Everyday Strangeness: Robert Ripley's International Oddities as Documentary Attractions

Abstract

My alternative title is "Everyday Estrangement," emphasizing a very particular aspect of everyday life theory having to do with the critical capacity of the strange. While most theorists of everyday life are concerned with the ordinary and its uses, not all visit the problem of critique; if, like Michel de Certeau, they are interested in critique from below, at the level of ordinary people and ordinary practices, this outburst is diffuse and often undetectable. For my purposes, I find in a combination of Bertolt Brecht and Henri Lefebvre an edge and a sharper definition. In both, the critique is spatialized as proximity or juxtaposition. Here, the problematic juxtaposition is that of the ordinary and the extraordinary, or the strange as it contributes to estrangement, where estrangement means distance and disillusionment. The reader will note my interest in suggesting that under some circumstances the ordinary verges on the extraordinary. Conversely, the odd thing can be made common or familiar. But what arises from this consideration is a new problem, the politics of determining what is strange, which carries with it a companion question: what is at stake in the separation of the ordinary from the extraordinary? Here, in my consideration of everyday life theory as it parallels documentary film theory, I suggest that although there is an ideological need for the separation between the norm and the aberration, in popular culture, since the early part of this century, there has been a fascination with the problem of the difference between ordinary and extraordinary.

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