“In the Streets” is the first edition of the Notebook Insert, a seasonal supplement on moving-image culture.
Illustration by Lale Westvind.
I started errantly watching live streams at work not long after the Sphere first blinked its enormous electric eye in September 2023. This was a vestige of a pandemic-era habit, lockdown having been a good time to virtually peer into places one could never go. Jellyfish floating in seemingly limitless blue suspension at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, some rural trail in South Dakota, the top of the Eiffel Tower. You could drop in to any of these streams and feel, reassuringly, that nothing consequential was happening. After spending some time letting these feeds unspool in the background, one begins to wonder who set these cameras up; who maintains the connection, checks on the equipment, wipes dirt off the lens; who decided this or that perspective was the best, the most representative, the truest.
In a superficial way, live streams from my own city, Las Vegas, appealed because they capture the city during the day, contradicting the standing imaginary consensus of nocturnality. But the Sphere live stream has been offline for days, and it’s raining in Vegas again. Click over to the “Las Vegas Boulevard Live” feed on the Skyline Webcams site—which tepidly suggests streams of the Trevi Fountain, Piazza San Marco, and Boulder City farther down the page—and the image is spattered with out-of-focus water droplets. “Las Vegas Boulevard Live” is selectively descriptive advertising. What you glimpse is just a small section of Las Vegas Boulevard, but nothing in the frame would tip you off to the location. The camera is angled awkwardly so that all you can see are the top halves of palm trees, a sliver of the street with cars passing at the bottom of the frame, and the flashing storefronts of a Lids and a T-Mobile. The shot is so zoomed in that there’s no sense of a horizon. From where it’s pointed, the camera must be mounted on or near the New York New York Hotel.
"Las Vegas Boulevard Live" (Skyline Webcams).
Mike Davis, in a short essay called “Tourists from Hell,” writes, “Tourists (why hadn’t I realized this) didn’t come to Hollywood as documentarists or urban explorers; they came to savor the confirmation of images already stored in their minds.” For Vegas, those pre-chewed images looking to be confirmed might feature the Strip lit up at night, the thoroughfare whizzing by, an intimation of dimmer, less colorful lights in the distance: the Strip as the most famous, and therefore interesting, part of a city that only exists to prop up the casinos. A location demands a visual language to interpret its idiosyncrasies, a way of expressing its individual cadence, its meaning. Filmmakers have been using the same phrases to cue an arrival in Vegas for decades: that familiar aerial shot passing down the middle of Las Vegas Boulevard, or approaching from the west over the Bellagio Fountain as it shoots water into the air, or swirls in quick shots through the Paris, the Rio, the Mandalay Bay, the Luxor. The 2008 card-counting heist movie 21, directed by Robert Luketic, deploys a brute-force barrage of casino fronts, helicopter-mounted camera sweeps, and impatient cross-dissolves, hopping back and forth from one end of the Strip to the other—the overwhelming, debauched beauty of Vegas illustrated, of course, as a playground. Even Terry Gilliam, warping and stretching images of the old Strip as rear projection behind Benicio del Toro and Johnny Depp ten years earlier in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), capitulates to a shorthand that amounts to “bright lights, lots of excitement.” Ten years before that, a jittery black-and-white streak of casino footage precedes the in-color spectacle of U2 leading a choir of onlookers beneath the Fremont awning in the music video for “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.”
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Terry Gilliam, 1998).
What does it mean to be unable to gesture obliquely toward something? What does it say about Vegas, or its perception, that so many films need its name in their titles? Las Vegas Nights (1941), Moon Over Las Vegas (1944), The Las Vegas Story (1952), Crashing Las Vegas, Meet Me in Las Vegas (both 1956), Viva Las Vegas (1964), The Las Vegas Hillbillys (1966), They Came to Rob Las Vegas (1968), Las Vegas Bloodbath (1989), Honeymoon in Vegas (1992), Leaving Las Vegas (1995), The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas (2000). One sees a steady progression from the ’40s through the ’60s, then a steep drop-off before the name returns to theatrical marquees at the end of the century. The destination moves: pleasure palace, illicit rendezvous venue, escape hatch, easy target, dead end. To invoke a name doesn’t always capture a totality, though sometimes it does. But Vegas has become its own nickname, the implication being that you know what you’re going to get.
Jump back a few years into the ’80s and the Strip, which is “Vegas” for many, seems barren, not yet populated by the tallest buildings that now crowd out the horizon. The Vegas of the corporate juggernaut era, beginning in the ’90s, when hotels and casinos started shouldering each other for more and more space, cauterized an entire, older section of the Strip and left it a few miles north, out of sight. In Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), Thom Andersen characterizes that city as a place that has been cinematically abused by ahistoricity, iconic locations of various vintages papered over, erased, or otherwise pointedly forgotten. Andersen resents that Hollywood has taken precedence over the entire city, both as an industry and as a geographical marker. I see the breadth of his disappointment, illustrated thoroughly with hours of clips from films shot in, around, and about Los Angeles—I see it, and I covet it. Where’s the record-correcting archive of Vegas? Who else but a local might take its depiction, its image, seriously? But maybe seriousness isn’t the point.
Next (Lee Tamahori, 2007).
Nicolas Cage’s frequent work in Vegas would make him one of the city’s adopted sons: Honeymoon in Vegas, Leaving Las Vegas, Con Air (1997), The Trust (2016), Sympathy for the Devil (2023). In Next (2007), he ambles around beneath the neon awning of Fremont Street playing a two-bit magician at some fictional casino. He passes into an unspecified hotel and plays a few hands of poker utilizing clairvoyant powers before being chased out by security. Cage enters a downtown building whose interior (ugly carpets, crammed slots, bad lighting) is convincingly nondescript and exits that same building, its front entrance now that of an expensive, seemingly new-built, and entirely geographically incongruent resort, some three or four miles south and west. The disorienting geographical frivolity with which Las Vegas is treated on screen is infuriating most of the time, but it suits Cage, whom I’ve seen around town a few times over the years. He seems right at home, taking it all in, popping up in the most improbable places. In person, he looks like a wax figure of himself, as uncanny as his chosen city. He makes sense here.
Martin Scorsese interprets Vegas’s surreality through a more extensive method of cut-and-paste, blowing out every gauzy Strip backdrop, pulling streets and facades together. In his Las Vegas, the daytime is clear and sharp, the night drenched in neon as seen through a cataract, the city a twinkling matte painting of late-twentieth-century nostalgia pastiche. Casino (1995) centers on a fictional Vegas establishment, the Tangiers, its exterior supplied by the Landmark Hotel (footage of the Landmark’s actual demolition features later in the film) and interior by the Riviera (likewise since demolished). Geographically, Scorsese’s Vegas never strays far from the Strip, taking detours to Main Street, Fremont, and the ’60s-built Paradise neighborhoods that, in contrast to today’s prefab ubiquity, function as taunting reminders of the city’s architecturally adventurous past. Scorsese also affords Vegas the rare privilege of standing in for other parts of the country: San Diego, Kansas City, Chicago. The city plays itself. The city plays whatever and wherever you want it to.
Casino (Martin Scorsese, 1995).
By the mid-’90s, when I was born, American cinema was already looking back at a Vegas that no longer existed. Its stars were dead and buried, its most recognizable monuments demolished or packed away to be resurrected later at the Neon Museum. Gilliam’s 1998 adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing transforms a gonzo journalistic dispatch into an early-’70s period piece, Thompson’s frenzied, acerbic, present-tense portrait of the country now acquiring a quaintness its author could not have intended. In the mid-aughts, my friends and I used to run around Vegas’s strip malls and shopping centers, where Elvis could still be heard on the loudspeakers. In some of the newer casinos, on and off the Strip, galleries featured flashbulb-lit black-and-white photos of a bygone era. On sound-dampening carpet, we’d sit and try to name who we could recognize, but we weren’t raised to be reverent to the city’s past. The pictures on the walls seemed like perfunctory homages that couldn’t help but feel like municipal brand management.
When people ask what it’s like to grow up here, my answers vary depending on how seriously I want to take the question. It also depends on how seriously the person asking takes the city. I don’t often know what it is that people hope to hear. It takes little effort to capitulate to their most superficial assumptions. And often, as here, it takes many words to arrive at something approximating the truth.
In 2001, Steven Soderbergh remade Ocean’s 11, just sixty years after the El Rancho Vegas opened on what was first called the Strip in 1941, further north than the modern-day equivalent. Gaudy experiential ventures like the Sphere or the Linq ferris wheel can seem inconceivable in the bare landscapes of Soderbergh’s film, but from the vantage point of the present, the fate of these dirt lots seems predestined. Already, the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, the Statue of Liberty, and the Great Sphinx of Giza have been recreated in miniature. In Ocean’s 11 through 13, Terry Benedict, played by Andy Garcia, serves as an avatar of conglomeration and tastelessness (he owns three major casinos: the Mirage, the MGM Grand, and the Bellagio; the latter two in actuality belong to the same corporation), but also the death of loyalty, of the gentleman’s agreement as ratified with a handshake. This is a world in which Sinatra is constantly invoked, at one point literally to the tune of his 1967 song “This Town.” Its vague lyrics about an “uptight,” “use-you,” “miserable” place might be applicable to any number of cities, but heard in this context, there's a pointed way that Sinatra imparts a brassy glitz to what is still, in effect, a diss track.
Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross, 2020).
Of course, no film depicts real places, only settings. Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross's Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (2020) is, at first glance, a documentary about the closing of a Vegas dive bar. But the bar doesn't actually exist: the film's exteriors place us in downtown Vegas, while its interiors were shot in New Orleans. Splicing both together results in a dreamlike experience, almost kitschy, yet the film is idiosyncratically humane. Because of the people shown, their ordinariness and their eccentricity, it's as close to the Vegas I know as I've ever seen in a film, even as it's largely fictionalized. This is perhaps the most adroit method of recreating the feeling of Vegas as it is: liberated from the task of physically or visually representing the city, all that a filmmaker really needs to get right is the varied, sometimes unified, often stridently individualistic spirit of the community.
The irony is that every Vegas fantasia, no matter how grounded or fanciful, preserves some genuine part of the city. In the backgrounds of Ocean’s 11 or Casino, the casino floors of Rain Man (1988) or Frank & Lola (2016), the car chases of Diamonds Are Forever (1971) or Jason Bourne (2016), one catches dozens of artifacts preserved and trapped. Vegas changes so rapidly and so often that one can watch films released just five years apart and see entirely different skylines. Movies become the only way of approximating what used to be, and there is a nagging, almost itching desire to peel back the cellophane and touch the past. What’s inside? In Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), Coop keeps hitting jackpots and seems to find nothing but coins. Out of the loud cinema of Vegas comes something quieter. Haven’t you noticed the hush, the uniform murmur on the highway, the turned-down jangle of slot music, the way everything seems to dissipate? Legacy acts set up their residencies, sports teams build their nests, more screens wink to life. Water drains down the Colorado. Eventually, there will only be images of a truly nonexistent city.
In that gap between now and the end, we have some amusements to choose from. The camera can only capture so much. The Strip runs north to south, a line of trees and light poles dividing the flow of traffic, both sides of the street a hodgepodge of new and older establishments. If you sit there long enough, awaiting a green light, the intimation of a dormant personality begins to creep through. The Sphere displays 360-degree images of the most inconsequential things, trite and vulgar images of naked eyes and basketballs, the planet, faces, cartoons, advertisements. Its makers would like the Sphere to fade into the very fabric of Vegas, as audacious and mundane as the Luxor with its MGM placard and blinding beam of light around which bats swirl in the fall, but it can’t help but act as a canvas for people’s projections. If they were smart, that’s exactly what the Sphere’s owners would do: run every frame of every film and television show shot in the city forever on a loop. As if to say, “You can learn a lot or nothing from this.” As if to corroborate and reject every cliché. As if to say, “This is real or none of it is.”
