A Circus Diversion
May. 15th, 2019 08:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWhen a PBS “American Experience” program on “the circus” showed up in the options Netflix presents me with, the recurring conviction I ought to use my subscription to that service for more than the anime series (or even “animated series”) on it cropped up again. I have watched a number of documentaries on it before (including some others sourced from PBS, “The Civil War” and a more recent piece about the Voyager missions), even if this might be a bit like how I read plenty of nonfiction but do grapple with the concern I’m not reading enough novels to escape the lazy thought “any fictional prose that doesn’t whoosh by over my head or at least depress me isn’t serious enough to really value.” As for why this particular case grabbed me, though, beyond “the draw of a reputable brand name” I might have been conscious “the idea of the circus” was picked up in my mind one second-hand bit at a time, and tied up with a sense of it being “antique.”
Each of the documentary’s two parts was almost two hours long, so I had to watch the whole thing over two weekends. As American-centric as I’d supposed it to be, it still surprised me a bit that it left off in the 1950s as the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus, the accretion of which had been the program’s focus, folded its big top for good. Some of the commentators were identified as modern “performers in the circus tradition,” but figuring out what might have happened between then and now seems left up to each viewer’s personal choice and effort.
It was interesting all the same to see the post-Civil War circuses, beginning to travel by railroad, suggested to be the beginning of “the entertainment industry” and making a million dollars a season. The sense of quaintness to the old pictures was contrasted by circuses carrying electric lights and moving pictures into the countryside (one clip was of an open-air ice hockey game, which did catch my north-of-the-border attention), even if this led to entertainment that wasn’t a matter of sitting under a big tent watching live performances for one day in the year. At the same time, that feeling of quaintness just might link with controversies about animal acts and sideshows, which the documentary did acknowledge, even if “clowns are creepy” can feel kind of a lazy joke to me even when Mystery Science Theater 3000 makes it. (I was convinced anyway I recognized in the documentary a bit of the short film about the circus the series “riffed” on.) None of this quite amounts to somehow wanting to “see the circus” for real, but there can be something too to knowing a bit more about what other people are more interested in.
Each of the documentary’s two parts was almost two hours long, so I had to watch the whole thing over two weekends. As American-centric as I’d supposed it to be, it still surprised me a bit that it left off in the 1950s as the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus, the accretion of which had been the program’s focus, folded its big top for good. Some of the commentators were identified as modern “performers in the circus tradition,” but figuring out what might have happened between then and now seems left up to each viewer’s personal choice and effort.
It was interesting all the same to see the post-Civil War circuses, beginning to travel by railroad, suggested to be the beginning of “the entertainment industry” and making a million dollars a season. The sense of quaintness to the old pictures was contrasted by circuses carrying electric lights and moving pictures into the countryside (one clip was of an open-air ice hockey game, which did catch my north-of-the-border attention), even if this led to entertainment that wasn’t a matter of sitting under a big tent watching live performances for one day in the year. At the same time, that feeling of quaintness just might link with controversies about animal acts and sideshows, which the documentary did acknowledge, even if “clowns are creepy” can feel kind of a lazy joke to me even when Mystery Science Theater 3000 makes it. (I was convinced anyway I recognized in the documentary a bit of the short film about the circus the series “riffed” on.) None of this quite amounts to somehow wanting to “see the circus” for real, but there can be something too to knowing a bit more about what other people are more interested in.