Electric Dreamland: Amusement Parks, Movies, and American Modernity

Abstract

Historians of the early twentieth-century culture industry have tended to categorize amusement parks and moving pictures in separate books or book chapters and to assign priority to New York City enterprises and audiences. In Electric Dreamland Lauren Rabinovitz advances a welcome alternative perspective. She recalls that early “movie audiences were also simultaneously parkgoers” and not just at Coney Island but also in large and small cities from coast to coast (p. 19). Moreover, Americans at the time experienced them as conjoined pleasures. It was not just that amusement parks frequently featured movies, and movies featured amusement parks. The experiences in either setting shared a pleasure code of eroticized visual stimulation and hyperkinetic bodily engagement. Rabinovitz argues that amusement parks and movies were “interlocked cultural phenomena” that determined how urban and rural people adjusted to an industrializing society and conformed to a new modern sensibility of what it meant to be American (p. 22).