As a Texan, my standards for barbecue are high but I can give full marks to a regional favorite here in Central Virginia. On a recent visit as I waited for the arrival of a rib platter, I noticed a singular contraption amid the pig menagerie that includes metal pigs with wings, pigs made of truck springs, and pigs crafted of chicken wire. Ghostly white and sporting a tooled leather saddle, the battle-scarred Porky sat atop a warped wooden box with a single word: RIDE. Just put in 50 cents—quarters only!—and see if Porky still has pluck.
Sadly, the kiddie ride has largely disappeared, the victim perhaps of personal injury lawyers championing parents whose kids were tossed off in mid-gallop as well as the decline of capable repairmen (never “technicians”). Bally’s, undisputed king of the kiddie ride, games of chance, and other coin-operated amusements, manufactured the Porky Pig ride along with so many others. Fully restored, a vintage 1950s Porky repainted in high gloss pink or red, fitted with new belts, and a snazzy saddle would run you around $3,000. According to one seller, kiddie rides such as Porky are very popular at barbecue restaurants.
According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, phenomenology is defined as the study of “the structure of various types of experience ranging from perception, thought, memory, imagination, emotion, desire, and volition to bodily awareness, embodied action, and social activity, including linguistic activity. The structure of these forms of experience typically involves what Husserl called ‘intentionality,’ that is, the directedness of experience toward things in the world, the property of consciousness that it is a consciousness of or about something.” That’s quite a load for a kiddie ride but let’s turn Porky loose and see what he can do.
As we have already seen, Porky the kiddie ride has a cultural history: a place in time and a role in people’s lives. He represents a technological innovation that deploys mechanics and electricity for entertainment purposes. He holds a place in popular imagination both as a character and as an amusement. He is designed for children but also has to appeal to parents; his first job is to earn the parent’s trust. Is this ride safe? Is this ride worth the time and money? But his primary role, his entire reason for being, is to provide pleasure. Those ever on the lookout for such things might observe that there is a certain quality of alienation present since none of Porky’s patrons, child or adult, will have much of an awareness of how the ride came to be designed, manufactured, transported, or maintained. It is there strictly to be consumed.
Still, Porky the object has a value, intrinsic and extrinsic, one immanent as well as one dictated by a capitalist market. He puts families into a happy frame of mind and that could lead to eating more barbecue. He evokes nostalgia for another time and his quarters pay, to the management, for his upkeep. Another aspect of his value is his ambiguous appearance: He is neither fearsome nor forbidding, yet he is recognizable to even the youngest child. He has been given a name and a friendly (if fierce) snout and sports an elaborate saddle, one that looks more like it should go on a horse’s back but was clearly made expressly for Porky. In fact, it is that saddle as much as anything that creates the demand in a child’s mind that this pig must be ridden. For the parents, the imperative is much more clearly stated on the base—RIDE.
Without a doubt, irony plays a large part in the phenomenon of Porky. His mere existence in a fanciful form at a restaurant that specializes in pork meats is deliciously ironic. The chicken restaurant chain Chick-fil-a has for years indulged this kind of irony on its famous billboards in which cows scribble out messages to motorists to “eat mor chikin” rather than burgers. Porky and his porcine peers obscure the unpleasant realities of food processing with cuteness and the promise of tasty barbecue, itself a cuisine imbued with individuality, coziness, conviviality, and family togetherness. If I were to insert the requisite two quarters to activate Porky, I would see him buck and lurch perhaps not unlike he did in real life. That might make the connection between pig as living creature and pork as food a little too vivid.
What about Porky as an aesthetic object? Is he beautiful? Not in a traditional sense but he does command attention and has imaginative potential. The molded form of his body signifies motion: His legs are bent, his head held high, his ears and tail extended. But it is an illusion of motion, and little more than a kind of sugar high for the imagination. He is created to look as realistic as possible but destined to remain nothing more than a simulacrum. This might lead the sensitive child to pity Porky trapped as he is in lifeless form. (Literature has many such protagonists.) His mechanism activated, the fleeting glory for pig and rider probably lasts little more than a minute. Depending on the condition of Porky’s inner workings, the ride may be rough or smooth. But think of the ignominy should Porky fail to perform: the frustrated parent, the disappointed child, the laughing patrons, the powerless restaurant manager.
The conscious experience of Porky Pig the kiddie ride demonstrates an intentionality at work here that is considerably more layered and potent than one might think. Considering Porky as an object results in a complex experience of that object and evokes him as a mental phenomenon that correlates the subject (me) and the object. The intentionality of Porky the object combines language, logic, epistemology, and interpretations of action and value to result in an experience of Porky that takes place both in my own consciousness and in the empirical world. What is missing from this experience was my disinclination to attend to the imperative issued by Porky, specifically, to ride. This I did not do because, by this time, my ribs were on the table and a new intentionality had begun to form.