World Film Locations: Las Vegas

Marcelline Block

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781841505886
• eBook ISBN: 9781841505909
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Sin and redemption. The ridiculous and the sublime. The carnivalesque excess of the Strip and the barrenness of the desert surrounding the city. Visited by millions of fortune seekers—and starry-eyed lovers—each year, Las Vegas is a city with as many apparent contradictions as Elvis impersonators, and this complexity is reflected in the diversity of films that have been shot on location there. 

A copiously illustrated retrospective of Vegas's appearances on the big screen, this new volume in IntellectÆsWorld Film Locations series presents synopses of scenes from a broad selection of films—from big-budget blockbusters like Oceans 11 to acclaimed classics Rain Man, Casino, and The Godfather to cult favorites like Showgirls and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Insightful essays throughout explore a range of topics, including the Rat Pack's Las Vegas, the cinematized Strip, Las Vegas as a frequent backdrop for science fiction, and the various film portrayals of iconic pop-cultural figures like Elvis and Frank Sinatra. Rounding out this information are film stills juxtaposed with photographs of the locations as they appear today.

World Film Locations: Las Vegas goes beyond the clichés of Sin City to examine what Hal Rothman and Mike Davis called 'the grit beneath the glitter', thus providing an opportunity to find out more about the unique position Vegas occupies in the popular imagination.

FEAR AND LOATHING Las Vegas and the Cinema of American Excess

IN THE 1998 FILM Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - directed by Terry Gilliam - the city itself barely appears, present instead mostly as a concept. The film is an adaptation of the book by Hunter S. Thompson, known for his unique brand of left-wing investigative writing which he called ‘Gonzo’ journalism. The story typically mixed his real-life trip to Las Vegas, in the aftermath of his investigation into the shooting of Mexican-American television journalist Rubén Salazar, with fictional elements. Gilliam’s adaptation stars Johnny Depp as Thompson’s alter ego Raoul Duke, alternately consuming endless quantities of mind-altering substances and writing feverishly on his beat-up old typewriter.

Las Vegas does appear of course, now and again, as Duke and his companion Gonzo (Benicio Del Toro) drive through the main drag, or arrive at various hotels waiting to be trashed in their drug-hazed binges. But as a concept it is the target of Thompson’s ‘fear and loathing’ - it represents what he hates most in American society, the free enterprise system, which he saw as the ‘single greatest evil in the history of human savagery’. In dramatic terms, however, we encounter fear and loathing mostly as a result of Duke’s drug trips, visualized by Gilliam in quasi-Python style.

In my book The American Cinema of Excess (2009), I introduced the film merely as an exercise in nihilism, and an illustration of Allan Bloom’s dictum that American nihilism is a ‘mood, a mood of moodiness, a vague disquiet. It is nihilism without the abyss’. Bloom thinks that without Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger or Sartre, Americans just can’t do nihilism, and so it degenerates into a kind of empty excess. For sure, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas demonstrates that excess at every turn, in a city devoted to an excess of free enterprise gambling and good-time profligacy. But I would suggest that something more is going on in both the city and the film which have to do with the inverse of fear and the inverse of loathing. A more positive reading of the film - and of the American national character - arises from the observation that the principal characters are in fact fearless and expansive. They don’t fear the law, they don’t fear the consequences of drugs, and they don’t fear excess in everything. Neither does loathing really enter into their world - other than a general rejection of fascism, injustice and hypocrisy - rather, they pursue a Whitmanesque expansiveness and openness.

Opposite Magic Trip / Below Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

The context is a moment in history where Duke is remembering what he calls the ‘high water mark’ of the hippy era. With the release in August 2011 of the film Magic Trip (Alison Ellwood, Alex Gibney), we are all invited to look back to that same period, through the voyage of Ken Kesey’s famous magic bus Further. Kesey - famous for his novel One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) - was, with the other ‘Merry Pranksters’, a key figure of that era, and, in 2005, his son Zane made a 40th anniversary trip in the bus Further. Destination: Las Vegas.

In my mind, the key moment in Fear and Loathing takes place nearly an hour into the film when Duke is reminiscing about the heady days of 1965, days of student protest against the war, days of free love, drugs, and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Duke is in his trashed hotel room, while Gonzo suffers the nightmares of a bad trip in the bathroom. Duke relives his own early drug taking, and the anti-war rallies, intercut with footage of the period. ‘It was madness in any direction’ - Depp’s voice perfectly suited to the narration -’you could strike sparks anywhere’. There was a fantastic universal sense, he reminisces, that whatever they were doing was right. ‘That we were winning… that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil, not in any mean or military sense - we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail.’ They were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. Now, less than five years later, muses Duke as he looks out of his hotel window, ‘you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes, you can almost see the high water mark, that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.’

Thompson loathed Nixon and ‘free-enterprise’ and, as the wave of hippy revolt rolled back and seemingly stayed back, we have all perhaps been asking where the new wave will come from.

Thompson loathed Nixon and ‘free-enterprise’ and, as the wave of hippy revolt rolled back and seemingly stayed back, we have all perhaps been asking where the new wave will ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Copyright
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Las Vegas: City of the Imagination
• Pack Mentality: The Vegas of the Original Ocean’s Eleven
• Electric Dreams: Lighting Up The Strip Sydney Pollack Style
• Fear and Loathing: Las Vegas and the Cinema of American Excess
• Strings Attached: Las Vegas in Science Fiction ‘B’ Movies
• Dream Machine: Las Vegas as Mythical Destination
• Beyond the Strip: Life and Culture on the Outer Limits of ‘Sin City’
• Resources
• Contributor Bios
• Filmography