Bruce Begout. Translated by Liz Heron. Zeropolis: The Experience of Las Vegas. London: Reaktion Books, 2003. Softcover, 126 pp, lots of pictures.
They used to say that Las Vegas is where show business careers go to die. Reading this book, I think that we can now say that it’s where philosophers go to make no sense.
This shortish meditation on the “Vegas experience” suffers from a willful lack of focus and thoughtfulness. The book’s most obvious flaw is that the author’s goal is to figure out what “Las Vegas” actively does to people. “Las Vegas makes fun of everything. It makes every reality an object of mockery….it uncovers the primeval scene of society: the impossibility of believing in the truth of the other” (13).
My snappy answer to Begout is that Las Vegas is an inanimate collection of asphalt, concrete, and building ordinances. It doesn’t “do” anything any more than Cleveland, or Cardiff, or Amiens (Begout’s usual stomping grounds) does. Certainly people in Las Vegas do things: casino executives try to maximize their RevPAR and slot win, players try to hit a royal flush, and gourmands go all in at the buffet. But it is impossible for the city itself, which is either a physical object or an abstraction, to perform actions. But Begout spends page after page treading water with this kind of superficial analysis that, frankly, I wouldn’t accept from a freshman.
Begout’s chief conceit is that Las Vegas is “Zeropolis,” a city whose “urbanity is nothingness” (121). If that’s the case, I’d like a full refund of my real estate taxes, and the cops and firefighters are probably wondering why they’ve been getting paid to watch over “nothingness” all these years.
Las Vegas is a real place. Just ask any of us who live here. We’ve got very real lives, and aspirations, and failures, and Begout’s vapid reductionism is as hurtful as it is inane. Begout’s failure to accept Las Vegas as a city built and inhabited by real people leads him to some strange twists, such as, “The unknown artists who created the giant signs of the Sands, the Sahara, and the Stardust are called Hermon Boernge, Jack Larsen, and Kermit Wayne” (60). What? If we know their names, they are, by definition, not “unknown.” if Begout’s point is that the trio of artists are unappreciated, that line should read, “A mostly-unheralded group of neon artists, Hermon Boernge, Jack Larsen, and Kermit Wayne, created the trademark giant signs of the Sands, the Sahara, and the Stardust.” It’s evidence of poor writing and sloppy thinking that Begout resorts to such byzantine formulations to make his point.
The author makes one interesting point, that someday museums will collect Las Vegas artifacts just as assiduously as they currently collect paintings by the Dutch masters or pre-Columbian Incan engravings. It’s a throwaway observation, and one that, upon reflection, isn’t true: by the time the intellectuals develop an appreciation for the Las Vegas of Tom Wolfe and Robert Venturi, it won’t be there anymore. It’s already not there anymore. We’ll have pictures and prose, and a few scattered signs and matchbooks. But the buildings themselves will be long gone.
Begout has a general contempt for humanity and a particular loathing for Americans, as shown by his description of the crowd at Caesars Palace:” poverty-stricken pensioners; obese and dowdily dressed black matrons; southern white trash there to gamble away their social security cheques; large parties of convention participants who have flown in to do some slumming on the cheap, etc.) 27). He genuinely does not like people, and you almost feel sorry for him as he drives his car down the Strip, watching the buildings pass by, aching for some human contact. Las Vegas, Begout says, amounts to “practically nothing in anyone’s life,” and he feels it’s an apposite utopia for us ignorant US Americans.
Reading this book, I kept waiting for Begout to deliver some original insight gained from his time in Las Vegas, or at least to get out and talk to someone. It sounds most of his time here alone in his room, reading Baudrillard and feeling uninspired, or cruising the streets in a rental car. He observes, but doesn’t interact. This wouldn’t be a problem, but he claims with great authority to reveal the soul of Las Vegas, and it’s clear that he doesn’t have the slightest idea about how the city really works. He knowingly tells us that “the ideal Las Vegas customer resembles Raymond, an engineer from Phoenix and an unrepentant gambler, still sitting at a craps table at half past three in the morning,” then goes on to blockquote Tom Wolfe’s description of Raymond, first published in 1964! (51) One of the characteristics of Las Vegas is that it changes quickly, so using forty-year old borrowed reportage hardly esteems Begout as a topical commentator.
Nor does the author let the facts get in his way: one page 38, for example, he says that there is gambling in the “toilets” at McCarran airport. Yes, there are slots at the airport, but last time I check, nobody’s installed them in the bathrooms yet. Unless Begout was talking about some Larry Craig-type antics, which is probably a whole other book in and of itself. As a result, Zeropolis is glib without being pithy. It’s mostly stuff that Begout’s read about Las Vegas glued together with unoriginal generic “Vegas is bad” musings–whether it’s by design or by accident, there’s no “experience” in this book about the “Las Vegas experience.”
To make matters, worse, either Begout’s original prose was hideous or he’s suffered from a gruesome translation. How else to explain text like, “With its thousands of fitful garish glitterings, it illuminates the celestial vault, which puts on a pallid show by comparison. (17)”. Now that’s mildly amusing if you imagine it being read by Jean Girard or spoken as a piece of linking narration in a Sandy Frank movie, but it’s impossible to take it seriously.
