Learning From Las Vegas:
Hollywood Narrates the Simulacrum
In their influential definitions of postmodernism, Fredric Jameson and
Jean Baudrillard both rely upon the notion of the simulacrum. It is in Jameson’s
words, borrowing on Platonian paradox: “the identical copy for vsJiich no
original has ever existed” {Postmodernism 18). And Baudrillard, using Borges,
explains, “Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a
substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a
hyper-real” (2). With the simulacrum, Jameson and Baudrillard extend Guy
Debord’s critique of “the society of the spectacle,” the common argument being
that in a society wliere exchange value supersedes use value the “original” or
“reality” disappears and all that remains is the copy; or, as Jameson quoting
Debord puts it, “the image has become the final form of commodity reification”
{Reader 74). Accordingly, for these critics, postmodernism is characterized by a
debilitating loss of reality and history which have become mediated (in the
fullest sense of the term) by the processes of simulation and their simulacra. In
this world of mesmerizing appearances and pseudo-events, not only does
revolutionary change seem impossible, the very notion of critical distance itself
is threatened.
If any proof is needed, recent events dramatically validate much of
what these critics have to say about the ideological utility of the simulacrum to
the existing order: fi-om the election of a Hollywood action hero as governor of
California to what Michael Moore has called a “fictitious war” by a “fictitious
president.” Having so ably diagnosed the problem, however, the question arises
how or if one can resist the society of the spectacle. Given the role of the visual
media in their accounts of late capitalism all three critics are disinclined to see
popular cinema, Hollywood in particular, as anything less than an active agent
of the simulacrum. And yet, in the 1990s, a series of Hollywood films, using Las
Vegas as their setting and prevailing metaphor, critique the simulacrum. My
discussion of Leaving Las Vegas (1995), Honeymoon in Vegas (1992), Casino
(1995), Bugsy (1992), and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) argues that in
their attempts to narrate the simulacrum of late capitalism, they manage to
analyze this phenomenon rather than just passively reflect it.
Before discussing the films, however, we need to consider the new
“virtual reality” to which they respond. According to the films, the cutting edge
of this virtual reality is Las Vegas and video/TV; both the place and the
processes create an entertainment form whose center is nowhere and whose
circumference is everywhere. Ironically, the rise of Las Vegas and video
encourages the return of two earlier technological antagonists: the Kinetoscope
parlor and the movie house projector. Through video and VCRs the industry