Russell Belk, University of Utah

Dateline Las Vegas. Megacorp recently announced plans for a new, entirely below ground, hotel/casino/theme park here to be called "Hell." Having already themed Pharonic Egypt, the Roman Empire, Caribbean Pirates, South Sea Volcanic Isles, the Land of Oz, New York City, Paris, Venice, Monte Carlo, medieval castles, and other exotic locales and eras, it seemed only a matter of time before someone in Las Vegas stumbled onto Hell. The resort ties in nicely with the city's annual Helldorado celebration as well as long-time recognition that this is a city that caters to those favorite mortal sins of greed, lust, drunkenness, debauchery, and bad taste. With the catchy ad slogans Megacorp is already trumpeting -- "Go to Hell," "You=ll be Dying to Get There," "The Devil Made Me Do It," and ADamned Good Fun@ -- Hell seems destined to become the latest and greatest attraction in the city of excess. With Hell=s promised spectacle of ever-flaming fire and brimstone, the Mirage's periodically erupting volcano is likely to seem tame. Planned theme rides like The Drop of Doom, From Here to Eternity, and The Bottomless Pit promise to offer much more profound and frightening adventures than the roller coasters and log flumes of MGM Grand Adventure, Circus Circus's Grand Slam Canyon Adventuredome, New York New York, and the Statosphere. What's a wild wave pool when you can swim in boiling oil? What's a barge on the Nile when you can be ferried across the River Styx by Charon? And what=s gambling for money when you can play AYou bet Your Life@? If the Secrets of the Luxor Pyramid Trilogy appeals to those fascinated with New Age occultism, imagine the Satanic possibilities of titillation, sadism, and torture in Hell. Demonic and devilishly costumed employees will be fittingly called the croupiers from Hell, the cocktail waitresses from Hell, the pit bosses from Hell, and so on. The new resort=s president is now being addressed as His Royal Satanic Majesty. And to attract aging baby boomers, Megacorp has already signed Mick Jagger to play the big doom doing ASympathy for the Devil,@ along with warm-up acts Kiss (AHotter than Hell@) and Meatloaf (ABat out of Hell@), while a succession of heavy metal bands will appear as lounge acts. It goes without saying that the resort=s restaurants will feature flame-broiled dinners, deviled eggs, devils food cake, and other demonic delights. A partial list of shops, entertainments, and restaurants in the resort's attached shopping arcade includes Needful Things, Souls on Fire Discotheque, Hellmark Cards, Save My Sole Shoes, Rosemary's Baby Shop, Devil May Care Clothing, Hellraiser's Bar, Beetlejuice Julius, Paradise Lost luggage, Inferno Hot Tubs, S&M Candies, Purgatory Pete=s Pets, Club Limbo, Death Watch Dinner Theater (featuring the "Corpses on Parade" musical revue), Hell's Angels Insignia Wear, the Faustus Follies, Hard Rock and a Hot Place, and Beelzebubba=s Soul Food. In the future when Las Vegas is rumored to have underworld connections, it is likely to have a whole different meaning.

I read the preceding paragraph to a doctoral student and a faculty colleague after explaining that it was the start of a paper on Las Vegas and that I felt certain they would get the drift as I read. At the conclusion they looked at me perfectly seriously and asked when the new resort would open. Satire is difficult in Las Vegas because the resorts of the city are already so preposterous that they themselves are giant farces. Gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson (1971) once wrote that: "This is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted." He also suggested that Circus Circus is what we all would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. But today it would not be surprising to learn of a Vegas resort called the Third Reich. It is more like the clowns have won the war, except that the spoofs and fantasylands are not so much seltzer-bottle/pie-in-the face buffoonery as they are calculated corporate efforts to separate people from their money.

Together, the Las Vegas theme resort casinos at the turn of the century are apt to leave us with the impression that we have just stepped into a three-dimensional television set with a wild agenda of disparate programming. It is the impression that has been called kaleidoscopic (Baudrillard 1988) -- an impression specifically cultivated by theme parks, television, and shopping malls. As Kowinski (1985) has observed:

Langman (1992) takes this argument further and suggests that beyond simple kaleidoscopic patterns there are often contradictions in the mall that we have learned to ignore:

Theme parks like Disneyland where Fantasyland, Frontierland, Adventureland, Mainstreet U.S.A., the Matterhorn, Pirates of the Caribbean, and the Jungle Cruise all abut one another, are a further preparation for the improbably kaleidoscopic nature of Vegas. As Jillette (1999) observes, there are nevertheless some key differences between Disney parks and Las Vegas:

Nuttiness it may be, but Las Vegas sells. There is something that attracts us here.

As Hess (1993) observes, both Disney and Las Vegas celebrate stylized versions of long-standing myths of the Western World (the exotic savage, knightly chivalry, winning the West, fabulous riches, utopian futures, and far away times and places), although unlike Disney, the casino resorts were the product of corporate competition for the next big thing, rather than emerging from a coordinated master plan. Las Vegas is also a compressed version of the package tour of 10 countries in 12 days. The package tour provides its mythic kaleidoscope of people, places, and things by theming countries through stylistic stereotypes:

Las Vegas, theme parks, and some shopping malls offer similarly themed pseudo-locales. And the playful consumption mode in which we experience such themed places been labeled post-tourism or post-shopping (Urry 1990; Featherstone 1991). Post-tourism is a playful sampling of the world with knowing recognition that the spectacle has been staged as a performance. Post-shopping is well illustrated by the film Scenes from a Mall (Simon 1991), in which Nick Fifer (Woody Allen) and his wife Deborah Finegold-Fifer (Bette Middler) spend an Christmas season afternoon at a Los Angeles area shopping mall (Beverly Center). During their visit they experience a magician, a mime, a strolling barbershop quartet of carolers in Dickensian dress, black rappers doing Christmas rap songs, a mariachi band in sombreros and serapes, and a Shanghai balancing act (see Belk and Bryce 1993). They also see an Indian movie (Mira Nair's Salaam Bombay), consume frozen yogurt at a snack bar, sushi served by kimono-clad "Japanese" waitresses, margaritas at a Mexican cantina, and champagne and caviar in a French cabaret. While at the mall they also buy an antique English picture frame, an Italian sport coat, and an Australian surfboard. It is no wonder that we do not feel too jarred in Las Vegas when we take the light rail connecting the Polynesian Mirage resort with its sharks, white tigers, and volcano to the adjacent Treasure Island resort with its Caribbean Pirates who sink a British naval frigate every 90 minutes following a fierce saber, musket, and cannon battle in the artificial lagoon.

The shopping malls that Las Vegas most closely resembles are the megamalls -- thus far the West Edmonton Mall in Alberta and the Mall of the Americas in Minnesota. With the many themed portions of the West Edmonton Mall, Hopkins (1990) suggested,

That everything includes submarine rides, a walk-through aquarium with sharks and sting rays, a wave pool, an ice skating and hockey rink, the world's largest indoor amusement park, an 18-hole Pebble Beach miniature golf course, Europa Boulevard with glass-domed arcade, a full-sized Spanish galleon, a trained dolphin show, the fantasyland hotel, and more. In fact there is a high degree of overlap and similarity in the simulated places of Las Vegas and the West Edmonton Mall, as well as in the amusement park entertainment offerings at each. The same games, rides, souvenirs, virtual reality video arcades, and carnival booths (ranging from the old knock-the- bottles-down to the new morph-your-face-onto-the-cover-of-a-magazine) abound in both. In each case those stepping off the thrill rides are offered an opportunity to buy a photo of themselves at the moment of greatest terror. The boundary between mall and gambling mecca is further effaced by the casino located in the West Edmonton Mall and the casino-sponsored learn-to-gamble storefront in the Mall of the Americas. Nor is it much of a stretch of the imagination to see Rodeo Drive (the one in Beverly Hills), Bourbon Street (the one in New Orleans), Venice Beach, Branson, Brimfield, Mystic Seaport, or a growing number of similar entertainment cum shopping meccas as revitalizing the medieval carnival in the same way that the megamalls, theme parks, and Las Vegas do. World=s Fairs have done this for almost a century and a half and periodic local fairs, festivals, and celebrations around the world perpetuate a far older tradition of consumption carnivals. But of all of these, Las Vegas in the 1990s is the most spectacularly successful, having made the city the fastest growing in the United States, with more hotel rooms than any city in the world. The 1994 population reached one million with two million now predicted by 2005 (Newcott 1996).

Both in light of its economic success and because it seems a prototype for future tourism, shopping, and entertainment, Las Vegas deserves more detailed analysis. While some aspects of the Las Vegas phenomenon have been usefully addressed under the banner of postmodernism (e.g., by Baudrillard, Debord, Eco, Featherstone, and Urry -- see Gottschalk 1995 for a summary), none of these fully addresses the farcical aspects of Las Vegas that I believe may account for its spectacular consumer success (rather than simply its marketing spectacle). Furthermore, I am not convinced that the consumer phenomenon of Las Vegas is all that new. Besides the medieval carnivalesque roots alluded to above, the beguiling offerings of the historic peddler contain a number of similar elements of magic, seduction, and the promise of something marvelously different from normal and perhaps able to transform our lives totally (see Belk 1997). Lears (1989) notes the peddler's skillful theatricality and suggests that:

It is no coincidence that Las Vegas offers the largest concentration of magic acts in the world. Like the casinos, they offer alluring allusions that make something out of nothing and transform one thing into another. These are our sources of contact with the miraculous.

Before discussing my interpretations of Las Vegas's consumer appeal further, I should disclose something of my "personal equation" as it relates to this place. My first contact with Las Vegas was on a family vacation by automobile when I was 9. The year was 1954 and my parents, my younger brother, and I were on our way from the Midwest to an ultimate destination of Disneyland. Crossing the dessert without air-conditioning made the motel swimming pools of Las Vegas appear as refreshing as the oasis after which the city was named (Las Vegas: "the meadows"). There was little of what has since become the strip and most of the action was downtown in "Glitter Gulch." I remember being impressed by the neon, lights, and "western" feel of the town. But I longed to get on to the "real west" which was the world of Disney that I had seen televised on the Mickey Mouse Club and the Walt Disney Show. My next encounter with Las Vegas occurred during four visits in the company of my wife's family in the 1970s and early 1980s. Her stepfather was a heavy gambler and as a result we were lodged for free, first in the Hilton and later in the MGM Grand. We were also Acomped@ on food and shows in town. By this time I had a quite negative image of Las Vegas and found the polyester glitz and gold-chain glamour I associated with the place to be far removed from my own aesthetic, athletic, and outdoor consumer lifestyle. To the extent that I gambled, I was definitely a low roller, putting a few coins in the slot machines and video blackjack or video poker. I never won or lost much or got too involved, except as an observer. But I did enjoy some of the entertainments I saw there including a show by George Carlin and a wild New Year=s Eve party with Sister Sledge, and it was nice to go to the short comp lines rather than wait in the regular queues with the unwashed masses. These perks, plus glitzy hotel rooms and abundant food, were attractive, but hardly enough to make me throw over my granola lifestyle for the Las Vegas swinger=s swagger. I was sufficiently fascinated by this contrast to my own consumer lifestyle and the sheer consumption excess of the town, that I had begun to take field notes and presented a few preliminary observations in a conference paper (Belk 1984).

In 1985 I attended the Association for Consumer Research Conference that was held that year in Las Vegas. Besides observing colleagues, going to a Paul Revere and the Raiders revival, and going to conference sessions in the MGM Grand Hotel, a number of us began to plan a cross-country qualitative field project called the Consumer Behavior Odyssey. In 1986, along with Hal Kassarjian, Tom O=Guinn, and Melanie Wallendorf, I spend two days observing and photographing the Las Vegas strip with the resulting Odyssey. This time our home was a recreational vehicle stabled at the Circus Circus RV Park. While not much of Las Vegas made it into the papers, book, and video that resulted from this project, it struck me at the time that the entertainments of the city shared carnivalesque elements with the flea markets in which some of our other work was also taking place. My next visit to Las Vegas was in 1992 when my daughter got married there in the Little Church of the West. The wedding party stayed at the soon to be demolished Dunes Hotel where the reception was also held. My daughter has a good sense of humor, as suggested by the big nose, moustache, and glasses she wore to her graduation at Rutgers. She also seems to share my love-hate camp fascination with Las Vegas. While still in Germany where they were living, she and her husband had chosen Las Vegas after they realized there would not be time during their visit to the U.S. to get everyone to their first choice for a wedding site: Disney World. The wedding gave me a chance to experience the packaged quickie wedding services for which Las Vegas is famous and to observe some of the then-new theme casinos that had started to open, including the Mirage and the Excalibur. I continued to talk to other visitors and keep field notes.

When Stephen Brown invited me to a 1995 conference on Amarketing eschatology,@ convened in order to contemplate the millennium, Las Vegas seemed an appropriate parallel to the Biblical Babylon and became the focus of my presentation (Belk 1995) and a subsequent book chapter (Belk 1997). A more recent visit to Las Vegas was with Dominique Bouchet and one of his sons in 1996 began another period of research. This visit was specifically to observe the most recent offerings in Las Vegas and prepare for the present project. We stayed at the Luxor (already under renovation) and visited most of the strip hotel casinos in addition to Sam=s Town, Rio, Hard Rock Cafe, and the downtown casinos that have been enveloped under a framework of lights and sounds called The Fremont Street Experience. We also made it a point to visit shopping venues and several residential parts of town. I have been back in 1999 after spending a year in Zimbabwe and against that background have found the spectacle of Las Vegas even more striking. Over the course of this 40-year period of three- to five-day visits to Las Vegas, I have conducted few formal and extended interviews. My methods have been primarily participant observation, including numerous casual interviews, photography, and secondary research using print and film material -- fiction and non-fiction, popular and academic. Along with Fuat Firat, Dominique Bouchet and I presented some of our findings at a conference of the Association for Consumer Research (see Belk 1998). What Dominique critiqued as a hollow and dated American tourist spectacle, Fuat and I saw more favorably. Together, this direct and vicarious experience is the basis for the following interpretation of the current Las Vegas consumption phenomenon.

An initial observation is that Las Vegas theme resorts play quite freely with what is real. In this respect they are like the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles that weaves a museum-quality drama composed snippets of fact tied together with clever lies provoking smiles and revelatory reflections on the similar legerdemain performed by mainstream museums (see Rugoff 1995a, 1995b; Weschler 1995, Williams 1999). One example of playing loosely with reality is the Luxor. On my recent visit to its pyramidal resort hotel and casino I floated "down" the hotel's then interior-encircling "Nile River" on an Egyptoid barge, while observing along the "shore" numerous once living desiccated palm trees and such Egyptian wonders as the temple of Abu Simbel, rendered in 1/7 the scale of the original near Aswan. If the temple has been miniaturized, the sphinx outside the Luxor has been giganticized to twice the size of the original I once saw at Giza. The Luxor's sphinx has also had cosmetic coloration and a nose job to restore what is missing on the Egyptian original. Giganticism is also evident in the pyramid itself, said to be large enough inside for nine 747 aircraft. Such fascination with the gigantic, the miniature, and the exotic are elements that have been linked to the creation of consumer desire with resulting manifestations in the souvenir and the collection (Stewart 1984). At least part of the appeal of Las Vegas appears due to the its playful treatment of what is real through the interplay of manipulated scale, theatrical lighting, nostalgia, and pastiche (Fontana and Preston 1990).

On the lower floor of the Luxor, I paid a fee to visit the resort's Tomb of Tutankhamen and Museum. At the entrance to the museum is a piece of limestone the size of two hands with a plaque thanking the Egyptian government for this relic from the one pyramid larger than the Luxor -- the great Cheops pyramid at Giza. Within the museum I saw Tut's tomb as it was discovered by Howard Carter in the 1920s, and was reminded of Tut's tomb treasures in Cairo's Egyptian Museum. The many relics in the tomb at the Luxor museum and the related professionally displayed papyruses, scarabs, coins, and cartouches prompted me to ask a guard just which things are authentic. He replied, "Do you remember that piece of limestone you saw when you entered the museum? That's it." True, Egypt itself has numerous elements of altered authenticity, including restorations to the sphinx, movement of the Abu Simbel temple when Lake Nassar covered the original site, and a Pharonic theme park outside of Cairo. But the patent falsity of the Luxor's Egyptiana (or the Romanesque carrera marble statuary reproductions of Caesar's Palace or the fake skylines of New York City, Paris, and New Orleans at other Las Vegas theme resorts) reveal a playful quality that marks what I think is the essential spirit of Las Vegas in its current incarnation. It is a spirit that combines extravagant spectacle and comic farce. It is the spirit that made my student and colleague so readily accept the opening scenario for Hell as the latest Las Vegas themed resort.

This spirit has been captured well by Los Angeles art critic Ralph Rugoff who suggests that:

A farce is a theatrical form in which humor is created through mockery involving sweeping improbabilities of plot and character. It is the theater of the absurd and the ridiculous, with predecessors including Aristophanes, the commedia dell=arte. amd Money Python (Davis 1978; Bermel 1982). Just as the Museum of Jurassic Technology mocks the concept of the somber overly erudite cultural museum, the Luxor, with its talking camels and its Flying Mummies acrobatic team, mocks any reverential homage to ancient Egypt as the cradle of civilization. The Luxor borrows the mystique and riches of Egypt, but only to exploit them in the same way an Egyptian themed video game, pinball game, or movie theater does. Consider the contrast between visiting the Luxor=s museum and visiting Cairo=s Egyptian Museum. Nothing in the Luxor is meant to be taken too seriously. For the visitor who buys a package ticket, the visit to the museum follows a motion simulator ride, 3-D movie, and adventure presentation -- all part of the Secrets of the Luxor Pyramid. In this preceding trilogy we learn of the pyramid discovered two miles under Las Vegas by an Indiana Jones type archaeologist named Carina. With the help of the casino developer she fights an Army colonel and the evil Dr. Osiris who seek to appropriate the pyramid and its levitator cars for their own purposes. Together Carina and the casino developer save the world by recovering the sacred crystal guarded by the pyramid=s priests (see Wolkomir 1995). After this narrated adventure and a walk through the cavernous casino and lobby of the Luxor, the visitor reaches the Luxor museum and gift store with a much more playful set of expectations than the tourist to Cairo. While Urry=s (1990) and Featherstone=s (1991) post-tourist also carries a playful mood to foreign destinations, this playful spirit does not regard the local museum offerings in these foreign locales as a farce. They may not be regarded too seriously, but their authenticity is unquestioned and the reverent decorum we have learned to employ in our museum temples is still maintained. In the Luxor=s museum, by contrast, the headset-guided tour provides an authoritative and serious narration, but almost no one takes long enough to listen to it or to match the audio narration with the corresponding displays before them. They are there to be entertained, amused, and amazed by fantastic treasures, not to be educated. This playful intent can also be seen in the Luxor=s use of an Egyptologist, not so much to assure authenticity as to assure that the hieroglyphics displayed throughout the hotel do not really say anything to someone who might happen to understand them (Wolkomir 1995). Las Vegas is instructing us through its farcical architecture and spectacles to adopt a playful mood of irreverent disregard for our normal behaviors and sensibilities.

In saying that tourists come to Las Vegas to be entertained, amused, and amazed rather than educated, I am also excluding another seemingly likely motivation: that people come to Las Vegas to gamble. Some do, most do not. Although 90 percent of those who come to Las Vegas gamble, only 11 percent come specifically to do so (Wolkomir 1995). And increasingly, the typical gambler in Las Vegas is a low roller who plays only the slot machines. This does not mean a decline in profitability however. Up to 70 percent of Las Vegas casino revenues now come from the slots, with a single machine retaining as much as $500 a day (Peltier and Milo 1996). Slot machine design has accordingly become a strategic mix of high art and high tech, with specialized machines such with motifs from Monopoly, Jeopardy, and Wheel of Fortune (Abrams 1999). At the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino even Jimi Hendrix and Sid Vicious have become part of slot machine iconography (Borchard 1998). Although there are now more legal gambling venues than ever before (see Hetzel 1996), rather than eroding, tourism to Las Vegas has dramatically increased. Half of all Americans have now been in a casino, and this number is growing (Cooper 1995). I think this mainstreaming of gambling has also played an important role in the changing motivations of visitors to Las Vegas. In order to see this and understand what I have come to believe brings people to Las Vegas today, some historic perspective on the city's touristic attraction is needed.

Wright and Snow (1978) suggest that the traditional attraction of Las Vegas is "a formula combining opulent accommodations, gourmet food and the titillation of gambling and sex" (p. 42). Given the organized crime control of the city that began with Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel's construction of the Flamingo hotel and Casino in 1946, coupled with the city's gambling, subsidized room rates, prostitution (illegally abundant in the city and legal in adjacent counties), and cut-rate pseudo-gourmet buffets, associations with greed, lust, and gluttony posed a glaring contradiction to America's Puritan past and its lingering work ethic. A sense of danger was fueled by the mob execution of Bugsy Siegel not long after the opening of the Flamingo and by several similar incidents including those depicted in the biographical novel and film Casino (Pileggi 1996). The city was seen as a vice-dripping dystopia by many, and this was precisely its attraction. It was the forbidden fruit. The tourist to Las Vegas was enjoying the thrill of transgression (Bataille 1985; Falk 1994). The expiation for the sin of transgressive enjoyment was a lavish monetary sacrifice at the gaming tables. Quick marriages and divorces, nude or near nude floor shows, free drinks, the exotic otherness of resorts with names like Alladin's, the Riviera, Hacienda, el Morroco, the Sahara, and the Tropicana, and the general celebration of excess in the huge casino signs, huge hotels, huge stars, and huge meals, all open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, added to the titillation of transgression. And, with the aid of air conditioning, the improbable location of Las Vegas in the Mojave Desert, the clockless, windowless casinos, and the resulting isolation of the city made Las Vegas gambling junkets something that could be partitioned off from everyday life -- a fantasy, a dream, or as Baudrillard (1993) suggests, an hallucination. It was a liminal or liminoid space where normal roles and class distinctions disappeared and there was a feeling that anything goes (van Gennep 1960; Turner 1969). It was a place on the margin (Shields 1991), a place of inversion, excess, and carnival (Bakhtin 1968; Stallybrass and White 1986).

But the transgressive lure of Las Vegas began to change when in 1966 Howard Hughes started to buy out the mob ownership of the resorts, ushering in an era of corporate investment. The next year, Caesar's Palace, opened, financed by funds from the Teamster's pension fund. In 1969 Nevada laws were changed so that licensing was required only for major stockholders in gambling businesses, rather than all stockholders as was formerly the case (McCracken 1996). By the late 1980s Steve Winn's Mirage hotel had opened the door to Wall Street investment. And when Winn's Treasure Island opened next door in 1993, a competition started to create the newest big thing in resorts. It hasn't stopped. Excalibur, the Luxor, Monte Carlo, the MGM Grand, New York New York, Paris, Stratosphere, Bellagio, Venetian Hotel, and Mandalay Bay have all opened, along with the Fremont Street Experience. Meanwhile, older Casinos add huge renovations or rebuild entirely. There already 120,000 hotel and motel rooms in the city and more on the horizon (Newcott 1996). The corporate mega-resorts have also begun to offer much more elaborate and often family-friendly fantasies and entertainments. Entertainments have also begun to become extravaganzas costing tens of millions of dollars to produce, including EFX at the MGM Grand, Cirque du Soleil=s AMystère@ at Treasure Island, it=s AThe Story of O@ at Bellagio, and Andrew Lloyd Webber=s Starlight Express at the Las Vegas Hilton (see Browne and Marshall 1995). The danger is gone and in its place there is a slick but sanitized corporate world that reminds many of Disney theme parks (e.g., Hess 1993; Tronnes 1995).

The mainstream hospitality industry that had shunned Las Vegas is now present in droves, with hotel casinos including Holiday Inn, Marriott, Hyatt, Ramada, Howard Johnson's, and Four Seasons. Inside these and other hotel casinos are Burger Kings, Pizza Huts, Wendys, and McDonalds. Hard Rock Cafe and Planet Hollywood offer museums of rock music and movies that present offer authentic artifacts of pretend significance rather than the Luxor museum's pretend artifacts of authentic significance. MGM and Warner Brothers Studios are now big players in town. Automakers are happy to offer their vehicles as casino prizes. And Coca Cola has built the World of Coca-Cola Las Vegas with a 100-foot Coke bottle which refines the Adigital storytelling theater@ (Boje 1999) developed in its other Aspectacular corporate showcases@ (Peñaloza 1999; Ger and Belk 1996). Visitors to the Las Vegas strip can now stroll (with the aid of moving sidewalks and monorails) through a pyramid with a laser beam that can be seen as much as 250 miles away, volcanic eruptions, a huge lion, live tigers, sharks, and penguins, talking animatronic camels and dinosaurs, sea battles, bungee jumps, roller coasters, laser tag games, Statues of Liberty, an Eiffel Tower, obelisks, a sphinx, a simulated Appian Way with high rent shops and a changing "sky" that goes from dawn to dusk each hour, medieval jousting, the yellow brick road, an automobile collection that includes Hitler's Mercedes and Elvis's Cadillac, the Liberace museum, and much more. With all these attractions, cheap rooms and free drinks are fast disappearing. Las Vegas is looking much less like a den of iniquity and much more like a fantastic theme park with attached fantasy shopping malls and fantasy hotels.

What is the effect of these changes in the character of Las Vegas on the tourist? Besides attracting more people the new Las Vegas also attracts a broader cross-section of people, both foreign and domestic. But despite the amusement parks, pirate ships, and video parlors, Las Vegas has not tapped the family market in the way Disneyworld or even Los Angeles have. Or at least corporate casino owners have been quick to tell the media that these changes were not intended to lure families and that Las Vegas is definitely not a place for children (e.g., Orwall 1995; Smith 1996). Less than 11 percent of visitors to Las Vegas are reportedly children (Newcott 1996) and a significant portion of them, "some in the industry suspect," are between ages 18 and 21 (Orwall 1995). Moreover, the casinos say that those who bring their children with them gamble less (Peltier and Milo 1996; Orwall 1995). Perhaps there is still something a bit unseemly about dropping $1000 at the craps table while the children are in the swimming pool, virtual reality arcade, or amusement park. However, even if these industry denials are true, this does not mean that the new fantasy resorts are a strategic mistake or that they are unprofitable. For whether or not they have attracted droves of children, the latest fantasy resorts seem to have infantalized adults. In my field notes from a recent visit to Las Vegas I observed:

This is never-never land for all those Peter Pans who don't want to grow up. They seem to echo Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire when she said, "I don't want realism, I want magic." Cooper (1995) offers a similar analysis:

As Tom Wolfe (1965) suggested, Las Vegas represents the reawakening of dreams; a childhood liberation in a town where nobody can make us go to bed.

What is the point of infantalizing adults? Why should corporations spend billions of dollars doing so in Las Vegas? A key answer seems to be that such infantalization, coupled with and nourished by the more playful and farcical character of the current incarnation of Las Vegas, foster a willing suspension of cognitive, rational, adult control and a welcome succumbing to a dream world of possibilities. And this triumph of fun and magical belief over purposive cognition and rationality is precisely the spirit associated with gambling (Lears 1994). As Allen (1995) explains:

Thus, adults, once they become infantalized by the magic, fun, and fantasy of Las Vegas, make better gamblers. They also make better consumers generally. One of the games they can play, for example, is Adress up.@ There is no clothing code in Las Vegas and all manner of outrageous clothing is likely to be seen. Another fun game is Apig out.@ All the normal inhibitions against too much of too many foods and drinks that are all bad for us are energetically broken in Las Vegas. AShopping spree@ is yet another adult entertainment played vigorously in Las Vegas, especially for the minority lucky enough to win big. The violation of these norms as well as those suggesting reasonable Anormal@ hours, all encourage spending recklessly as well. Las Vegas is not a place for those hard headed adults who cannot let go of the control, rationality, and incredulity of adulthood. But for those who can indulge themselves in the magic, fun, and fantasy of childhood, Las Vegas is Mecca.

While I think this adult infantalization theme helps explain the current popularity of Las Vegas, I also wonder whether the casinos protest a bit too much about not intending to attract children and families. The lure of transgressing taboos remains a vital form of consumer desire (Belk, Ger, and Askegaard 1997) and the surest way to extinguish the thrill of transgression in Las Vegas is to assert that it is becoming a kiddie-land. Still all is relative. Turner (1969) insists that modern industrial societies do not have truly liminal rites of passage and suggests the alternative term Aliminoid.@ Bakhtin (1968) maintains that "Carnival spirit...was gradually transformed into a mere holiday mood. ...but this carnival spirit is indestructible, it continues to fertilize various areas of life and culture" (p. 33). Likewise I believe that the transgressive basis for consumer desire remains alive in Las Vegas and elsewhere, even if it has diminished in strength and importance as the more playful spirit of the ludic post-tourist has increased.

If Las Vegas offers spectacular farce and those who go there seek to engage in a form of infantile play, what should we make of these developments? Are they good or bad? Should Las Vegas be praised for its empowering liberation or should we lament that the nearby above ground nuclear tests that were a part of the 1950s Las Vegas spectacle weren't detonated in the center of the Strip? There are a number of good reasons to object to Las Vegas. The city=s spectacular growth has also meant high crime rates, racial unrest, overcrowded schools, and environmental pollution (Zukin, et al., 1998). Tens of billions of dollars are spent each year at American casinos and the amount has grown by 1800 percent since 1976 (Popkin 1994). Gambling is self-indulgent and hedonistic rather than altruistic. It can readily be argued that the money spent in Las Vegas would be better spent on education, preventative medicine, and numerous charities. A disproportionate amount of income is spent by the poor rather than the rich on gambling, and the poorest of the poor cannot play at all. Although most of the current Las Vegas gamblers are not compulsive or addicted to gambling, many are and cannot help themselves (Burns, Gillett, Rubinstein, and Gentry 1990). The alcohol that flows so freely in Las Vegas can also be addictive and destructive. There is something sadly ironic about walking up to the Las Vegas Hard Rock Cafe casino past power-guzzling neon lighting and water-guzzling foliage and passing their brightly displayed slogan urging us to "Save the Planet." It might be argued that Las Vegas and its invitation to excess in eating, spending, sex, and entertainment, helps to promote instant gratification and subvert the work ethic. And it might easily be suggested that Las Vegas is tacky and promotes an image of America and Americans as being frivolous, materialistic, passive, and shallow. Although some of these criticisms are elitist ("my culture is good yours is bad"), excessively rationalistic ("if it doesn't produce something concrete it is bad"), or overly Puritanical ("play and fantasy are sinful and evil"), there is some truth to many of these criticisms. Nevertheless, to my surprise given that it is far from being my idea of a good time, my own conclusion is that there is more that is good than bad in the new Las Vegas.

The childishness and playful spirit that can be found among tourists to the fantasy worlds of Las Vegas is the same frame of mind that nourishes imagination, hope, and unapologetic fun. We need play (e.g., Huizinga 1970; Csikszentmihalyi 1975) and not just as release, ritual, refreshing re-creation, or rule-governed activity. We need play because it is a joyful, self-transcendent part of life. Las Vegas is not the only possible play venue, but it is largely elitist and ethnocentric to condemn it in favor of "higher" forms of play in music, literature, poetry, art, or other personal favorites. Others will argue that we should pursue self transcendence through religion or love instead of play. Play has been labeled a higher order need in affluent societies (Weisskopf 1966), although the same can be said of altruism. But play, even in the indulgent world of Las Vegas, need not preclude altruism. Our task should be to balance both. Just as no play makes Jack a dull boy, clinging always to purposive, rational, self-control makes Jack (and Jill) still duller. Just as the mocking self-burlesque and parody of the farcical resorts of the new Las Vegas tell us that Las Vegas does not take itself too seriously, they tell us that we should not take ourselves or our play too seriously either. Urry's (1991) post-tourist and post-shopper carries just this attitude that it is good to lighten up some times.

The spirit of the new Las Vegas and the infantalized consumer who plays at being a tourist there, remains that of the carnival. What is the Strip but an elaborate midway? The new extravagant entertainments are updated versions of jugglers, fire-eaters, and freak shows, while the animal acts, showgirls, and magicians have simply added a bit of technology to their traditional acts. The neon lighting that sets Las Vegas aglow at night is borrowed from the midway at the 1933 Chicago World=s Fair (Hess 1993). And the shops in Caesar=s Forum, the Fashion Show Mall, and the merchandise arcades of the casinos are updated versions of the peddler, the carnival, the bazaar, and nineteenth century European shopping arcades . To call this postmodern does an injustice to these historical predecessors to the new Las Vegas. Rather than inventing something entirely new in either marketing or consumption, Las Vegas has expanded the scale and cost of attracting masses of jaded but still playful consumers. But the underlying promise of something entirely different and extraordinary is not new at all. People have always needed to play, even if they have not always needed to pay so much for the privilege of being infantalized. And we have always found our most intense carnival at the margins: in medieval fairs, on leisure beaches, at festival days that occur at the seams between seasons (e.g., New Year=s Eve, Mardi Gras and Carnival, Midsummer=s Eve, Lesbian and Gay Pride Day, Samhain, Guy Falkes Day, and Halloween -- see Belk 1996), on the edges, far away on foreign holidays, and whenever and wherever we can partition off time and space to create an enclave of nonreality. If we now take this as farce and knowingly play with these inversions of the ordinary, it is not likely that the situation was ever much different. What has changed, and what makes Las Vegas unique, is the scale of the carnival. Las Vegas as a whole is the latest big thing. It will have to continue to innovate and reinvent itself in order to remain so, and the window of consumer tolerance for boredom has narrowed due the pace of change experienced there recently. But for the present and near term future, Las Vegas is the grand carnival and the big play pen of many average consumers.

A brief return to the opening vignette about the hypothetical new Hell theme resort reminds us that even this outlandish proposal is not without precedents. One was at Cincinnati=s Western Museum, established in 1820. In addition to unusual rocks, stuffed animals, coins, insects, and Indian artifacts, the museum had a number of more spectacular exhibits including a mermaid made by stitching the top half of a monkey onto the bottom half of a fish, a tattooed Maori chief=s head, and a charade known as the invisible girl (Dunlop 1984). But the most spectacular of all was an electrified and mechanized depiction of Dante=s Inferno with which visitors loved to scare themselves and their companions. Two more recent precedents are the Tiger Balm Gardens (now Haw Par Gardens) in Singapore and Hong Kong, started by the family that invented and so successfully marketed Tiger Balm. A key part of the gardens are the graphic sculpted depictions of various mortal sins such as adultery and anger and the ten Buddhist hells in which such sins are punished. These punishments include being sawn in half, being crushed under a heavy stone, and other sin-befitting torments. Like the Western Museum, these depictions are popular tourist attractions. Likewise there are numerous popular torture museums in various European cities. While my proposal for the hellish theme resort in Las Vegas may be a bit more spectacular, it would hardly be the first hell on earth. Thus we might extend the maxim that the difference between a man and a boy is the size (or price) of his toys. As illustrated by the phenomenon of Las Vegas, the difference between the carnival of old and the carnivalesque of the present is the size and cost of the spectacle. And the difference between the transgressing Las Vegas tourist of old and the new playful post-tourist is the minimal size of our current guilt and the maximal size of our appetite for farce.

Footnote