ABSTRACT
Coney Island is well known because it has been used in many films, from Indian Bollywood productions to Annie Hall. Coney Island was just the kind of place that inspired Walt Disney to create his own amusement park, a working class amusement area. As Dick Zigun explains, he saw that Coney Island could be a stage from which to champion art forms that had grown out of American culture: tattoos, burlesque, freak shows, things of that nature. As Russian cultural theorist M. M. Bakhtin writes in his book: One can see amusement parks like Coney Island as having had their roots in the carnivalesque impulse that flowered in the Middle Ages. Much of modern day life is connected to ancient rites and rituals and, in the case of amusement parks like Coney Island, what Mircea Eliade would describe as 'degenerated' forms of festive pleasures that took root in the Middle Ages.
