Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2001 | Page 126
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Popular Culture Review
But why, then, is a space filled with volcanoes, castles, pyramids and
canals American? It is not essentially that these sites and monuments are re-cre
ations and thus not of their original homes. There is less difference between the
Vegas Eiffel Tower and the Parisian Eiffel Tower than one might expect. The North
American version is smaller, yet to scale, it is true —but so what? This is the age of
the postmodern simulacra, the era of lost innocence! Both Eiffel Towers are con
structs, man-made, of steel; both are tourist attractions; both draw people to a
space to generate profit; both are functionless in the sense that their reason for
existing is to be visited (or better yet, our reason for visiting them is because they
exist to be visited). We will not be duped by any fancy metaphysics that appeals to
“originality” or “history,” or to stable identity and meaning across time. Las Ve
gas’ Eiffel Tower is not even really American because it is in Nevada. It is Ameri
can because one can capture it in a look along with a pyramid and a medieval
Castle. Thus is its mode of presentation changed. It is categorical experience — in
the same way we experience the being-together of bread and butter as more than
bread+butter, the Eiffel Tower and a pyramid are more than their conjunction. To
say that I experience buttered bread is not to posit a new ontological object; it is to
note that the objects of consciousness are presented categorically as being together.
The being-together of Paris and Egypt and Venice and England — this is Las
Vegas. And to think that this is not so — to think that the Eiffel Tower can still be
the Eiffel Tower alongside a pyramid, that mere conjunction exists, and that such
conjunction does not alter the conjoined — this is American.1It is the modem
melting pot mentality, a misguided cosmopolitanism that posits identity as a simple
m atter o f choice, ignoring — inevitably — context, community, and the
intersubjective nature of the world we share.
But this is the easy answer. Everyone in Vegas wants easy answers from
the destitute addict who knows the next Keno game will be the one, to the desper
ate academic who comes to town, pen in hand, to bury Caesars’ Palace, not praise
it. How easy it is to dismiss this place when seen from atop the ivory tower: Las
Vegas is a celebration of greed, of excess. The odds are stacked against you, the
mob bodies are stacked a meter deep in the sand, and the showgirls aren’t really
stacked at all (“that’s silicone,” whispers the professor). It’s all true; but it’s all too
easy. There is something special about Las Vegas — something that makes it espe
cially wonderful and especially horrible at the same time. And this dual yet simul
taneous presentation is at the heart of the way the city is experienced. In a certain
sense all tourist cities suffer from some degree of split personality. The more de
voted they are to tourism, the more they lose their original identity which (in theory)
was the reason for tourist interest in the first place. Briavel Holcomb has pointed
out that tourist consumption is unique in that it is the consumer, not the product,
that moves.2 But cities do move in the sense that they are dynamic and malleable;