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from the sky. The mythic reminder is complete here of human frailty and
vulnerability, victims rather than dominators of the fates. From the
contortionist’s back that doesn’t break to the muscleman ^\4io horizontally
balances himself on one hand comes the message that all human striving, the
fate of the individual human condition, is to defy the gods.
According to Horkheimer and Adorno, magic and art provide a direct
conduit to forces that are forcefully relegated to opacity within the bourgeois
world (14). The forces are therefore veiled in a seductive state whose power is
masked and never demythologized. That is just the scenario of entertainment in
Las Vegas, where its creators construct ever more seductive masks. Both magic
and art are simultaneously ritual proof of the existence of primal forces, and they
provide the reassurance that human effort can still control those forces. Magic
and seduction in Las Vegas enact the poetics of domination in countless
individual stories.
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Roberta Sabbath
Works Cited
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CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.
Pile, Steve. “Sleepwalking in the Modem City: Walter Benjamin and Sigmund Freud in
the World o f Dreams.” A Companion to the City. Ed Gary Bridge and Sophie
Watson. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
“Pulcinella.” La Commedia dell Arte. (pars. 2). September 12,2004.
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Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.