Act 2
Scene 10 – Las Vegas
From the book,
Theatres of Capitalism:
Managing Corporate Spectacle, Resisting with Carnival, and creating
Festival on the Global Stage
By David M. Boje, Ph.D. November 13, 2001
Scene 10 – Las Vegas
Las Vegas integrates concentrated spectacles of bureaucratic script with diffuse spectacles of Las Vegasization. Las Vegasization is the bait and switch game. The bait is a bold, elaborate, and bracy concentrated spectacle of wealth and power displayed along the Strip. The switch is you going wild with addictions to gambling, sex, maybe alcohol in ways that separates you from your cash. This is a spectacle that diffuses in imitation as city centers, malls, and airports try to become Las Vegas replicants.
Come to Las Vegas. Play the role of the winner, of one who can afford to gamble and lose, because you will win ultimately. Positivity abounds in the integrated spectacles of late modern capitalism. Your role is to believe that you are the fortunate one on whom the universe will shower its blessings, in for form of Las Vegas casinos showering you with jackpots, women, and indulging all your desires. You forget the more organic and festive aspects of life, like love, health, well-being, art, nature, friendship and community. These are sideshows. Las Vegasization is showing, not telling. It is images of wealth and power, showgirls and luxury phantasmal. Spectacle is postmodern theatre since the spectators becomes actors on the stage, in Las Vegas theatre, proactively designing their own consumption experience, a willing participant in the theatrical production being eagerly consumed. It is the new spectacle in Theatre of consumption.
My theme is capitalism is becoming more a Theatre of integrated spectacle, scripted to make experiences that we work in and consume highly positive. As Marcuse (1964) says, the negativity is banished; only positivity remains.
I want to explore how theatrics is utilized in the now capitalism to seduce us into work and consumer roles where we can let our addictions go wild. I want to apply Aristotle's six elements of dramatic Theatre to Las Vegas (plot, character, thought, dialog, melody, and spectacle), but put them in a new order, according to their role in capitalism. I will argue that it is now spectacle that dominates in Las Vegasization, not plot or character, as theorized by Aristotle. Spectacle is visual; you don't tell it, you show it. The point of the Theatres of capitalism is increasingly to use spectacle to trigger our addictions. Here and there carnivalesque protest resists spectacle, and people do seek festive alternatives. But, mostly spectacle just co-opts all other theatrical forms. First a story about showing spectacle, then I turn to a systematic rendition of each of Aristotle's Theatre elements, as they apply to the new capitalism of Las Vegasization.
Since I gave up drinking, gambling, and meat, I am mostly just addicted to the entertainment. I am standing in front of a 54-foot Mirage volcano that is masquerading as a peaceful waterfall. Someone I don't know tells me, "Beginning at dusk, the volcano spewing fire up to 100 feet above the lagoon, every 15 minutes until midnight, each day of the year." Another says, "It's as close as you can get to an active volcano without lava spilling on your shoes." The conversation is getting lively, so I add, "Can you believe it a man made volcano erupting right on the Las Vegas strip?" Cascading waters chum and a giant fireball erupts, to the delight of hordes of spectators. I am standing close to the front, so I can feel the heat, as the lagoon "catches" fire.
I have a decision to make, the show is over, and I can move on to see others, or go inside the Mirage. I decide to go "stripping," a term that describes spectators moving from one spectacle to the next, especially the free ones, all along the Strip. I want to see Paris Las Vegas; the half-scale replica of the City of Lights' famous Eiffel Tower is great photo op! I skip the $8 elevator ride to the top. It's a long walk from here to the Excalibur, to see on the hour, a giant, scaly, fire-breathing 5 1 - foot robotic dragon that lurks in the castle moat at Excalibur, does battle with a robotic Merlin the Magician for domination of the mystical moat. I decide the robot battle can wait.
I head to Caesar's Palace. I love how they co-opt festival into a spectacle titled, "Festival Fountains," where robotic Roman statues come alive for a laser, sound and fire show every hour on the hour starting at I 1:00 a.m., in Caesar's Palace Forum Shops. Something strange has happened to festival, but also carnival in Las Vegas. Carnival was once about resistance to spectacle power, with lots of satire and parody. Carnival is different in Las Vegas. Twice an hour, at Circus, Circus, Circus, Circus, I can watch the world's greatest Circus acts. For an exploration of carnival, I head to Harrah's. They offer a free Carnival Court with 20-minute shows featuring gymnasts, dancers and fireworks. There are also live bands, from reggae to rock, performing in this open air, covered court situated right in front of Harrah's south side. As with Circus, Circus, there is no parody or satire of spectacle here.
It's after 8 P.M, the fountains of Bellagio, time to see a spectacle span of more than 1,000 feet, featuring choreographed music ranging from Luciano Pavarotti to Frank Sinatra, gushing jets of water flirt, dance, and soar up to 240 feet in the air. Bellagio Fountains is said to be just like being in the heart of Lake Como in Italy. Having never been there, I will take their word for it.
It is a bit of a walk back to Treasure Island. But, that spectacle is every ninety minutes, and lasts for eight-minutes. I watch the Pirate Battle at Buccaneer Bay in front of Treasure Island as two huge fifty-foot high battleships with oodles of live pirates put on a spectacular re-enactment of activities, I am told I would expect at a Boston Tea Party. I was not there either.
I decide not to pay the $14 admission to the MGM Grand Adventures Theme Park. It would be a study of both Disneyfication and McDonaldization. It duplicates a Disneyfied amusement park, surrounding it with McDonaldized food stands. There are more fast food stand and T-shirt emporiums than rides. I also skip the Venetian Grand Canal Gondolas Ride. $12.50 seems a little pricey for a ten-minute gondola ride, where a singing Italian takes you to shop at The Gap. I. decide to just take their virtual Venetian gondola tour when I get back to my computers I also skip the Rio and their Masquerade Show in the Sky. It features a cast of 36 performers, five floats, elaborate costumes and four different themed parades. For just $9.95, I can participate in the actual parade. But, that is too far off-Strip, out on Flamingo Road. I stay on Strip, and take a long walk to the Luxor, where Tut-O-Mania lives on, in a full-scale mock-up of the great Egyptian king's tomb, meticulously reproduced, they say, according to actual historical records. I have not been to Egypt, but the animated guide tells me this experience is as real as real can be.
I want to experience Digital Storytelling Theatre in a six story Coke Bottle. You can tell your stories and have them become part of Coke's Digital Storytelling Theatre or just vicariously re-live all those key events in your life that revolved around Coke. When I get to the door, I decide to skip it; I don't drink Coke so why go in? I am handed a flier. Drive 30 minutes along Boulder Highway to the Ocean Spray Cranberry World for free spectacle. It says I will learn more than I care to know about cranberries. While the free samples and bakers' treats is tempting, I know I will be forced to watch the kitchen demonstration. I start thinking about spectacles that other corporations are putting on in Las Vegas. What about M&M World? It has, a 3-D movie adventure starring Red and Yellow M&M, all within a four-story shopping complex that features thousands of original M&M's brand merchandise. Nah, I gave up milk chocolate when I became a vegan; why suffer through the temptation?
I choose to drift into the Mirage. I want the experience of rebelling against their treatment of animals, and that entire artificial environment is just too much for an ecologist to pass up. I see a tropical rainforest with palm trees reaching 60 foot, a simulated cascading waterfall, artificial lagoons, and expertly sculpted tropical flowers and plants, including elephant ears and orchids. Someone next to me says" there are more than 100 different types of plants in this rainforest."
My Las Vegas appetite for spectacle addiction knows no limits. I want the experience of rebelling at the spectacle, and the occasional fun of being a player in the show. I want to participate with wild abandon, and become a character taking risks. Well, I actually don't want to use the $5 off coupon for bungee jumping or if I pay $35 to get the thrill of skydiving.
Las Vegas is the grandest, most grotesque and materialist consumption spectacle on earth. It co-opts the rebellion of carnival and the fun of festival. And we are all strippers, addicts wandering between spectacles, addicted not to drinking, gambling or sex, but to the experience of being the actor on the spectacular stage.
Las Vegasization is the ultimate spectacle of Theatres of production and consumption being distributed widely throughout the global economy. Las Vegasization is the ultimate spectacle, an amalgam of Disneyfication of visual architecture, storyboarded and themed shopping malls along with McJobs work in McDonaldized employment regimes. Las Vegasization is being distributed to the world, as cities everywhere are imitating the combination of theme park with casinos, sex industry, lots of Hollywood star power, and visual spectacle remakes of Paris, Venice, Italy, and Egypt, made more real than the real. Las Vegasization is a bait and switch game, the visual spectacle is the lure, the real game is separating you from your cash by seducing you to become an actor instead of just a spectator.
I agree with Firat and Dholakia (1998: 156-157), it is time to replace "market" with the metaphor of "Theatre." Theatre is the newest medium of economic and cultural transaction and interaction. I want to extent their link between capitalism and Theatre, but developing the theory of Theatre. I assume that theatrics co-evolves with capitalism. Las Vegas gambling and sex industries, hotel-casinos and strip clubs combine visual spectacle, fusing Disneyfication, McDonaldization, and Hollywoodization in a new visual Theatre of capitalist consumption. Las Vegasization is what Gottdiener, 1997: 4) calls "the theme milieu with its pervasive use of media culture motifs that define an entire built space increasingly characterizes not only cites but also suburban areas, shopping places, airports, recreation spaces such as baseball stadia, museums, restaurants, and amusement parks." Las Vegas is capitalism's role model for what Firat and Dholakia (1998) call the "Theatres of Consumption."
Last year (2000), a group of postmortem, sociology, philosophy, marketing, and management professors descended on Las Vegas and deconstructed everything. Our musings about how the Las Vegas Casino-hotel is the new paradigm for business, one based on the Theatre of consumption, rather than production and distribution. This year, we produced a journal issue titled "deconstructing Las Vegas" "' I had the task of roasting Mark Gottdiener, a sociologists with two books on Las Vegas (1997; Gottdiener et al., 1999). Ritzer and Stillman (2001) applied his McDonaldization critique to Las Vegas, pointing out that the new business model smashes time boundaries to create the 24/7 Theatre of consumption. From marketing Russell Belk and Fuat Firat did a postmortem take on Las Vegas consumption. Myself and other regulars at the critical postmortem track of IABD did our usual management and production critiques. I looked at the postmortem production aspects of the strip tease industry.
This chapter is structured into the Septet elements (see Scene 7).
(1)Plots
(3)Characters
(4)Themes
(5)Dialog
(6)Rhythm
(7)Frames
In Las Vegas there is also an implosion of three theatrics across these six parts, (1) ancient festival theatrics that was much more tied to seasons and nature, (2) the carnival theatrics of the Middle Ages that parodied power, and (3) spectacle theatrics, of which there is no better example than Las Vegas. The plan of the chapter is to overarch Aristotle's six elements with this trilogy of theatrics, festival, carnival and spectacle.
I shall argue that the postmortem consumed is possessed by a schizophrenic identity, a paradox of conflicting life styles. The postmortem consumer is involved in creating their own use-value and surplus value, in being a producer, and sometimes a director, of the Theatre they consume. Increasingly the consumer takes a proactive attitude towards the products they consume in another way, by becoming more aware of who makes their products, and under what conditions. The postmortem consumer jumps onto that stage of consumption spectacle being produced in Las Vegas or Disney, and assumes the role of spect-actor (spectator and actor), experimenting for a day or a weekend with a temporary lifestyle (e.g. gambler, Mouseketeer, sex god or goddess). The postmortem consumer also seeks alternative life styles, that are more earth-friendly, and more about participating in community. Finally, the postmortem consumer is engaged in acts of carnivalesque resistance to the market ideology of global capitalism.
I will argue that alternatives to spectacle, such as festival and carnival, have been coopted and appropriated in Las Vegasization. This chapter is an exploration of the hypothesis that the spectacle of consumption, particularly in Las Vegas is appropriating both festival and carnival. To explore this hypothesis, we will look at Aristotle six parts of dramatic Theatre.
First Part: The Visual element of Spectacle, Carnival and Festival
Spectacle in its postmortem garb is a visual environment that mixes architecture styles from around the world, in a theatrical milieu that is bigger than life, more real than the original, just spectacular. Carnival and festival are also visual, but spectacle takes it to another level. Different genres of Theatre, spectacle, festival and camival, tend to emphasize different theatrical parts. Spectacle for Aristotle was ranked as the sixth part (or element), but for Las Vegas, I am moving spectacle to the top of our list. Festival would put character above all others. Carnival stresses the theme of sweet chaos and resistance to spectacle.
Progressively our daily life of production, distribution, and consumption occurs within a spectacular visual theatrical theme environment. Las Vegasization is migrating to the web with sites like e-casino. In the postmortem theatrical turn, our visual milieu includes Casino Bars, Strip Clubs on the World Wide Web, where the gambling and sex industry appears on our computer screen.
Spectacle has two meanings. First, following Aristotle, spectacle is everything you see in the Las Vegas Theatres of capitalism. It is the visual aspects, the theatrical props, costumes, make-up, lighting, and the architectural style of sets that are used inside the Casinos and along the Strip. To avoid confusion with Spectacle Theatre, we will call this the "visual part." Second, spectacle is also a genre of Theatre, and what the spectators consume in postmortem capitalism. Spectacle is both a "visual" part of the Poetics of Theatre, and it is most important in the postmortem turn of late modem capitalism.
Las Vegas stresses the theatrics of visual spectacle more than Aristotle could ever have imagined when he ranked 'spectacle' as the least important of his 'six elements.' Perhaps he would not be too alanned, since the Greek word for Theatre is "theatron," and means the "seeing place." Las Vegas is definitely the "seeing place" of all types of spectacles. Spectacle is visible everywhere in Las Vegas strip, in the advertising extravaganza, from the four-story coke bottle that houses digital Storytelling Theatre, to the indoor malls of Caesar's palace, to a theme park casino like MGM, to the simulated Egyptian tombs of Luxor, the model Eiffel tower of Paris, Paris and the sanitary canals of Venice. Las Vegas is more real than reality itself, more authentic than the original, and much tidier, more climate-controlled, and a safer vacation for the masses. Las Vegasization is the new role model of Americana, reterritorializing the shopping malls, airports, and cities that mimic Las Vegas, and become Las Vegasization.
There is an important co-evolution of capitalism and its theatrics. Once upon a time spectacle, festival and carnival were indistinguishable. Modernity separated production from consumption, and with it leisure from work. Production in the home was transformed into labor in the factory. This according to Marx, allowed the capitalist to extract and accumulate surplus value. There is in late modem, a separation of public and private consumption. Consumption in the public space (movies, dances and social gatherings), with late modernity (post-World war 11), became consumption in private spaces (television, home video, and computer games). Fiat and Dholakia (1998: 10) refer to this as more alienated consumption.