Off the Rails

'...here jeopardy,

panic, shock, are dispensed in measured doses

by fool-proof engines.'

- W.H. Auden, 'Fairground' (1966)

Steel Dragon has conquered Goliath. Millennium Force is vanquished. Viper, Mind Eraser, Son of Beast - none of them can compete with the Dragon's awesome power. Meanwhile, out in the suburbs, Wild Wonder, ShockWave, and The Space Invader have taken the lives of innocent civilians. A campaign of resistance is mounting. An American congressman has proposed legislation to bring the punishing force of these huge metallic killers under government control: 'We appear to be approaching the edge of the safety envelope, yet there is no agreement where that edge may be crossed.'

This is not the plot of the next X-Men movie. It's simply the latest report from the rapidly growing roller-coaster industry. The past ten years have been a boom time for white-knuckle rides: new ones are going up at a rate not seen since the original craze for wooden coasters in the 1920s. Technology keeps advancing, pushing against the laws of physics and the limits of the human body. The new roller-coasters have higher hills, more elaborate loops and twists, and feature odd novelties such as stand-up cars and inverted tracks (you dangle from above, like a ski-lift). And, thanks to magnetic resonance motors which whip you out from the starting gate, there are stronger G-forces. We've come a long way from the Switchback Gravity Pleasure Railway - built in 1884, the first roller-coaster in the United States. Japan's Steel Dragon, the latest engineering marvel, opened last August at Nagashima Spaland, near Nagoya. Over 30 stories high, it cost $55 million. The Guinness Book of Records has certified that it is the longest, tallest, and fastest coaster in the world - records that were set and broken three times this summer.

You'd think that there would be a reasonably intelligent way of talking about all this spectacular (and spectacularly expensive) architecture. Despite a 100 year history, roller-coasters suffer a dearth of criticism. While cultural theorists are in love with amusement parks, they have little to say about the rides themselves. You can find dozens of Baudrillard-quoting articles about Coney Island and Disneyworld, but not much about what it means to actually strap in and take the plunge.

Maybe that's because roller-coasters don't traffic in representation. They're not simulacra, but the real thing: more like drugs than movies, working directly on the stomach and the inner ear. To call the experience 'visceral' is, for once, not an exaggeration. No matter how theme parks might dress them up with borrowed narratives - you're on a rocket, a runaway train, you're Batman - what happens on a ride is almost entirely a matter of physics and physiology.

The only thing that's not meant to be real, of course, is the danger. The adrenaline pleasures come cheaply - after all the shaking around and screaming, nobody gets hurt. Out of this comes a double language: there's danger and then there's 'danger', fear and 'fear'. Branded with mock-threatening names, like professional wrestlers, roller-coasters promise similarly theatricalised cartoon violence. In the rhetoric of amusement park rides, hyperbole - literally, 'throwing outward' - is the trope of choice.

What happens, though, when the line between real and make-believe danger seems to blur? There have been at least four roller-coaster-related deaths in the last year, and injuries at US theme parks have increased by 95% since 1996. Even Disneyland, that sanctuary of manicured fun, had to temporarily shut down Space Mountain after a malfunction sent several riders to the hospital. (A sign went up featuring a hard-hatted Mickey, gamely reassuring us: 'Sorry, folks, this ride is closed for refurbishment.') Late in August, a couple of weeks after Steel Dragon made the papers, 'The Big One' at Blackpool had a collision between cars that injured 13 people. More distressing news comes from the journal Neurology, which suggested that roller-coasters might cause subdural haematomas in previously healthy riders.

Edward J. Markey, a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, has read all the reports and statistics, and taken it upon himself to lead a crusade against the killer coasters. He's sent out press releases, held news conferences, written to doctors, and amusement industry groups. His bill demands inspection of fixed-site rides by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. (Inspection is currently required on travelling carnival rides, but permanent theme parks slip through the cracks.) It's the new high-speed technology, though, that really gets Markey going. In a letter to the director of the National Institute of Health, he wrote: 'to my surprise, I learned that no government body at any limit is responsible for setting limits on how high G-forces should be allowed to rise.' That's right: the law of gravity remains shockingly unregulated.

All this bluster can't help but be a little comical; we are talking about amusement park rides, after all. An essay in the online magazine Feed described Markey's campaign as 'a tangle of incendiary hype, shoddy science, and misplaced concern'. While there's no question that the thought of children dying at an amusement park is deeply sad, when it comes down to it, the congressman just doesn't have a lot to go on. The fact that, statistically speaking, exercise equipment and steam irons are a lot more dangerous doesn't matter much - roller-coaster accidents, following a logic of their own, seem to signify differently.

That logic is precisely what Markey - knowingly or not - has grasped. His campaign for government intervention is itself couched in the familiar language of thrill-ride 'fear'. The introduction to the National Amusement Park Safety Act of 1999 slips all too easily into absurdly theatrical diction: 'Today's rides are huge metal machines capable of hurtling the human body through space at forces that exceed the Space Shuttle...'. True enough, but try for a moment to imagine William Shatner reading that passage. It's as though Markey took the amusement parks' hyperbolic claims literally - what if the Mind Eraser really does erase minds? Matching the roller-coasters' G-forces with an equally heightened gravitas of his own, he has managed to turn amusement park rhetoric into political discourse. Which may very well be what it always was.

A 1904 article on 'The Amusement Business' noted: 'In the popular amusements is most strikingly manifested that curious disposition of people to make their amusements so like their daily life... The switchbacks, scenic railways, and toy trains are merely trolley cars, a little more uneven in roadbed, jerky in motion, and cramped in the seat than the ordinary means of transportation, but not much.' The quaint rides of the last century are all gone, replaced by towering monsters. Public transportation is a lot less wobbly. Resemblances between the fairground and the ordinary world now take place in the realm of language. Our rides are perhaps more elaborately vertiginous than daily life, but not much.