[On December 5th, 1945, five naval jets disappeared over the Bermuda Triangle, helping establish an urban legend that has endured to this day. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five such urban legends, leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post!]
On two
ways to AmericanStudy the bizarre spate of clown
sightings in 2016.
First
things first: I have to share my two favorite sentences from the Wikipedia page
“2016 clown sightings.” For sheer silliness, you can’t beat “In October 2016,
McDonald’s decided that Ronald McDonald would keep a lower profile as a result
of the incidents.” But for far more significant effects of such a craze, there’s
“nine people in Alabama [were] arrested on suspicion of ‘clown-related
activity.’” That’s really the duality of most urban legends, I’d say—they tend
to be quite silly in both origin and collective conversation; but they can have
very real and all-too-often destructive effects on their societies. If you don’t
believe me, here’s a bonus third sentence from Wikipedia: “Students at Pennsylvania
State University and Michigan State University were involved in mobs that
searched for clowns on campus after reported sightings.” I submit that any widespread
phenomenon which leads to “mobs” can never be dismissed as simply silly.
So the 2016
clown craze was both silly and serious—but what can we make of it? One
definite, and very 21st century, layer was the possibility—and at
times the unquestionable reality—of the sightings being part of marketing
campaigns. That turned out to be definitively the case for one of the most
famous sightings, a series of viral
pictures of a clown wandering an abandoned parking lot in Green Bay in
August 2016. A Facebook page soon followed, claiming that the clown was named
Gags; and then, lo and behold, indie filmmaker Adam Krause revealed that it was
all marketing for his short film Gags the Clown, which was expanded into a
feature horror film in 2018. Thanks to such stories, as well as to the era’s
general and increasing difficulty of distinguishing reality from reality TV (to
coin a phrase), just a month later New Line Cinema, distributor of the in-production
film adaptation of Stephen King’s It (which would be released the
following year), had to release
a statement that “New Line is absolutely not involved in the rash of clown
sightings.”
Neither
was Donald Trump, at least as far as I can prove. But it’s nonetheless impossible
to miss the coincidental timing of this spate of sightings in the months leading
up to the 2016 presidential election (and yes, the clown sightings were a
global phenomenon, but that doesn’t mean the American ones didn’t have
specific resonances here). Speaking for myself, but also for many other
AmericanStudiers with whom I’ve spoken about the moment, when Trump first descended
that golden escalator in June 2015, the campaign he launched looked and sounded
and felt like a clown show. And even though by the summer of 2016 it was beyond
clear that things were far more serious than that, they were also still, y’know,
a clown show. Indeed, I’ll go a step further: the most dominant political and
social force over the decade since can be summed up as—perhaps can’t be summed
up any better than—a killer clown. Ha, ha, fucking ha.
Last urban
legend tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Urban legends you’d highlight for the weekend post?
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