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

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.

Background

In 1930, world-famous syndicated cartoonist Robert Ripley produced twenty-four episodes of the Believe It or Not series as live action theatrical shorts for Warner Brothers/Vitaphone. The Ripley human interest snippets were not, however, called "documentaries," but rather "novelties" or "pictorials." ¹ The black-and-white footage was shot and cut in the straightforward informational news style, however, and would thus seem to belong to the larger documentary tradition. ² Although it was short-lived, the Vitaphone series was not the only one of its kind. There was a revival at Fox, as well as rival series at both Universal and Columbia Pictures: an early attempt to use color in Strange as It Seems, and then the last gasp Stranger than Fiction in 1940. ³

The connection between Ripley's Believe It or Not and the moving picture news media is further confirmed by a study of Fox Movietone News (1927). ⁴ Both evidence a frank frontality (everything toward the camera) in the black-and-white image and the excited radio-style voice-over on the track. While the subject matter and presentation style is often similar in both, the Fox Movietone News mixes weird phenomena (especially human curiosities) with legitimate news, comprising what might be called "tabloid news" (T 99). Ripley's theatrical shorts, in contrast, were totally tabloid and comprised exclusively of weird stuff. However, whereas Fox Movietone subjects verged on the "freakish," justified as human interest or for their "news" value, Ripley overlooked famous freaks in favor of original and newly discovered phenomena, sometimes "freakish" and sometimes not so strange after all. ⁵ Both, however, were precursors of the contemporary television news magazine in their unpredictable miscellany. To give some examples of the subjects the Fox Movietone News would have featured within their news roundup screened before the main feature in the 1920s: the world's largest banjo, a man eating glass, conjoined twins Margaret and Mary with their fiancé, a man calling hogs and imitating a donkey, bathing-suited women riding ice blocks pulled by cars, the wedding of tall man Robert Wadlow, a man blowing smoke through his ears, a man eating razor blades, and finally Robert Ripley playing golf on a rooftop in New York City.

Clearly, a talking and walking Robert Ripley is offered as one more amazing phenomenon in the Fox newsreel as well as in the Vitaphone shorts, both examples...