For us, Las Vegas is the epitome of the conjunctural crisis and conceptual elision that arises when we seek to distinguish between the traditional modernist tenets of ‘fiction’ and ‘reality’. Where does fiction begin and reality end? As with many other ‘false binary oppositions’ (Gergen, 1999), the delineation of these two constructs is no longer tenable in a ‘past-modern’ world (Stones, 1996).

In a passing reference in America, Jean Baudrillard (1988) describes Las Vegas as a hologram. On the only other occasion where he talks about Las Vegas (i.e. later in America), it is portrayed using the metaphor of a mirage in the desert. The use of ‘hologram’ and ‘mirage’ as decriptors is intriguing; both phenomena share an appearance of ‘realness’ (i.e. in a material sense), but neither is what it seems (i.e. there is no concrete entitiness). These images, like Las Vegas itself, start to tentatively capture something of the fragile and precarious nature of distinguishing between reality and fiction.

Las Vegas, as an elaborate macro-spectacle, is a perplexing concoction of illusion and allusion. However, as Guy Debord reminds us: "The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images" (1970:4). In the proposed paper we are interested in exploring the interplay between ‘social relations’ and ‘images’ as intrinsic facets of the ‘Las Vegas spectacle’. Social relations are examined using ‘critical discourse analysis’ (Fairclough, 1992; 1995) and the specific images which are subjected to discursive scrutiny are cinematic re-presentations of Las Vegas.

There were three main criteria for including films as part of the sample. First, only films which could be described as ‘mainstream’ insofar as they enjoyed significant box office success were selected. Second, inclusion also relied upon Las Vegas featuring in a significant proportion of the film (i.e. it was the primary location). Finally, Las Vegas as a setting had to be central, rather than incidental, to the plot (i.e. not just any big city would suffice as a plausible backdrop to the story). In all, five films which fulfilled all of the criteria were identified:

"Viva Las Vegas" (1963) - starring Elvis Presley and Ann-Margaret.

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is employed to enable a deeper and more socially contextualised analysis of cinematic dialogue to be achieved than is possible via micro-linguistic techniques such as conversation analysis. As Fairclough (1992) points out, CDA attends to discourse as "being simultaneously a piece of text, an instance of discursive practice, and an instance of social practice" (p. 4). As such CDA "crucially mediates the connection between language and social context, and facilitates more satisfactory bridging of the gap between texts and contexts" (Fairclough, 1995:189).

We envisage that CDA will provide rich insights into aspects of ‘Vegas films’ as a particular genre of ‘text production’ and ‘text consumption’ (Keenoy et al, 1997). This in turn will enable parallels to be drawn with the ‘real’ Las Vegas as a ‘spectacle of [text] production’ (Boje, 1999) and a ‘theater of [text] consumption’ (Firat and Dholakia, 1998). By revealing privileged and marginalised discourses (Mumby and Stohl, 1991), and via the deployment of an ‘intertextual critique’ (Bakhtin, 1986), we hope to develop fresh perspectives on both Las Vegas and the process of organizing. In particular, we contend that the complex interplay between reality and fiction is the very essence of "Las Vegas-ness" (or perhaps more aptly "Las Vague-ness"). Through the juxtaposing of the ‘realness of fiction’ (i.e. Vegas films) with the ‘fiction of reality’ (i.e. the actual city) we provide an elaboration of Las Vegas as the quintessential spectacle; a place where ‘hyperreality’ (Baudrillard, 1983) and what we termed ‘de-hyped fiction’ collapse into each other.

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