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Popular Culture Review
erupting volcanoes must compete with merchandise on the home shopping
channel, nature is degraded or even lost. Through Jack’s example, however, the
film holds out the hope that television’s new vis ual juxtapositions will cast
unexpected light and provoke unexpected responses.
Jack’s most unexpected response comes through an unlikely deus ex
machina—an airplane filled with members of the Utah chapter of the Flying
Elvises on their way to Las Vegas.
By the time they reach their destination. Jack, now dressed in the
standard uniform of the Elvis impersonators—^the King’s wiiite, high-collared
jumpsuit—joins them as they skydive into an audience eagerly awaiting these
new gods of camivalesque simulation. Jack’s “leap of faith” works on two levels
at the same time as it unites those two levels: most obviously, it represents the
necessary leap of faith that Jack needs to make in order to marry Betsy; but it
also represents Jack’s faith in the humanity of our models or simulacra, no
matter how degraded the original (Elvis) or how ludicrous the copies (Elvis
impersonators).
A complaint sometimes heard about Casino is that the trio of Martin
Scorsese, Robert DeNiro, and Joe Pesci are covering ground they already went
over in Goodfellas, But this misses the importance of Las Vegas as the setting
for the mobsters’ self-destructive violence. The world of Las Vegas and its
casinos provides Scorsese with issues that are absent from the New York setting
of Goodfellas. Most notably, there is the presence of the simulacrum in Casino,
and, as in Leaving Las Vegas, it is linked to a pathological masculinity
transfixed by the spectacle of femininity. This connection is made wiien the
movie’s central narrator, Sam “Ace” Rothstein (Robert DeNiro), ^\ilo is running
the casino for the mob bosses back in Kansas City, explains the casino’s
network of visual surveillance. The symphony of ocular paranoia is overseen by
a rotating video camera Sam calls “the eye in the sky watching all of us.”
Through this video camera he catches his first sight of the spectacular Ginger
(Sharon Stone), and the movie’s love plot commences.
The love object as creation of an inhuman eye goes a step further than
Leaving Las Vegas where Sera could step out of the video camera’s picture
frame even though she could not escape its violence. In Casino, one has to
wonder if the visual network leaves room for escape. As in real life, the film’s
visual relationships are so pervasive and complex that they are easy to overlook.
Radiating outward from the casino’s panopticon you have the mob bosses
sending out their soldiers to “keep an eye on” their money or the people
handling it. In fact, this is the basis of Sam’s friendship with the homicidal
Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci). Nicky is given the responsibility of watching Sam,
the “golden Jew” as Nicky calls him, creating an odd couple mix of mobster
“brain” and “muscle.” Just as Sam’s work for the mob involves a tight network
of visual checks, Nicky’s strong-arm and robbery operations involve a small