Page 65 - Sorrow of the Earth: Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull and the Tragedy of Show Business

boat-cum-counting-house. But inside, there’s another whole city, with its

street lamps, its leafy groves, its strange campaniles with coloured onion
domes like Russian churches and folklore kremlins; its brass bands, its
refreshment stands, its gently curving roofs, its pointed towers, its little
painted houses, redolent of Prague and its castle, as much as of Italy, India or
China. Because here, we’re any old where. Crowds in boater hats stream past
beneath plaster gargoyles, comic-book monsters, in a bargain-basement
Venice. There’s a mix of canals, fake castles, elephants with their African

mahouts and their American flags. People squirt water, slither, slink, yell and
punch each other. And then, at night, Luna Park sparkles, millions of little
Tinker Bells settle on the roofs, the displays, the bridges, and along imaginary
washing lines, like tiny stars fallen from the sky. And the sky is now less
brilliant than the Earth. And the Earth has become the Moon, that old whatsit

which used to make us dream, with the kind old face Plutarch talks about, its
melancholy and its solitude.
But on the Moon in Luna Park, everything is spires, minarets and jollity.
It’s a break from the office and the factory floor. People jostle amiably,
pleasantly bemused, and their eyes are turned towards the solitary heights of
the towers, each of which strives to be the tallest. The days of Indians, bison,
and all those cross-stitch panoramas of the Wild West are over. Audiences

want something different now. That’s what audiences are like. You have to
keep inventing stuff for them. They want a show that’s never been performed,
a wild spectacle that doesn’t yet exist. They want life itself. All of it. This is
doubtless why Elmer Dundy keeps adding towers to Luna Park; it has to reach
ever higher, shine ever brighter, and make one helluva racket!
But in the morning, when the sun comes up, the tat is obvious and the

vulgarity is plain to see. The make-up has melted off. From his pilot’s cabin,
Elmer looks out at his sleeping forest, and he thinks back to the very first time
he saw the Wild West Show. He feels a sort of nostalgia and something close
to remorse. Spectacle, he says to himself, is definitely not what it used to be.
Finally, it’s opening time. He looks down at the unseeing, indolent crowds
as they enter his fiefdom. Master of Time and Solitude, Elmer has installed a
small skylight in the narrow staircase that leads to human thought. And all he

asks is that they glance through it, just for a moment, and take a look at his
city of light, his paper angels, and that they believe—yes, that they make out
they believe, just for a second—that it could be real. Elmer, like Buffalo Bill
in the past, knows perfectly well that you let yourself be taken in—you