Learning From Las Vegas
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army of informants on the lookout for new targets. Even before Nicky starts
having an affair with Sam’s wife Ginger, the two old friends have started
watching out for each other in an entirely different sense. This has a particular
irony for Sam who was relying on Nicky to watch Ginger who quickly unravels
under the demands of the perfect hostess, housewife, and mother image Sam
requires of her. Furthermore, rumors of Nicky’s adultery with Ginger cause the
older mobsters to watch Nicky with increased intensity, who in turn tries to
watch them through the henchman who is supposed to be watching him.
Finally, all of this activity and its visual tyranny are being watched by
the press and the FBI. The mobsters’ efforts to avoid the FBI’s ubiquitous
bugging devices and cameras create scenes of buffoonish and surreal comedy.
At one point, the eye of The Law (recalling the casino’s “eye in the sky”) comes
down to earth when the FBI’s surveillance airplane makes a forced landing on a
fairway where Nicky and his cohorts are playing golf However, more
threatening to the mob than the FBI is the exposure of the press. It is Sam’s
inability to evade an unassuming newspaperwoman’s simple but persistent
questioning that comes closest to jeopardizing his performance as a front man
for the mob. While Scorsese shows the press is open to manipulation, it seems to
offer some hope that this intense scrutiny that sees so much at the same time that
it looks the other way can offer something like a breakthrough.
The visual tyranny seems to be the culmination of an earlier vision
which is only implicit in the film: Bugsy Siegel’s narcissistic dream of taking
Hollywood to the deserts of Las Vegas and creating a “paradise”—as Sam calls
it upon his arrival in the 70s. But what is left of Sam and the mob after the new
entertainment industry takes over, like what is left of Hollywood after television
and video, is only a sad shadow of their former selves. Sam is still making
money for the mob, but now he does it in an antiseptic room surrounded by
television screens flickering with images bounced off of a satellite—some “eye
above the sky.” Unlike Nicky, he has survived—^brains win out over brawn. But
this is clearly Pyrrhic, for the mob’s tragi-comic struggles have only cleared the
way for its takeover by the corporation—that junk-bond financed reconstruction
of Las Vegas wliich replaces the mob’s primitive and inefficient accumulation
of capital with a cold and anonymous drive for profits that can knock down
buildings as though they were made of straw.^ The film’s ending suggests the
corporation’s legal rip off of the consumer with their totalitarian dreams of
Disneyfied fim is more frightening than the mob’s violence and sale of sin.
One wonders how much Casino'^ depiction of the demise of gangster
Vegas (with its connection to an older Hollywood) is motivated by Barry
Levinson’s Bugsy which came out only three years earlier. Scorses