STEP RIGHT UP: ANDREA CRESPO

There’s an elephant in the room and no one is talking. Our imaginaries are haunted by specters of old, our sensibilities shaped by them as much as the backlash against them. Yet in many ways, they have re- turned, ‘reconfigured’ and adapted for our times (Stulman Dennett, 141). I speak of ‘freak shows’ and the artificial historical figure they’ve created through entertainment practices, ‘frames of mind’, and ‘styled presentations’: the offensively termed ‘freak’ (Bogdan, 35). Not the ‘freak of nature’, but the ‘freak of culture’; as this pejorative slur is not apt to describe a single human being on this planet, but rather a historical figure that is projected unto certain people who are far-flung along diverse axes of bodily, psychological, and behavioral differences (Garland Thomson, Freakery, xviii). Howev-

er, such language is not often used in shows of recent decades, save for a few of its manifestations. Indeed, what has made them fit comfortably within contemporary mediascapes is their often sanitized and humanistic inflection; the way they blend the virtuous with the vicious.

But how did we, particularly in the United States, where many of these modern practices were scaled
for the masses, arrive at this point? After all, the ‘freak shows’ of the 19th and early 20th centu-
ry had gone nearly extinct by the Second World War. The public had decided, by this time, that such a form of entertainment was in ‘bad taste’ if not blatantly immoral in spite of the industry’s claims that the shows had educational and moral value (which made them, in a sense, precursors of today’s ‘edutainment’). The concurrent adoption of broadcast television on a mass level only served to expedite the ‘freak show’s’ decline in cultural prominence. Ultimately, as a result of these shifts in public opinion and technology, dime museums shuttered across the country and traveling circuses amended their shows to exclude ‘freak shows’ (Garland Thomson, Introduction, 11).

But that wasn’t the end of it; the United States and much of the Anglo-sphere later decided that the show must go on. Television, though it supplanted the old shows with alternative and more convenient forms of entertainment, broke the hiatus during the last decades of the 20th century. As a medium, it served to defamiliarize many of the display practices present in older shows, recontextualizing them in ways which would make the public more at ease consuming them.

The first of these new display practices to emerge was the tabloid talk show. Though it existed as early as the 1960s, it wasn’t until the mid-1980s and through the 1990s that talk shows began to fea- ture guests whose physiologies and, in particular, psychologies were the loci of interest. Such guests included people with deviant sexualities, unusual lifestyles, strange behaviors, and the like. Though occasionally people who are physiologically different are featured on these programs, a great deal of them is considered so as a result of choices they made through body modification and plastic surgery. This focus on psychological and behavioral rather than physical differences is one way the talk show differs from earlier shows. However, it replicates the dime museum in its educational mode of presenta- tion, in how it sets up an ‘expert’ or lecturer that mediates between the guest(s) of interest and the audience. The role of expert, lecturer, and the interviewer is filled by people such as Oprah Winfrey, Dr. Phil, Maury, and Jerry Springer; names many of us still remember despite the decline of the talk show in recent times (Stulman Dennett, 142).

During the talk show’s heyday, those who were born physically different, as well as those who underwent drastic forms of bodily modification were to be often found appearing on medical documentaries. Medical documentaries were a more austere and educational form than the talk-shows, playing into people’s morbid curiosities with clinical coolness and detachment. The main stage of this form was the surgi- cal theatre, in which all sorts of procedures were performed before audiences of millions. While much attention is directed towards the patients (very often conjoined twins being separated or transsexuals receiving ‘sex-change’ procedures), a lot of it is channeled towards the technological refinement of the stage itself as well as its supporting actors: physicians (Clark and Myser, 339). The medical doc- umentary continues to exist today and many of its tropes have migrated to reality shows centered around plastic surgery as well as other forms of edutainment.