Learning From Las Vegas
135
When he begins to protest, the mother dies. The deathbed scene is played with
such a fine parody of melodrama that all the demons represented—^parental
tyranny, incest, death itself—lose their power to frighten. Throughout the film.
Jack’s Oedipal trauma will be referred to and even joked about. Jack tells his
girlfriend, Betsy (Sarah Jessica Parker), of dreams he is having about his
mother, and in a familiar fashion she teases him about their sexual nature.
Significantly, at the end of the film, wiien Jack has finally surmounted his
Oedipal fear of commitment and married Betsy, he is still pursued by dreams
about his naked mother—although now, in the dream, she gives her consent to
Jack’s marriage. Honeymoon in Vegas suggests a postmodern appreciation of
parody and play that makes Leaving Las Vegas look like a throwback to a dour
modernist orthodoxy.
More debilitating than Jack’s Oedipal anxieties, however, is his not
unrelated voyeurism that reduces Betsy to the status of “whore.” When Jack
takes Betsy out on one of his private investigations in order to have her confirm
his pessimistic view of relationships, she does not see the same thing he does.
Unlike Jack, she does not see a weak and fallible human nature; instead, she sees
and condemns the power of older men to control and carry on affairs with
younger financially dependent women. From his voyeuristic comer of the
Oedipal triangle. Jack cannot see this threat that Betsy is warning him about.
Because of his voyeurism and its resulting pessimism, it is all too easy for Jack,
with the help of one of those older men, Tonuny Corcoran (James Caan), to
inadvertently turn Betsy into a “wliore,” as she herself proclaims wiien Jack tells
her how he gambled her away in a card game with Corcoran.
Corcoran, on the other hand, suffers from the visual tyranny of
simulacra. He can only see Betsy as a copy of his deceased wife, wiio in turn is
another copy. The black-and-white flashbacks of Corcoran’s wife show a
woman who not only bears an imcanny resemblance to Betsy but also to the
platinum blonde starlets of Hollywood’s glamorous 1930s and 40s. And it is her
pursuit of the Hollywood beauty image that literally kills her—Corcoran relates
how through incessant sunbathing his wife contracted a fatal melanoma.
The new mode of seeing and representation that undoes both Jack’s
pessimistic voyeurism and Corcoran’s wishful fetishism is, surprisingly,
television. While Corcoran pursues Betsy in Hawaii, Jack returns to New York,
where he spends his time listlessly channel surfing. However, a news broadcast
about an empting volcano in Hawaii, with Corcoran and Betsy among the
onlookers, catches Jack’s attention and forces him to act. The televised image of
an erupting volcano vsfrich reduces an event of natural wonder to the
commodified spectacle of the “news” is a deft representation of the simulacrum.
The volcano references an earlier world where the unquestioned priority of
nature gave it the power of superstition, mystical fertility, and unknowable
depth. No doubt, in the spectacular world of television, where images of