Lure of Rollercoaster

As Meredith Neil explains, the roller coaster has attained an iconic and emblematic status in our cultural consciousness ; for over a century, it has become immediately recognizable as a sign of risk, danger, and pleasure. Unlike the merry-go-round and the ferris wheel, the roller coaster offers the illusion of a liberation from spatial constraints, since it is capable of manipulating both horizontal and vertical dimensions. Neil's suggestion that "the curvilinear has symbolized relaxation and pleasure, while straight lines have sober and business-like overtones" is supported by other theorists who argue that in its nineteenth-century form, the roller coaster provided a sense of free-form movement, an impractical spatial in terpretation of the commuter railroad.
Robert Cartmell notes that engineers experimented with looping coasters as early as the 1920s; because of technological limitations, however, these coasters relied solely on the properties of centrifugal force, and although they were extensively tested, riders never fully embraced these new experiences in spatial disorientation because they remained unconvinced that the coasters were safe . In recent decades, however, rapidly evolving technologies have exponentially increased the possibilities of manipulating space by defying physical forces such as gravity, to create ever more distinctively terrifying roller coaster experiences which pose no actual threat to the safety of riders. Indeed, Russel Nye has described the public appeal of the contemporary roller coaster as a "riskless risk, a place where one may take chances that are not really chances". What is emphasized in the new, high-technology coaster, then, is a regulation of the tenuous relationship between a perceived danger and the assurance of safety-in effect, a successful portrayal of a participatory simulation of danger.
...There are other, more visceral ways in which the experience of individual coasters function in a contextual relationship with ground-level space. Some coasters offer the promise of free-form movement, liberated from the spatial and temporal constraints which the patron experiences not only on the park's ground level, but also as a rule in the structure of everyday life. In the more technologically advanced thrill coasters, this liberation is often
highly exaggerated in its intensity. It is, moreover, quite brief: no coaster ride in AstroWorld exceeds four minutes in duration, and the periods within the ride which comprise the most intense forms of euphoria are much shorter. The most exhilarating portion of the shortest coaster ride, the Skyscreamer, consists of a period of only several seconds, in which individual cars, raised to a landing by elevator, are perpendicularly "dropped" from a height of sev-
eral stories, after which the track abruptly turns 90 degrees from the vertical to the horizontal, at ground level. End of ride.

Orchestrated (Dis)orientation: Roller Coasters, Theme Parks, and Postmodernism
Michael DeAngelis, Cultural Critique, No. 37. (Autumn, 1997), pp. 107-129