Madness of crowds: Will Self visits Las Vegas

It's gone family-friendly.

By Will Self Published 29 August 2012

Welcome to family-friendly Vegas. Photograph: Getty Images

I was reading Jean Baudrillard’s meditation on Las Vegas – on an iPhone sitting in a sushi bar in the dead centre of the casino at the Mandalay Bay resort in Las Vegas. “It is in such a universe,” Baudrillard wrote of the contemporary mediatised world, “that what [Paul] Virilio calls the aesthetic of disappearance gathers strength, and that the following begin to appear: fractal objects, fractal forms, fault zones that follow saturation, and thus a process of massive rejection, of the abreaction or stupor of a society purely transparent to itself.

Like the signs in advertising, one is geared down, one becomes transparent or uncountable, one becomes diaphanous or rhizomic to escape the point of inertia – one is placed in orbit, one is plugged in, one is satellised, one is archived – paths cross: there is the sound track, the image track, just as in life there is the work track, the leisure track, the transport track, etc, all enveloped in the advertising track.”

My friend and colleague David Flusfeder has written eloquently for the NS on gambling in Vegas but my journey to the dark heart of the American dream possessed not even the impetus of the adrenalised: I was there because it was the obvious stopover on a family trip back from the wilds of Zion in Utah to our jetting-home point: Los Angeles.

Flusfeder observes that Las Vegas presents the best exemplar of the great democratic denomination of American culture: the dollar. Anyone can lose their shirt in Vegas – so long as they have a shirt to lose. He also points out the strange Manichaeism that invests American debauchery: everyone is entitled to go to Vegas, get drunk and stoned, have commercial sex and gamble – so long as the shit they do stays steaming in the desert, while when they return home they continue to say grace before dinner.

However, in recent years this dichotomisation has been undermined by the drive of the big casino hotels to broaden their market base. Hit hard by the recession, no longer do gamblers flow through the flashing mandibles of the gaming rooms like so many krill being sifted by an avaricious leviathan; and so the monsters of the deep have gone looking for smaller fish to fry. Strolling through the vast halls and Babylonian corridors of the Mandalay Bay, what struck me was not cod-opulence but the complexion of the crowds thronging them.

Men-in-black and ladies-in-couture conventioneers were massing for the evening’s moral turpitude, crepuscular gamblers were a-creeping and demi-prostitutes a-sidling but just as thick on the polished ground were family groups returning from the artificial beach (the vast pool had been closed due to proximate lightning strikes, not even Moe Greene would relish his punters being stir-fried in chlorine). In the teeth of recession a plush room that more than comfortably houses a family of four was going for $200 a night, all in – about £35 a head – so it was cheaper to enjoy all this largesse than it would be to put up at your local bypass-bound Travelodge. On our first trip down from the 15th floor the lift was full of little girls in swimsuits sitting cross-legged in pools of water – clearly they’d been playing in there. Elsewhere stolid Midwestern families sauntered past the blackjack tables as they might stroll past the enclosures in a petting zoo.

What this infusion of genuine – rather than feigned – juvenescence does for Vegas I’m not altogether qualified to assess, but my hunch is that it spells out T-H-E E-N-D, as clearly as the final credits of a major sword-and-sandals motion picture. It wasn’t the public exhibitions of hyenas being induced to rape female slaves that did for the Roman empire – it was the presence of Patrician kiddies in the stands of the Colosseum. There’s something about the mass acknowledgement of transgression as a trans-generational phenomenon that does for a culture. In Vegas I was witnessing Baudrillard’s society that is transparent to itself – and therefore invisible: the point about the children trotting through the casino was that they couldn’t really see it, while the gamblers couldn’t really see them. Both moieties were childlike in their belief that by covering their own eyes they could somehow not be perceived by others.

Baudrillard, who didn’t live to see the final familiarisation of the Vegas mirage, would undoubtedly have appreciated it as the complete confirmation of his view that under conditions of late capitalism the very notion of “the social” becomes a product to be marketed exclusive of any real relations. But then, speaking as rhizome, what would I know: I just eat raw fish and extend my filaments through neon loam.

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19 comments

Wed, 2012-09-05 23:28 — astromancer (not verified)

If American Dreams have a Dark Heart, it is because we still dream. What is the British dream? Knighthood? Social dominance with the power to humiliate others? From your fiction, drama, TV, and Films, I would suggest I've got that right. Greed, if only for security and comfort, may be a sin, but our sins are based on the suffering of others. The British dream of social power and the freedom to humiliate requires losers and sufferers. Americans just want the pleasures of wealth (even if it is only security) for themselves, they aren't concered to see others suffer.

Who can say the suffering of others would be required anyway. But the suffering of others isn't the goal of the American Dream. For the British Dream, the suffering of others is the whole point.

Wed, 2012-09-05 23:27 — astromancer (not verified)

Who can say the suffering of others would be required anyway. But the suffering of others isn't the goal of the American Dream. For the British Dream, the suffering of others is the whole point.

Fri, 2012-09-07 03:19 — Craig H (not verified)

You wear Willy Loman's American Dream blinkers - which he finally removed, while you aren't even aware they exist, in typical USA mode. Insular ignorance is your condom. I am certain you're not a member of one of the USA's first peoples. Nor Vietnamese, nor Cambodian, nor El Salvadorian, nor Nicaraguan, nor Chilean, nor Iraqi, nor an Afghan, nor Iranian, nor in fact from the other 61 countries that you've humiliated, bombed, murdered the citizens of, and generally intervened in since world war two. The truth is the USA is the most rapacious, greedy, ideological, murderous, and generally criminal country since ... well since the UK and other European colonial entities were in the business.

Sat, 2012-09-08 15:45 — John Cheese (not verified)

Blah, blah, blah, bad ole USA. You might want to do a little history reading. Russian Man of Steel-Stalin, purges worst of last century, multi-millions gone.
War crimes- Start in the pacific with Japan against the Chinese. Japs did some pretty awful stuff. Try just WW2, 41-45, what we recognize. Goes back even farther than that. Cambodian Pol Pot/Khmer Rouge- took out 21% of Cambodian population- about 2.5 million...
German Nazi atrocities goes without saying, and all over Europe, not just the camps...heck, the cartels are even skinning poor Mexicans right now in Veracruz, 470 miles from our southern border. Grab Alec Baldwin & feel free to relocate...

Thu, 2012-09-06 10:45 — anon3 (not verified)

Interesting argument, but surely social even ritual humiliation is an American failing too, in a country so economically and culturally divided, cliques rule, and the way to prove belonging appears to exclude, and often definitely, pointedly and ritually exclude, or include. just thinking that the million high school/college films tell us as much.

Wed, 2012-09-05 20:04 — Fred Garvin (not verified)

You need to celebrate your diversity!

Wed, 2012-09-05 20:00 — anon3 (not verified)

So you liked it then?

Wed, 2012-09-05 16:37 — John Cheese (not verified)

If a Royal craps in Vegas & no one sees it, did it really happen?

Wed, 2012-09-05 11:11 — hugh markey (not verified)

Vegas is an illusion? Marxism?
Let's deal with the first example and leave Marxism to history. First - the suckers have to be there. Law of Supply and Demand. Yes, sir - Boulder Dam workers and GI money: Bugsy and the Mob recognised a gold mine when they saw it. Klondike and CaliforNIA fer example. Just look at the Internet for God's Sake. You don't need astrophysicist grey matter to see the bl**** obvious. With any gold rush you need what? Gambling and Girls. And what did the mobsters do - supply. Simple economics, fellas/marks/suckers/johns.
And we mustn't forgot how important, historically speaking that is, Moe Greene was in the scheme of things.
Sonny Liston showed Moe a clenched fist, in a friendly sort of way of course and by way of introduction, and Moe went bananas. Treatened to have the World Champ rubbed out for this display of 'lese majeste'. Would you believe?
And China. Banker for Las Vegas - would you believe.

Sure-thing