Learning From Las Vegas
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of history similar to Jameson’s postmodern nostalgia—a replay of the present as
past that evades its own present and turns the past into a series of meaningless
glossy fragments—what the television writer refers to as a ''nostalgia for things
we were too young to be aware of at the time.” What better expression of the
simulacrum do we need?
While this picture of Las Vegas and its reception confirm much of what
Jameson and Baudrillard have to say abut postmodernism, it can also serve as a
backdrop to Hollywood’s recent and more critical efforts to narrate the
simulacrum. The television writer’s nostalgic view of Las Vegas and rat-pack
machismo is diametrically opposed by the picture of Las Vegas one finds in
Mike Figgis’s Leaving Las Vegas, The film’s protagonist Ben (Nicholas Cage),
a Hollywood screenwriter on a suicidal binge in Las Vegas, acts out a grim
parody of the rat-pack fantasy of wine, women, and song."^ As Ben heads down
the 1-15 (the freeway connecting Los Angeles and Las Vegas) his trip is
represented through a series of film frames played at high speed, suggesting the
lack of any real distance or difference between Hollywood and Las Vegas. The
major difference between the two cities, as Ben later points out, is that the liquor
stores in Las Vegas are open 24 hours a day. The close connection between
Hollywood and Las Vegas suggests that we are watching not only the death of
an individual in Las Vegas, but the death of that larger community Ben
represents, Hollywood.
Ben and Hollywood are also closely connected through their shared
notion of woman as spectacle.^ The closest thing to an explanation Ben gives for
his drinking is a comment he makes to a prostitute, who deftly and symbolically
strips his wedding band from his finger while sucking it, "Did I start drinking
because my wife left me or did my wife leave me because I started drinking?”
The rhetorical question connects his excessive drinking with "woman
problems”—a staple for the motivation of all sorts of bizarre behavior on the
part of Hollywood’s heroes ever since Humphrey Bogart, at the very least. The
only sight we get of Ben’s wife comes in a snapshot of her, seen when he cleans
out his home and, in a sacrificial bonfire, purges himself (or so he thinks) of his
past. The snapshot of the wife with her arms around, presumably, Ben’s son
stresses that the picture of domestic bliss and the maternal figure it is based on
are just that, a picture.
Early on, the movie stresses Ben’s preoccupation with pornography and
his embarrassingly awkward come-ons with women. It would be a severe
misreading of the film to see his relationship with Sera (Elisabeth Shue), the Las
Vegas prostitute who befriends him, as some transcendence of his early failures
with women wiiether they are as wife, mother, or prostitute. Certainly, Sera’s
periodic asides to some therapist, unknown and imseen by the audience, evoke
the notion of true love, wiiich is part of her characterization as a hooker with a
heart of gold. But this cliche must be viewed ironically in light of Ben’s