Learning From Las Vegas
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audience’s belief in true love, and the romantic view of Siegel as some sort of
man ahead of his time. In Casino, on the other hand, the gesture of extraordinary
trust sets in motion a corrosive exposure of Sam and Ginger and their illusions
as the two struggle for the keys to the safety deposit box. During the struggle
Sam grows meaner, more manipulative and petty, v ^ le Ginger’s desperation
makes her alternately vicious and pathetic. However, as Sam himself points out.
Ginger, despite all her threats, never turns him over to the FBI. So, in the end,
she stands by her man, but with ironies that are absent or reassuringly resolved
in the love plot of Bugsy.
Also, the last images we get of the two female leads are important
signals in films that put such emphasis on the power of feminine appearance or
spectacle. For three hours we watch the gradual disintegration of Ginger from a
confident, eye-catching hustler into an emotionally and physically bruised drug
abuser. Nonetheless, the final glimpse of her comes as a painful shock ^\ilen she
overdoses in a seedy motel. It is as though Scorsese sets up the spectacular
female only to slowly unmask her, revealing the face of death underneath. In
contrast, the last we see of Hill takes place in the monument named after her, the
Flamingo. When she hears the news of Siegel’s death. Hill walks out into a
strong desert wind blowing back her glamorous dress and turning her into a
tragically beautiful Greek statue. The scene cuts to black, against wiiich a
postscript tells us she commits suicide in Austria. Under the cover of romantic
darkness her beauty is preserved and the historical record of her time after
Siegel’s death—what Janet Maslin refers to as Hill’s “long, shady career”—
y
disappears (12).
All of the films discussed thus far are postmodern in the sense that they
are within the prevailing discourse of postmodernism understood as what
Jameson calls the “cultural dominant of the logic of late c^italism ” {Reader
85). Furthermore, their setting in Las Vegas—for many the quintessential
expression of postmodern culture—evokes questions about postmodernism
thematically if not formally. But Ter '