The Las Vegas Post

I’m writing this upon my return from Las Vegas, but as I reflect on the experience through the lens of semiotics, I’m faced with a pronounced difficulty. In this course, we’re concerned mostly with denaturalizing signs—with reading and deconstructing the texts, ideologies, and myths embedded in our surrounding world. But having been to Vegas twice, I’m surprised by the extent to which the city denaturalizes itself. There isn’t so much as a thin veneer of honesty overlaid upon it—the strip revels in and announces its artificiality—people travel there less to be, and more to escape their everyday being. Yet even as I announce these facts, I find them surprisingly untroubling. At the very least, Vegas represents itself as it is—pure veneer, utterly constructed.

My experience in Vegas started on Fremont street, where I stayed at the Vegas Club. Fremont street—also known as old downtown—is in many ways set in opposition to the more famous strip. Whereas the latter’s development is on an inhuman scale (any one of the large casinos is about the size of a NYC block), one can traverse from one end of Fremont to the other in about thirty minutes—and pass around a dozen or so casinos along the way. In contrast to the celebration of wealth in new Vegas, on Freemont street neon signs unapologetically entice passerbys with cheap buffets and booze. Posters announce casinos “loose slots” and dirt cheap blackjack tables. Fremont is a relatively more accessible Vegas experience than its more famous cousin.

Despite the charm of Fremont street, one can nonetheless arrive on the more fabled strip by traversing a few miles down Las Vegas Boulevard with its surprising array of wedding chapels, pawn shops, and bail-bond outfits. Yet once one arrives, the strip itself is a little banal. At all hours of the day, a strange mix of characters walks up and down the street carting overpriced liquor. Various nightclubs charge exorbitant fees and play the same top forty music that’s everywhere else. Beneath the glittered facades of the Bellagio and Venetian, homeless people sell water and Mexicans advertise for escort services. It’s all wholesome family fun.

Aside from somewhat crass materialism, there are other interesting elements common both to Fremont Street and the strip. Sex is one of the more prominent of these elements. Dead center on Fremont, you have the unfortunately named “Glitter Gulch” strip club. And at all hours, barely dressed women dance for crowds of middle-aged men and their slightly disgruntled wives. Similarly, the strip is exceedingly proud of its nightlife and unabashedly advertises itself as a good place to hook up. Aside from sex, and unsurprisingly, booze also features prominently in Vegas. This is likely because alcohol facilitates a casual disregard both for STD’s and for losing one’s shirt.

One might wonder why Vegas is a vacation destination at all—couples and families go there. But alongside the cities admittedly awesome scuzziness, there’s a peculiar beauty to the nature of its myth. Though one can rip on venues like Caesars for their faux marble and chimerical displays of wealth, it’s remarkable that these venues exist at all—in the middle of an empty desert waste. Vegas is a city that built its fortunes, yet it simply did not have a lot of raw material to work with. Vegas constructed itself upon its myth—the city is artificial, yet it announces this fact—it revels in at the same time that it believes its mythologizing. Though Vegas is steeped in sex, booze, and artificial wealth, it at least doesn’t pretend that things are otherwise. There’s a chutzpah to the city which I admire.

Vegas is a somewhat difficult city to write about, much less deconstruct, simply because the place is so excruciatingly obvious. The place lacks subtlety. I nonetheless write about Vegas because it raises a question that’s of at least some interest to the study of semiotics and to myself. I’m untroubled by, or even love, Vegas and its materialism, strange sexuality, and escape from reality. But I love Vegas despite these elements—which I sometimes find objectionable elsewhere—simply because it announces them so cleanly. I appreciate the fact that Vegas, by being so extreme, make visible those tropes which underlay so much of our culture. The negativity that surrounds us simply loses its power once it becomes visible. In this way, Vegas is simultaneously able to embrace cartoonish materialism and also to offer an escape from it.

There’s a strange double-movement to Vegas. By being so obvious, the city lies suspended between myth and myth’s dissolution.