Stephen Linstead

Jean Baudrillard, reflecting on Michel Foucault’s delineration over several works of the ways in which societies order themselves, centring the inteerests of some and excluding the interests of others:

Baudrillard is echoing Bataille here – death is exclusive, and exclusion is deathly. But if death is exclusive, why do people go to Las Vegas to die? Why, amongst the masses of pleasure-seekers, towering monuments and glittering halls of entertainment, amongst the abundance of heat and light, do they seek and find the cold and darkness of the tomb? Whynis Las Vegas such a compelling image of life and death?

So one answer is to die of pleasure. A pleasure so total, so extreme that it consumes us, consumes life, completely. A complete surrender of self to annihiliating ecstasy. The ultimate pleasure is death.

Doesn’t Las Vegas offer the state-of-the-art in hedonism? The last word in every pleasure you can think of? With death just around the corner, down the alley, the drying-out clinic, the desert beyond…. Is it the fascination of the risk of death that makes Las Vegas so sexy?

The very moment of sexual fulfilment, the "little death" of orgasm reminds us of its temporality and our own mortality. If we wish to escape such uncomfortable reminders, we can always resort to passive nihilism, where we cease to struggle for being and becoming in order to simply accept existing. Passive nihilism links the global millions of armchairs stationed in front of their TV sets to death on a mass scale. We don’t have to wait for our death to come. It is already here and with us, the death in life of passive nihilism, the living death of kitsch. For Baudrillard, it is the great cities which are the temples of kitsch:

If we are enduring a living death, city-bound and glued to our TV screens, how can we become alive again? How can our nihilism become active, and how can we reclaim our subjectivity?

We must risk death. Risk symbolic death through loss of property, status, esteem or career, or even risk actual death. If death is literally almost upon us, the risk is lessened. So why not stake everything on one last roll of the dice if what we will gain is a moment of identity, of self- knowledge and self possession, of sovereignty; to know real life no matter how briefly?

And so we come, in our millions, to the glittering desert door that is Las Vegas. To risk something, to gamble our money, our sexuality, our libido on some kind of gain, some kind of self- enhancement through the sacrifice of self-effacement. But it doesn’t work quite as we thought, because Las Vegas is the quintessential city of kitsch, and sacrifice on that altar remains, simply, loss – we have been seduced and abandoned.

And yet, just as there is no absolute escape from kitsch, so there is always the potential for kitsch to connect with something else, something more redemptive. We may not find what we came for, but we may find something more valuable.

In this paper I will explore these ideas by looking I two films with central characters who come to Vegas to die – Leaving Las Vegas with Nicholas Cage in his Oscar winning role opposite Elisabeth Shue, and Girls’ Night a British buddy movie with Brenda Blethyn, Julie Walters and Kris Kristofferson – with the aid of theory from Georges Bataille, Jean Baudrillard and Jonathan Dollimore, among others.

Absolute pleasure and absolute knowledge – absolute pleasure being that which is so pleasurable that living on is impossible, absolute knowledge, ironically, being that knowledge which contains knowledge of its own death – come together in death. Short of that moment of fulfilment, we have only a death which is its own end – death in Vegas.