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The Amusement Park (George A. Romero, 1973/2019)
🕑 Added 2021-06-11 02:02:54 +0000 UTC
To state the obvious, we would not be paying any attention to this medium-length public service announcement if it weren't a work-for-hire by a major film artist. Then again, if Romero weren't behind the camera, The Amusement Park would be a lot more "professional," and considerably less weird. This isn't a film that stands up against the classic of the Dead trilogy, mostly because of budgetary considerations and Romero's willingness to remain inside the margins of the assignment, even if only just.
A more productive way to consider The Amusement Park, I think, is to look at it alongside other bizarre, radical PSAs. After all, a majority of PSAs adopt the outward trappings of horror cinema, but bend the genre to its own ends. Didactic concerns outstrip any traditional narrative drive or character work. But this doesn't confuse the viewer or compromise the films' integrity, because the kinds of information usually organized by narrative can safely be presumed. We have a basic understanding of the dangers and social ills of the society we live in, so like the best PSAs The Amusement Park functions very much along what we might call a monstrative axis. As the introduction and conclusion inform us, we're being asked to viscerally feel a problem, and then decide what to do next.
That said, there's not really much of a reason why Romero needed to set this film in an amusement park. That probably has more to do with what locations were available. Some of the spaces in the park are not metaphorical; rather they are labeled like you'd find in editorial cartoons. But the horror isn't prompted by the roller coaster or the bumper cars. Rather, it's the brutality of the interactions and the callousness of this micro-society that are difficult to watch. The protagonist (Lincoln Maazel) is summarily humiliated in a Kafkaesque fashion: stripped of his money, possessions, his basic needs, and his dignity. Near the end of the film, a young girl calls him over to sit with her and her family and read her a story. He is delighted, but when the kid's mom decides it's time to go, she packs up her family and leaves, treating the old man like he were invisible. In the course of the film, he has gone from being a nuisance, to an object of suspicion, and by the end, nothing at all.
Auteurists and Romero fans alike will certainly see the director's favored themes at work here. As with zombification, old age is an unbidden transformation that turns a viable human being into an Other, an object of fear and loathing. As Maazel notes in the epilogue, we will all be arriving at the amusement park sooner or later. In a way, Romero drives this point home best in a brief interlude that shifts its focus away from Maazel's character. A young couple sit down with a fortune teller, who shows them their future. They are living in a Pittsburgh slum. He is in advanced stages of dementia; she is frantically trying to get him some help, but nobody listens to her. By the end of this segment, the couple regard one another with disgust, splitting up immediately.
Romero suggests that we can comprehend old age, but perceive it as something that only happens to other people, like a car accident. If we truly saw it coming, a part of us would die on the spot.
