When I was a kid my aunt and uncle took my siblings and me to a multicounty fair about 70 miles from our home town. I was probably about
11 years old at the time and withdrawn and introverted – just trying to make
sense of the world. When you live in small towns, fairs are always a big deal. It
is a rare approximation of big city life. The only place where you could see
that many people in one place. There were the usual carnival rides, carnival
food, carnival smells, and carnival people. An odd mix of farm life with the
exotic. Felliniesque is a description that comes to mind not so much for the
surreal atmosphere but the jarring presentations of unusual appearances and behaviors. And keep in mind this was all about 40 years before the Internet. In my town at the time we had 3 very grainy black and white TV networks and on any given day only 2 out of three were working. They all broadcast standard network TV and signed off the air at midnight.
The most Felliniesque location at the fair was the Midway –
a long thoroughfare bordered by tents and trailers on each side. Vendors were selling cotton candy, caramel
popcorn, snow cones, and hotdogs and the odor of that food was always in the hot, humid air. It was a noisy place due to the carnival barkers shouting to get people to
come to their attraction. My only experience with carnival barkers before that
was my well-travelled Grandfather’s imitation of one and he was right on. There were games of skill that involved
tossing rings or baseballs at targets, or shooting air rifles. In those days it was typically 35 cents to try
and if you won – the prize was some sort of stuffed toy animal. The games
clearly favored the house. There was usually
an obvious gimmick that made it very difficult to win. It was common to see a
young couple at one of these games, with the guy spending a lot of money in
order to get one of these prizes for his girlfriend. The idea that these
strangers were in town to unfairly take your money added to the excitement of
wanting to beat them at their own game. Some of the carnival workers knew how
to add commentary to keep people coming back without getting them too excited
or angry. I watched all of that at a
distance and did not take a chance on the games.
The most disquieting aspect of
the carnival was the Freak Show. At the time – I am sure the term had fallen
out of favor replaced by “human oddities” or similar terms, but everybody still called it The Freak Show. In just a few years
it would be appropriated by the hippie generation and reinvented as a positive social
term as in “let your freak flag fly.” Those
attractions had colorful and primitive graphics adding to the bizarre cartoon like appearance. “Man-eating Amazon rats” displayed 7 or 8 rats
chewing on a horrified man. Similar signs proclaimed significant alterations in
appearance or deformities. Superlatives were everywhere as the “World’s
tallest, fattest, strongest, shortest….”
In order to get people to pay the price of admission to the trailer
there was typically stage with an introduction where you could get a glimpse of
the attraction. I remember watching a middle-aged man extrude his eyeballs out
at the crowd to a mixed reaction of amazement and disgust. He was
the most animated and expressive. All
the other human oddity performers seem bored and they were expressionless. I
listened to the local people coming out of the attractions talking about how
they were disappointed that the part human, part canine man was just a paper mâché
creation in a glass case or that the bearded lady was just a short obese man wearing a dress.
I found the entire Freak Show atmosphere very unsettling.
It just seemed wrong to me. I was always taught to mind my own business and treat
everybody the same no matter what their appearance. In a Freak Show – those norms
go out the window. The social norm
suddenly becomes excitement, excessive commentary, and mixed derision some due
to people feeling like their expectations for the unusual were not met and some
feeling like they were ripped off. It was an embarrassing display of a lack of
empathy and I was embarrassed to be there.
In today’s parlance some might say I was traumatized by the event but I won’t
go that far. I went home and thought about it for a long time. What that lifestyle would be like. What it is
like to consent to participate. I would see occasional TV shows with similar themes
about these potential conflicts. Workers were who coerced into these positions based on their appearance and overworked, but I never saw any
real-life stories where that was true. Eventually the memory faded.
As a freshman in a liberal arts college, English literature
and composition was a year long required course. Kafka’s A Hunger Artist was
one of many required readings. In this short story Kafka describes a man who is
basically a side show attraction based on his skill in fasting. He sits in a
cage on straw and fasts initially to the accolades of an observing public who admired him at a distance. He
is managed by an impresario who limits the fast to 40 days based on
entertainment rather than health concerns – public interest fades at that point. Eventually public interest fades altogether and he signs on with a circus
where he is eventually ignored during his fasting. Even though he always knew he could fast much
longer than 40 days and was past that point - both he and the circus staff
stopped counting. He was eventually
discovered near death when the apparently empty cage was inspected. He speaks
briefly about wanting to be understood and how his fasting was easy because he
never found a food that he liked. A definitive interpretation of Kafka’s essay
is not available and there are multiple interpretations. Food seems like a metaphor for the attention
of others and that we need more than literal food for sustenance. It speaks to
the general case of people who are marginalized in society and may need to take
desperate measures for social contact. In the end the Hunger Artist rejects
food/social contact. He dies and is buried with the rotten straw in his cage.
Was a Freak Show a similar attempt to establish social contact?
A more typical interpretation is the practical one – it is just a way to make
money or more commonly a way for these people to make money. If there were societal safety nets, would these shows need to exist? It seems that
there is a top-down way to deal with the problem and that is just banning these
venues or making them so culturally unacceptable that they would not exist. A societal safety net would be the bottom-up
approach - adequate income, housing, medical care, and empathic support. The reality today is that I don’t see either of
those approaches happening.
I have not been to a fair in at least 10 years. The last one I attended was the second largest state fair in the country. There were no Freak Shows or human oddities, but they still exist, usually on television where much more biographical content is provided. The sensationalism associated with them has been taken over by the Internet where any observer can basically see whatever they want ranging from 3 minutes clips of soft (or hard) core pornography to watching Komodo dragons swallow livestock whole headfirst to watching someone split firewood.
Various authors have suggested the dopaminergic effects of watching sensational videos and the importance of taking a break from all that dopamine. Like most neuroscience in the popular press that is undoubtedly an oversimplification. Flashing back to my childhood experience – there is a right and a wrong way to do things. Even as a kid I did not need to be shamed into avoiding freak shows, but one of my colleagues assures me that some people need to be and that shame is not necessarily a bad thing.
Widespread acceptance of high frequency and
indiscriminate sensationalism does not seem like a good development for society. Instead of attending a rare annual event - people can engage in this activity all day long and every day. It has occurred with the expansion of exploitation from just the marginalized to
everyone and resulted in a much coarser general audience for public discourse. There is some discussion about the lack of critical thinking skills - but that critical thought starts upstream from the cognitive processes with emotion and some clearcut ethical rules and knowing that your excitement may be clear violation of those rules.
We need to figure out ways to move beyond the Freak Show
existence. We already know some of those rules. We need to do it before AI makes things a lot worse.
George Dawson, MD, DFAPA
Image Credit:
Jack Delano, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Freak_show_1941.jpg
"Freak show 1941" https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/19/Freak_show_1941.jpg/512px-Freak_show_1941.jpg
