[On June 20th, 1947, mobster Bugsy Siegel was killed in Beverly Hills. So for the 75th anniversary of that murder, I’m going to AmericanStudy Siegel’s role in the development of Las Vegas, along with other contexts for that tellingly American city. Leading up to a weekend post on Vegas in song!]
On what we
can learn about the city from a handful of feature films.
1) Viva Las Vegas (1964): I
can’t lie, Elvis Presley films have always seemed to be to exist as vehicles
for, well, Elvis Presley, as well as for specific songs (for example, the performance of “Viva Las
Vegas” in this movie is certainly impressive, but Presley’s character is
supposed to be a race car driver, not a musician!). Moreover, the screenplay
for this film was apparently
written in 11 days, before which time there had been no Vegas connection
whatsoever in the planned movie. Yet despite those factors, I’d say Viva represents an early and striking
image of Las Vegas as the place where dreams come true, an enduring, idealized
counterpoint to the Sin City symbolism I wrote about in yesterday’s post.
2) Honeymoon in Vegas (1992):
Those dreams aren’t just financial or individual, of course—they are also
romantic, as illustrated by the city’s ubiquitous quickie
wedding chapels. Of the many films that explore the city’s romantic allure
(including Viva, with Ann-Margret central to
Presley’s character’s dreams), the James Caan-Nicolas Cage-Sarah Jessica
Parker-starring Honeymoon in Vegas
stands out because it utilizes Las Vegas iconography so fully—right up to a
conclusion featuring a pack of skydiving Elvis
impersonators! Cage’s character has a fear of skydiving but goes through
with it for love, which parallel’s the film’s overall message about the
interconnected power of love and Las Vegas (he promised his mother on her
deathbed he would never marry, but is willing to do so in Vegas).
3) Leaving Las Vegas (1995): Just
three years later, Cage would star in one of the bleakest Vegas films (and
American films period) ever released. Leaving
Las Vegas does feature a central romance and one potently connected to the
city at that, as Cage’s depressed alcoholic writer Ben Sanderson meets and
falls in love with Elisabeth
Shue’s cynical prostitute Sera. But without spoiling all the details, I’ll
simply say that the film’s romance ends just as tragically as do these two
characters’ individual arcs—and while tragedy isn’t limited to any one setting,
in this case the tragedies do feel interwoven with the excesses and horrors
that lie beneath the city’s glamorous façade.
4) Showgirls (1995): From
Oscar-winning tragedy to Razzie-winning
farce, AmericanStudies really does contain multitudes. I’m not gonna try to
rehabilitate the reputation of Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls, truly one of the worst films I’ve ever seen (and
featuring a central performance from another Elizabeth, Berkley, that
is, let’s say, less good than Shue’s). But I think many of those badnesses do
directly correlate with the city in which every second of the film’s action
takes place (Berkley’s Nomi arrives in Vegas at the start and departs it at the
conclusion): ridiculously over the top and cheesy and fake and yet impossible
to turn one’s eyes away from, even as we know we’re throwing our money away on
something thoroughly debauched and debased and destructive (at least to our
sense of good taste, if not indeed to our dignity).
5) 21 (2008): The
Vegas heist thriller 21 is a much
much better film, but is problematic for two distinct and even more troubling
reasons: it “whitewashed”
many of the real people on whom its story is based, casting white actors to
play Asian American figures; and it stars the now-disgraced
sexual predator Kevin Spacey (although at least he plays a despicable
villain). The first reason in particular might warrant staying away from the
film and reading the source material, Ben Mezrich’s Bringing
Down the House (2003), instead. And in any case, both these stories,
like all the Vegas-centered heist and con tales (of
which there are many),
reveal a deep-seated collective desire to take down the house, despite the oft-repeated
reality that the house always wins. Both of those ideas have a great deal to
tell us about not just Vegas, but all of America.
Last Vegas
context tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Las Vegas contexts, histories, stories you’d highlight?
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