Viva Las Vegas
It's the gaudiest mirage in America, a city with little sense of shame. Why is it that we love this town so?
By RICHARD CORLISS Las Vegas

Let's just say it: Las Vegas is the great American fictional city. It's a page-turning novel told in a million lives and 100,000 hotel rooms; an epic movie with casino chips for special effects; a tragedy of addiction and a burlesque with the smoothest showgirls around. It's the town that attracted James Bond, Michael Corleone, Beavis & Butt-head. It's where Robert Redford offered a million bucks for a night with Demi Moore, where Rain Man and Starman got Lost in America. Is Vegas only a movie, a living novel? Does the town even exist? Yes, inside the hopes and greed and need for excess that define us all at our most reckless, most alive moments.

The trick of being a great American city, at the end of this century of electronic media, is to match muscle with myth, power with showbiz. New York has the concrete grandeur and Broadway, Los Angeles the Pacific and Hollywood. (Sorry, Chicago, you've got big shoulders but plain features. Too bad, Houston, you're a launch pad with too much air-conditioning.) Sometimes showbiz is all a city needs. Orlando has Disney dream parks built over a swamp, and Las Vegas is a giant id sprouting from a dry groin--the gaudiest mirage that ever gushed, geyser-like, from the desert.

Or is desert quite the word? You needn't gaze down from the revolving tower atop the Stratosphere hotel (where a roller coaster winds around the spaceship-shaped aerie) to see that this stretch of Nevada is pretty damn ugly: infinities, in every direction, of dry, brownish-gray earth that is too bland to be called dirt, too soiled to be called soil. The carcasses of extraterrestrials are supposed to be housed at Area 51, the famously obscure military installation nearby. But, really, why would aliens want to land here anyway? Not for the scenic majesty. Just maybe, because Las Vegas is near: for the love of the game.

Vegas' bounty and challenge is to be all things to a certain kind of person: a childlike adult with too much money, itching for risk and sensory overload. It's not enough that the New York-New York hotel evokes Manhattan's skyline in its exterior silhouette; it must have (of course) a Coney Island roller coaster one floor above the casino. Visitors stand in line for an hour anticipating their two-minute thrill, even as they stay all night at the craps table, slouched over their ever-smaller pile of chips, still waiting for the salvation of seven. Ambition and sensation are the twin signposts at the last American frontier, and Vegas is their crossroads.

The American dream--to get rich quick or have fun failing--is contagious. It lures the wealthy from Europe, Latin America and especially Asia; the formal parties that opened Bellagio had a nice splash of Chinese and Japanese guests. These folks, otherwise sensible, cling to one equation. Go to O, the amazing waterworks show at Bellagio. and you may be culturally enriched, but you will surely be $100 poorer. Gambling is the only night out that offers the hope of returning your investment. Ah, hope--it's the ultimate mirage in this Wild West town. You can ride the bucking bronco of probability for only so long. You throw the dice but, eventually, the dice will throw you.

PAGE 1  |  2