Fun House

Turner Classic movies just ran The Lady From Shanghai, and I'm always excited by it. I'll sit still for any Rita Hayworth film, and Orson Welles is something like a hero to me, and this where they intersect, as they did in marriage. 

But what always gives me a kick is that the finale is set in my amusement park. Playland in Rye, New York.    

Mom and Dad took us there several times a summer. It was there that I first had pizza, and learned the deadly truth about those red pepper flakes. In the beginning, it was the little cars and little boats that went around whose only virtue was the bells you could ring, and the toy train and the small roller coaster. But soon I was this tall to ride the adult rides, the majestic Dragon Coaster and the banked high-speed racing carousel. I went there regularly until I left for college.

But the thing that may have colored my whole view of American culture was: Playland was beautiful. Not beautiful in the garish it-was-raucous-but-I-was-a-kid sense. but elegant. Stylish. It was an Art Deco masterpiece, with colonnades with quasi-Greek illustrations up top and lettering from the golden age of sign lettering. And there was a boardwalk and a boathouse looking out on Long Island Sound (the last scene in the movie.)

The rides were studded with light bulbs, certainly, but it was completely devoid of splashes and bursts and HEY KIDS stuff. Even the shooting galleries and ring-toss booths were nestled between the columns . There was a magnificent tower at the end of the main colonnade, there purely for decoration, and Art Deco wonder with a jewel like stained glass light at the tom, electric blue glowing from the center.

And of course there were no media tie-ins, nobody in cartoon-character suits, and the trashy little tchotchkes were completely generic.

Even though Palisades Park was just across the Hudson, and there was an ad for it in every DC comic I read, we never went. Coney Island was then in decline, and we didn't even know about it enough to whine. Because why? We had Playland.

And as a result of that, I think I missed the idea of a certain kind of trash that an awful lot of America assumes is part of its heritage. If rides and cotton candy and wheels of chance were set in state fairs or Riverside in Chicago or Palisades or Luna Park in New York, or if you grew up in the marketing days of Disney and Great America, then the loud and the cheap and/or the aggressive and the corporate got attached to the most fun you had in your short lives. And you either retain that bond, feel guilty about it, or cast it out angrily from your now much longer ones.

But I grew up without the idea that rides and all that were cheap and tacky--because they weren't. There was no need to be embarrassed about going to have fun: in fact there was a romance and a dignity to it. (This was perhaps further enhanced that, with one exception, when we saw the circus, it was at the Westchester County Center, a beautiful massive Art Deco building too. Add to that the pilgrimages to Radio City and it's no wonder I love the style.)

That may be one of the reasons why I simply don't believe in the division between popular and high art, or vulgar and elite culture. There are forces that drag them apart, and they just seem to get more and more powerful, but it's neither essential nor inevitable. Playland is still around today: it fell on hard times at one point, and I visited it when the owners had licensed some cartoon characters or other to walk around, and they'd covered up the Art Deco friezes with garish red-and-yellow trapezoids--but that did not stand and the county bought it and restored it to its beauty and continues to operate it. So hooray for socialism. (It's now a National Historic Landmark, so hooray for socialism again.)

I only wend into the Fun House a few times, and I'm ashamed to say I was too scared to go down the enormous slide (for which they gave you rugs to sit on.) even though my younger brother and sister were not. Pity Welles didn't use that: it was visually impressive. but the big spinning disk was there, as of course were the mirrors. And the Fun House burned down before I could muster up enough courage to try the slide--and a sadness that they never rebuilt that huge structure.

I like to think that Orson Welles looked at Playland and fell in love with the place, maybe a bit, and decided to transfuse some of that peculiar magic into The Lady From Shanghai. I like to think that he had some of the same respect for it that I do. And it's nice to know, not just in a film's parting shot but still, to some extent, in real life, that a vision earlier than Uncle Walt's and different, a vision that ties fun and games, not to cartoons and cross-marketing, but to public monumentality and style, still survives.