Las Vegas is a vast, astounding, and expensively-developed product. Like any product designed to attract those who don’t need it, it contains within its marketing the assumptions it makes about its target customers. Every adult knows that we don’t win at gambling: we give progressively more money to the house until we quit. Thus the narrative Las Vegas sells itself with must inspire an irrational, indeed anti-rational, fervor in its visitors, a powerful hostility to reason. This narrative is made manifest in spectacularly coordinated fashion across all sorts of experiential fronts: Las Vegas, in dozens of ways, works furiously to subvert your realistic critical discretion.
This is not news, but I was stunned by the discipline with which Las Vegas produces its message and the complexity of its strategy. In a city where corporations privately fund $11 billion dollar developments nothing is an accident, and the interweaving of media methods and acousticovisual attacks on your reason is brilliantly executed.
The key theme is that to dream, to fantasize, is itself fun; that is, to believe in what isn’t true is itself exciting. Implied is how terribly dull it is to ground oneself in reality (the reality in which striptease dancers don’t come home with you and slot machines safely favor the casino). The best-marketed dreams consist of evocative symbols rather than literal descriptions, as we are justly ashamed of the theme of these dreams, the infantile pleasure principle run amok.
Hence the obsession with magic and illusion. Where else in the world do so many flock to see magicians? Dozens of them in the major casinos perform their elaborate special-effects tricks, announcing that “magic is real” and “seeing is believing” and “illusions happen here” and giving you “the power to believe.” One notes that his magic makes childhood dreams come true. And audience members pay to be further encouraged that the most magical trick of all -taking a statistical improbability comparable to being struck by lightning and spending hundreds or thousands of dollars pursuing it- is real. They have the “Power to Believe!”
Hence the proliferation of “fantasy” aesthetics. Excalibur is a castle-casino with Arthurian legends alongside its slot machines and a “Tournament of Kings” nightly. It sits across from the repurposed cinematic lion of MGM. Planet Hollywood and the Hard Rock Cafe and countless evocations of pirates and cowboys and adventurers beckon the tourists on the strip, every casino wearing its own memetic mask. Why should adults care for such hackneyed fantasies? They are the fables of youth, the story-worlds of childhood dreams: they resonate beneath our faculties.
Hence the repackaging of pre-Christian mythologies: the vast Caesar’s Palace isn’t alone in its utilization of Greek and Roman statuary, although it isn’t outdone. In its shopping colonnade, the gods speak to shoppers and everywhere references to their power are depicted. In the Egyptian aesthetic of the Luxor one finds the same curious use of dead culture, despite Americans’ famed lack of interest in history. That’s because it’s not history that is offered but (1) a world free of Judeo-Christian moral strictures, (2) an alternative metaphysic of deprecated gods and superstition, and (3) ever-more exoticism to take you away from this moral, modern, rational universe (and your mortgage).
Hence the lavish reproductions of cities -Venice, New York, Paris- which announce that we are free to believe in the miracle of teleportation: we are not in the dull ordinary world of our hometowns or even of hackneyed Las Vegas: we are in Paris, and in Paris why shouldn’t one play craps or buy some Versace? This further surrealization of reality and enactment of spectacle is shockingly expensive: a sure sign that its return on investment is demonstrable.
Hence the boundless repetition of suggestive phrases to describe shows, casinos, shops, and the like: provocative, exotic, titillating, glamorous, exclusive, hot, cool, shocking. All mean little or nothing but ably set the expectation: we are free and transgressive here, and you should be too. The napkins challenge you: you aren’t safe, are you? You aren’t sexless, neutered, weak? You aren’t dull are you? Don’t you have the confidence to get out there and try your luck?
Hence the satiation of longing at a safe distance: delivered call girls and strip clubs and nude shows provide consumable sex but not the vastly more terrifying romance; drive-through wedding chapels make fast-food of lifelong commitments; buffets allow gorging without requiring the anxiety-inducing debate that accompanies selecting an entree. You can have it all without engaging anything!
Hence the strong presence of televisual media themes. As we are assured by television that Las Vegas is a sinful yet safe and magical place by TV, so when we arrive to deposit our savings into bleeping televisual gaming machines we are constantly reinforced in our flight from awareness by TV’s forms and contents. Everywhere are screens, on buildings and in tables and in walls, and everywhere are television personalities, but not those of today: always distant relics from earlier eras, the Osmonds or some actor from the Brady Bunch. When a casino spends $75 million dollars on fountains, it can afford whatever entertainment it wants; but it wants these relics, because they help lull us further into the somnambulistic suggestibility of our childish TV dreams: here are the Osmonds! Here are the Bradys! Here is the magic of your lost youth! Here are the knights of the round table! Here is Paris-as-symbol! This is a play world of play possibility!
But the money is real, of course. And I suspect that is why on every overpass I saw the most complete and elaborate suicide-prevention fences I’ve ever seen, why the faces of those pulling the slot levers were never expressive of this endless fun but rather of the pedestrian fact that fantasy isn’t a pleasure; it is the source of most displeasure. To dream of what isn’t is to awaken to what is with a heavy heart, and perhaps a light wallet.
And I believe this also explains why, wherever one goes in Las Vegas, dozens of people are taking photographs: an experience created by and supported through media fantasy disappoints in reality. Standing before the reproduction of the Trevi Fountain, one knows one is supposed to feel something like awe, but one knows as well that this cheesy recreation is not actually awesome. Still, having been promised through media that this experience will be richly meaningful, one reaches for the lens to mediate the experience until it is a depiction of itself: the ‘fun’ of turning your life into an advertisement or television show in real-time is needed when the absence of actual fun threatens the mood.
Someone who lies to be liked may develop the skilled mendacity of a method actor, but to see truly spectacular deceit one must find a grifter: someone who needs to be believed else he starves. Our best actors are in police stations, prisons, boardrooms: wherever livelihood depends on duplicity.
And that is why Las Vegas puts to shame Hollywood’s best efforts, for in Las Vegas music and light and sound are coordinated across all art forms to monetize the escapist fantasy life we tourists are told is so much fun.
And when the escape fails and we return home to real life, we can pull out the photos and the tag line -“What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas”- and wink, wink, nudge, nudge our friends about all the supposed fun we had, the whores and the liquor and the poker and the magic and the roller coasters and the shows and so on, and maybe we’ll never have to accept that we sat sadly in a sea of slot machines dreaming of riches and sex while paying to get fleeced like sheep.
