You don't have to think of the sexual desperation in a place where
prostitutes are listed in the Yellow Pages (as "escorts") and where naked
women and "boylesque" shows are advertised everywhere. You don't have to
listen to stars who croon love songs in the midst of all this
lovelessness. You don't have to attend the massively hyped boxing matches
where men pound at each other to satisfy the frenzy of bettors. You don't
have to think much, don't have to analyze. You have only to look at these
faces.
In them you'll see the appalling cost we pay for the dominance of
money--how it has seeped into our spirits, our psyches, so much so that
we come to Las Vegas to both wallow in and exorcise its power. These
things cannot be done at the same time, so it is a helpless attempt. And
that, finally, is what these faces broadcast: helplessness--the
expression of people who don't really know what they're doing but feel
compelled to do it anyway.
If this sounds extreme--well, that too fits Las Vegas. It is hard
to imagine a city more extreme, more overt, more in the grip of
compulsions. It is hard to imagine a place exposing its psychology more
nakedly, under the garish tints of its neon. It used to be that Vegas
made a kind ofWorld War II it was a tiny desert gamblingtown that few
knew of about. Here, in 1946, Bugsy Siegal and oth-ers invented the
mod-ern casino. For nearly gangsters held sway, population and fame.
Gangsters, almost by definition, have contempt for society, for normal
life. Their very existence is an expression of that contempt, and they
built this city in their own image. Its garishness, its sexuality, and
especially its "play," the games not of chance but of odds that sucked
money from all who came here, reflected their temperament, their values,
and above all their secret. That secret, the core of their contempt for
society, was simply this: that they could not exist, and certainly could
not profit, unless supposedly normal people desired what they
offered--desired to escape from a moral code they could not live without
but could not entirely live within.
The town made a kind of sense because it seemed aware of its
purpose, its secret; and it was small and private and, in its way, rather
sophisticated. No one walked into a casino casually. Men wore suits and
ties, women wore evening clothes. Their fashions and manners suggested
that they had come to do something special: transgress. The ritual was
almost conscious.
By the mid-1970s the place had grown too big, and was too much in
the public eye, to be run overtly by gangsters. Corporations began to
take over the casinos. Gradually they've come to call their hotels
"resorts," not casinos; and they refer to what goes on there as "gaming,"
not gambling. The gangster casinos used to be dimly lit; the corporate
casinos tend to be bright. The gangster casinos were openly, even
proudly, sexy and sly in atmosphere; the corporate casinos hide behind
The Wizard of Oz, circuses, knights.
People used to enter a casino formally; now they wear the same
outfits they wear to their hometown malls. The corporations are in effect
saying, "It's all right to do this, it's good clean fun, nothing to feel
shady about." The gangsters' Las Vegas liked feeling shady--relished it,
in fact. The corporate Las Vegas denies shadiness in their decor while
offering it in their services. The city is as up-front as it ever was,
for it can deny neither its purpose nor its psychology; but the people it
draws are less up-front, pretending they're doing something quite in
keeping with the way they normally live while doing things, especially
with monty, that they would never normally do. The toll this takes is
seen in their pleasureless faces.
A gangster's rebellion is evident, and their casinos invited
license and rebellion. A solid citizen's unconscious rebellion is
torture. The solid citizens have come to Las Vegas to defile the very
thing that, in their own eyes, makes them solid: money. As in the old Las
Vegas, they do here what they can't do elsewhere; but unlike the old Las
Vegas, they do it furtively, rarely looking at each other, each alone in
front of their machine, pretending to attempt to win what they are almost
certain to lose: the money that defines and confines them, the money they
slave for and that gives them the small freedoms that excuse their
slavery.
Every nickel, every dollar, is alive with pain here. Here the
American dreamer is the American sucker. Here, in the last truly
wide-open and wild town of the Wild West, everything we've paid so dearly
for is stripped bare, our dark side gleams in a neon glow, and we leave
finally exhausted by our own helplessness--trying to put the best face on
it, telling each other we've had a good time--and usually broke. We go
back home, and settle back into the grind of making the money that we've
just lost--back to spending 20 minutes a day with our spouses, talking 10
minutes a week with our kids, and accumulating enough money to vacation
again in Las Vegas.
Tags:
anathema,
demographics,
fantasies,
fantasy,
gambling,
good reason,
impulses,
job security,
las vegas casinos,
little time,
malls,
michael ventura,
middle class,
money,
money money,
national shrine,
nothing but time,
oppression,
personality disorders,
potent mix,
rival,
Social Security,
supermarkets,
weekdays
