwalk at Santa Cruz. I’m a huge admirer of Peele’s film career, especially the razor sharp precision of Get Out and the perplexing yet palpable grandeur of Nope (which contains what I consider to be one of the most disturbing shots in any film), and while there are certainly things I like about Us—almost all of them visual, not narrative—it is pretty firmly in the third place spot.
The story here feels a bit thin and rushed (despite its considerable run time), and is burdened by over-explanation in the third act that still fails to really sell me on its central idea, but the very beginning of Us is, for me, a perfect piece of uncanny filmmaking.
As we follow the main character, only a kid, walking behind her parents (including a father played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, who needs to be in more movies ASAP), Peele allows us to embody a distinct feeling of smallness and even isolation that is immediately unsettling. All of this is heightened by the fact that it is nighttime, and the mixed laughter and screams from all around feel less like family fun and more like harbingers of doom. Freud described the uncanny as “the return of the repressed” and to me, Us evokes this brilliantly by making this all feel just close enough to an experience that most any kid has had—feeling overwhelmed and uncomfortable in a place that is supposed to be “fun.”
When our main character peels away and finds herself in a hall of mirrors (a trope that would feel too on the nose if it wasn’t handled so well here) I simply can’t look away. In part because I feel connected to certain fears I felt when I was young (isolation, uncertainty, the allure of transgression, the fear of one’s own self image…take your pick). We don’t yet know that what we are seeing here is a flashback (the bulk of the story takes place when this young girl is grown) but there is a palpable dreamlike nostalgia to this sequence. A feeling that we are inhabiting a collective memory (this is not the first time that a theme park will be used in this way on this list).
This straightfroward, largely wordless sequence of mounting anxiety draws us into the film with a slow build, as if we’re riding a roller coaster up and up until Peele cuts to credits at the precise moment before we know our car will drop. It’s this fine tuned and uncanny overture what makes me return to Us again and again (tethers me to it, if you want to get cute) despite not loving the film as a whole, and further proof that Peele knows just how to place an audience in the palm of his hand.
The Warriors - dir. Walter Hill, 1979
I may be in California now, but I am a forever New Yorker, and you can’t think about New York and theme parks without thinking of Coney Island, and you can’t think about Coney Island without thinking of The Warriors.
What I love most about this movie is its use of a hollowed out NYC setting, and in particular how it shows Coney Island not on a crowded sunny day, but instead portrays it as a desolate and arrested wonderland. The Coney Island in Hill’s groovy take on apocalyptic gangs is vacant and creaky beneath an overcast East Coast sky, and feels distinctly like a decaying memory of a place built for good cheer—just as the Warriors themselves feel like a bunch of childhood chums whose innocence and camaraderie has been tested by a harsh and violent world.
Where Us makes great use of a theme park’s many sights and sounds, there is something unsettling about an empty theme park at rest, and The Warriors understands that. All of the action and violence that occurs here is thrown into relief by the fact that its vision of NY is eerily silent (and a few years before Carpenter’s Escape From New York, no less).
Coney Island in summer is great, and I’m all for a day of riding rides and cheering on the mermaid parade and wincing at the sideshow sword swallowers. But in my heart I most love Coney Island in the winter. To me there is nothing like a walk along the empty, windswept boardwalk with some warm pierogis, the Wonder Wheel and the Cyclone hulking like strange ruins.
New York feels most alive when it is full of bodies and sounds and energy, but for me it’s those rare moments you find yourself suddenly and improbably alone in a briefly quiet pocket of the city, especially at its outer limits, that it feels both strangely surreal and the most like home.
Westworld - dir. Michael Crichton, 1973
The film that is most synonymous with “theme park goes wrong” is without a doubt….Jurassic Park. I won’t argue that point. But, it’s worth noting that 20 years before all that dinosaur mayhem, the author of Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton, directed his own film in which the main attractions of a theme park based in speculative technology become the central threats.
Westworld is a fun, scrappy B-movie that combines two simple yet seemingly unlike ingredients: sci fi and westerns. It’s an idea based in a Reese’s-esque combination so simple and effective that it later became an HBO series (which was pretty excellent for about a season or so, before it lost sight of its the elegant simplicity of its premise). Other things have tried this combination before, some with success (Firefly) and some, eh, not so much (Cowboys and Aliens). Aside from a Twilight Zone or two (and boy does this thing feel like one long episode of that show) Westworld has a firm grip on this particular genre cocktail.
What’s most interesting about Westworld, and another thing it shares with Jurassic Park, is that the park attractions—be they dinosaurs or realistic humanoid gunslinging robots—are not themselves inherently evil, but instead it’s the hubris and shortsightedness of their engineers that is to blame. Westworld’s biggest shortcoming is that it doesn’t really reveal the men behind the curtain, so to speak, and doesn’t take them to task for their arrogance and recklessness—something that Jurassic Park, on the other hand, does urgently and phenomenally well (“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they never stopped to think if they should” as Jeff Goldblum’s Dr. Ian Malcolm so keenly observes).
While it never rises to the intellectual or cinematic heights of Jurassic Park, Westworld is a great ride, especially in the final act, when it becomes one long and largely wordless chase sequence. When all of the setup gives way to this final pursuit, it feels like something greater than it has been up to that point. It feels almost primal. Yule Brynner’s straight faced unstoppable forward momentum acts as a blueprint for countless other faux-human predators (the T-1000 in Terminator 2 and The Agents in The Matrix to name a few) and in the end, when the unstoppable force is, well, stopped, there is an appropriate dose of melancholy. We don’t cheer at this ill-considered creation’s demise—he didn’t ask to be made—or if we do, we might be missing the point.
Final Destination 3 - dir. James Wong, 2006
When I find myself at a theme park, any theme park, this is the movie that is never far from my mind. Sure, it’s a decidedly campy entry in a campy franchise (this movie contains a hilarious smash cut from and aerial shot of side-by-side tanning beds engulfed in flames to side-by-side coffins), but it does have its moments of effectiveness. In the horror cannon, its curious that one of the most lasting franchises is essentially built on a series of increasingly repetitive Rube Goldberg sequences, but this one has always been my favorite. In part because it has Mary Elizabeth Winstead at the center (an actor who can actually act, which can’t be said of all of FDs) but also for its opening sequence on a roller coaster called Devil’s Flight.
This might not be the best Final Destination sequence (that probably goes to the highway scene in 2) or the silliest (the gym, the pool, the NASCAR race…take your pick) but it is the one that tapped into my particular fear that if just one small thing goes wrong (like a loose screw coming slowly undone) a thrill ride can become a death trap. I don’t think I’ve ever been on a ride where some small part of my brain wasn’t considering all of the little nuts and bolts that need to stay in place to ensure a safe conclusion, and while that fear might not have originated here, it was certainly cemented.
If you can ride a roller coaster without thinking about this scene, well, good for you.
Carnival of Souls - dir. Herk Harvey, 1962
Carnival of Souls takes the idea of a theme park as a playground of dreams and memory to a much deeper level. Following a car crash, our main character moves to a desolate patch of Utah and becomes entranced by an old abandoned fairground pavilion. There’s not much more to explain in terms of the plot, but there is an experience to be had if you choose to put this on (maybe this halloween season?) and there may be more for you to find in this relic than you think.
Watching this today, it’s easy to suspect it as a direct influence on George Romero’s genre-defining Night of The Living Dead just 6 years later. It’s also hard to imagine that David Lynch didn’t take a few notes when he was making Eraserhead, and I felt certain pangs of recognition while watching Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse. One of those films where it really doesn’t much matter if what we are seeing is a dream vision or a strange reality.
Teetering on the edge arthouse, Harvey shot his film using guerrilla style filmmaking on a 33,000 dollar budget, and the result is both surprisingly accessible and yet far more disturbing than many of the celebrated studio horror films of its day (I love my Universal monsters, but they don’t deliver a fraction of the sustained chills that this one has in spades). It’s the hand held POV shots. It’s the desolate, run down, nowhere setting. It’s that maddening but entrancing organ music. All of these things together, and the fact that the fear at the heart of this film is neither explicitly stated or easily defined, that makes Carnival of Souls feel relevant today. It’s not an investigation of fear, it’s a scale model of how fear feels.
The thrills here aren’t cheap, and this wonderland is never anything but foreboding, but no conversation about theme parks in film will ever be fully out from under the shadow of Carnival of Souls.
The Florida Project - dir. Sean Baker, 2017
It’s no big surprise that every film above deals in genre storytelling. There’s something about the setting of a theme park that lends itself to horror, or dystopia, or paranoia, but the movie moment that for me seems to speak most directly to the function and meaning of theme parks in our culture, and in particular as part of the landscape of America, is Sean Baker’s The Florida Project.
The story follows a young mother and her daughter who live in a hotel just outside the walls of Disneyworld in Orlando, Florida. The motel, painted a bright but somehow bruised pink that clashes with the harsh reality and struggles of its long-term residents, acts in a real way like the theme park in Carnival of Souls—a place of transience and impermanence, a sort of dream world all its own. Or it would be if the drama playing out inside its walls wasn’t so painfully real.
We hear about the theme park nearby, but the film’s story plays out entirely outside its limits. Giving us the sense that while the hotel is situated just outside, it might as well be another planet. Until, that is, in the film’s final moments, when the story of this family is finally pushed to breaking and our young protagonist has nowhere left to turn.
(if you don’t want the ending to this movie spoiled, stop now.)
Having slipped away from some well-meaning (but not very competent or empathetic) social workers who are separating her from her mother, our teary-eyed protagonist grabs the hand of her best friend and together they run into the land of make-believe, straight toward its center of gravity—the castle. This was shot by Baker on an iPhone (the film up to this point was shot on a much more classically cinematic 35mm camera) and was done so without the permission of Disney (yet again the sequence we are given here is wordless, the imagery speaking for itself). The way this is shot grants it a sense of urgency and even transgression, but what makes this work so well narratively—and speaks to the role of the theme park in our late capitalist society—is that millions of Americans have videos just like this, sitting in the depths of their phone storage or idling in the cloud. Little shards of memory from trips they have taken from their own lives. Lost weekends where they can rub shoulders with Goofy and Tinkerbell and fleetingly feel as though real life can be traded in for something wholesome and magical, if only for a short time (and for a significant ticket price, parking not included).
What happens after this mad dash toward Neverland isn’t seen. The film ends before they reach the castle doors. But what happens next doesn’t matter (and certainly isn’t anything too pretty). This girl’s life will continue outside those walls, but for this moment she succeeds in losing herself in a crowd of Americans all attempting to do the same.
While theme parks might be wielded by storytellers as metaphors for memory or innocence or hubris, they are all versions of escape. Places we know aren’t the real world, where we can only ever be tourists, but which we nevertheless are drawn to because they remind us of something: that escape (into memory, imagination, dreams, nightmares) is possible, but only for a spell.
Thanks for reading.
P.S.
I’ve left out one film that I feel needs to at least be acknowledged here, but I feel unable to adequately tackle it in a list format. That is Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpiece, Spirited Away.
I don’t know if I’ll write about that one here—it’s one of those films whose power feels greater the less it is examined—but for several reasons it just didn’t fit for this post…despite its themes of arrested development and fear of change in the world and in yourself being so directly tied to my own story.
Maybe one day…though at the moment I think I have more to say about a certain flying pig.