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THE FUNCTIONS OF SHOWMANSHIP IN FREAK SHOW AND EARLY FILM

Concentrating upon popular conventions of showmanship in freak and film shows at the turn of the twentieth century, this article describes the apparently paradoxical strategy of bringing images and instances of otherness into institutional contexts where their function was primarily one of reassurance for audiences. Novelty, distraction and difference were certainly vital to the shows, but the demand for otherness was predicated upon deeper continuities—a need for comfort or for reinforcement of deeply engrained social values of gender, nation, class or race, for example—that appeared under threat at the fin‐de‐siècle. Good showmanship was not, therefore, merely a talent for managing and promoting the effects of alterity and shock within a variety format, it was also characterized by an unfailing ability to represent exhibits in a manner that did valuable cultural work for audiences. When promoting entertainments that seemed to contribute to the problem of empathy, generating anxiety and celebrating otherness, the showmen were in fact depending upon the remarkable ability of their customers to both objectify otherness and internalise it, allowing it to contribute to a safely bounded sense of self. This ability of spectators to draw reassurance from challenging material has remained at the heart of cinema ever since. In this limited sense, showmanship has survived within cinema as a set of institutional practices that, like the practices of freak show, have always succeeded in repackaging otherness in an ideologically ‘safe’ and highly popular form.