Pileggi was much luckier than most of the writers who have preceded him. He nailed a period in Las Vegas history without once falling prey to the common temptation to write the definitive book about the city. So, while “Casino” is a merely excellent book when judged by the usual literary standards, by the standards that apply to books about Vegas it’s a masterpiece.
No other city, no subject, is quite so un-congenial to artistic interpretation. Visual artists take a pass on the place and the better musicians just stop long enough to play the gig and pocket a check before heading on down the highway. For writers and moviemakers, the city operates like some mythical siren, luring otherwise sensible authors onto the rocks of first-person pomposities and seducing moviemakers into forgetting where their talents lie. The good writing about Vegas occupies a very short shelf. There is John Gregory Dunne’s “Vegas,” Michael Herr and Guy Peellaert’s “The Big Room,” Larry McMurtry’s “The Desert Rose” and a few essays by Tom Wolfe, A. J. Liebling and Joan Didion. More precisely, nearly all the good writing about the place can be contained in 358 pages, the length of the handy new anthology “Literary Las Vegas.”
The shelf of good movies on the subject is no shelf at all. Bits and pieces of some very good films (“The Godfather,” “Lost in America,” “Get Shorty”) take place in Vegas, but for every good movie set there (“Honeymoon in Vegas”), there’s a fisfful of stinkers (“One From the Heart,” “The Only Game in Town,” “Amazing Colossal Man”). Despite this jinx, Las Vegas keeps luring them. Every A-list director, from Francis Ford Coppola to Martin Scorsese, seems compelled to take his crack. This fall no fewer than three movies use Vegas as their setting, including Scorsese’s forthcoming “Casino,” his much anticipated film version of Pileggi’s book. Of the two movies that have opened already, “Showgirls” is like an old Elvis movie without Elvis, and “Leaving Las Vegas” is so unremittingly bleak that you wonder why anyone would go there, even to drink himself to death, which is all the protagonist has in mind.
If Vegas is a tough town for artists, they can certainly respond in kind. In fact, they sound like disenchanted lovers. Before he went there to make “Leaving Las Vegas,” Mike Figgis says, “I thought there’d be an electricity in the air, a kind of glamour–albeit tough- a cool, sexy kind of glamour.” Instead, all he found were “people walking around looking miserable, playing slot machines. Not even expecting to make any money or win the jackpot or anything, just kind of feeling that they have to go through this ritual called Las Vegas.” James Toback, who wrote the script for “Bugsy” (while staying in the Bugsy Suite at the Flamingo, the very hotel-much remodeled–that Bugsy Siegel built), says simply, “I loathe Las Vegas. It’s a totally disgusting and despicable and revolting city.” That aside, “it’s a good place to locate a character. It forces people to reveal themselves, because it exists to stop people of what they have.” Scorsese, who shot a lot of his new movie inside an actual working casino, also found the patrons oddly inspiring-and more than a little frightening. It took him two days just to get used to the infernal din on the casino floor. “The noise around you builds and builds, machines, people,” he observed. “It was really scary.”
Las Vegas can be scary. And it’s alien territory. As the comedienne Rita Rudner has pointed out, wherever you’re from, Vegas is the opposite of that. But this can be a blessing, too. Pileggi calls it “a wonderful city of redemption, wiseguy redemption. Everybody’s been out there an hour and a half. There’re no Cabots or Lodges. It’s a city without a past for people who want to forget theirs.” Or as Dave Hickey, professor of art criticism and theory, at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, puts it, “This is the one place where you can come and everybody gets treated the same. Money doesn’t mean anything here, in the sense that money buys virtue everywhere else in America. All it is here is just shit you gamble with, and that really changes the tone of the city.”
Hickey does not deny that there is “a very dark edge” to Las Vegas. But he contends that American artists, writers and moviemakers consistently misinterpret what they see when they visit the place. “Vegas is a wonderful lens through which to see America, if you want to understand the puritanical nature of America,” he says. “But America isn’t a very good lens through which to see Vegas, because this is the sort of anti-America. The rest of America is watching everything but your hands. Here we just watch your hands. We don’t care what you’re thinking or how you’re dressed.”
Las Vegas–a casteless city, a city where they pump oxygen into the casinos to keep things lively, where you can go into a restaurant at 4 in the morning and the waitress asks you if you want breakfast, lunch or dinner. It’s the only desert city with more than three dozen tanning salons and about the only place in the world where, as Hickey points out, “the architecture tries to look less big than it is, because the architecture here is not to remind you of the power of something.” It is not, in other words, a city conducive to what we are accustomed to think of as art. When people mention their favorite books or movies (Toback likes “The Only Game in Town”; Scorsese prefers “Ocean’s 11”), they just sound like guilty pleasures. If anyone-and it would probably have to be someone who lived there-ever did catch the real Vegas in a book or a movie, the rest of us might like it. We might even understand it. But don’t bet on it.
