Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 2005 | Page 16

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Popular Culture Review
Do we then “suspect” that the story of Lenin in Las Vegas is ironic?
The answer is yes. There are layers of observational irony that envelop the story
as a whole, in addition to threads of it found woven throughout the chain of
events. There is what we shall call, at the risk of appearing a bit Muecke-ish,
irony of place, of time, and of events, or locational, temporal, and situational
irony.
Locational Irony
The irony of place or locational irony is the most obvious and heavy
handed. Clearly, discovering a larger-than-life statue of a communist
revolutionary in a Las Vegas casino is a situation which “defeats expectation.”
A casino generally—with its emphasis on individualism, immediate
gratification, and luck—is an unlikely setting for a Marxist who contrarily
values communalism, labor, and need. Furthermore, the city of Las Vegas itself,
called by art critic Robert Hughes, “the Disney World of terminal greed,”
epitomizes capitalism with a vengeance.30 Former bookies and band members
can become gambling moguls; tipping is an art form; and opulence and
materialism are badges of honor. Likewise, the 24-hour commercial culture is a
matter of civic pride—where else can you buy a lawn mower at 3:00 in the
morning?
A second ironic element of the story involving place is that Lenin could
evoke such a negative response in a city where virtually anything goes, a city
that has been deemed so “unfailingly piquant and over the top that it is sui
generis, its own highly peculiar self.” Where according to Time Magazine, “in
no other peacetime locale are the metaphors and ironies so impossibly juicy.”31
Or where, in the words of Hunter Thompson, “When the going gets weird, the
weird turn pro.”32
Surely observers are surprised to learn that citizens are offended by a
mere statue of Lenin in a setting as tolerant of the bizarre as Las Vegas—in a
city whose motto is, “What happens here, stays here”; where role models
include showgirls in feathers and flying Elvi; where the mushroom cloud
released during atmospheric atomic weapons testing was hailed as a tourist
attraction; where you can ride a roller coaster atop a 115-story tower and get
married just down the street at a drive-through wedding chapel with a
mechanical arm that throws rice on your windshield.33
A third element of locational irony is embedded in the recent trend in
Las Vegas to build caricatures of places known round the world. These famous
sites are fairly accurately replicated but with flair and fantasy. Accordingly, after
the opening of New York New York, one visitor extolled its virtues by declaring
that it was just like the Big Apple but without the street crime and garbage.34
Hughes also recognized this feature of Las Vegas, albeit less enthusiastically,
when he wrote, “Las Vegas is a city in which every cultural citation is fake. The
city is built on simulation, quotation, weird unconvincing displacements, in