Nevada nightmares

IN the opening titles of Mike Figgis's Leaving Las Vegas, the tinsel credits flicker tantalisingly over a wide shot of the city at night, a shimmer ing sliver of multi coloured light sandwiched between the blackness of desert and sky. It's a potent image which has attracted many film makers, and, in one of those, non coincidental coincidences that happen all the time in Hollywood, Vegas is the setting for three films released in the first months of this year. With Figgis's low budget romance, Martin. Scorsese's gangster epic Casino and Paul Verhoeven's much reviled Showgirls, Las Vegas seems to be to 1996 what Scotland was to 1995.

Neil Postman, in his anguished 1985 critique of the infantilisation of American culture, Amusing Ourselves to Death, bemoans Vegas's current status as the symbol of modern American society. At various points in the country's history, says Postman, the US has been represented by the revolutionary spirit of Boston, the industrial might of Chicago and the melting pot of New York. "Today, we must look to the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, as a metaphor of our national character and aspiration, its symbol a 30 foot high cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl."

Postman's lament, with its anachronistic imagery (cardboard is in the grand tradition of American puritanism, the obverse side of a coin that makes cocaine one of the country's largest industries while young adults are not allowed to buy a beer in a bar.

If Las Vegas itself is a construct of the entertainment industry, what is it in the movies? A combination of the Emerald City of the Wizard of Oz and Pottersville, the nightmare town that would have happened if Jimmy Stewart had never been born in It's A Wonderful Life, it's a place where good girls become good time girls, and simple farm boys lose their family savings at the blackjack tables. Vegas is usually represented as the last stop on the line, but the city is hundreds of miles to the east of Los Angeles, the real last stop in America's westward drive. Las Vegas is where the American Dream began to double back on itself.

In Barry Levinson's Bugsy, Warren Beatty plays the 1940s mobster credited with creating the modern Las Vegas myth as a great American dreamer. As Levinson presents it, Bugsy Siegel's folie de grandeur, the building of the ruinously expensive Flamingo Hotel in the middle of the Nevada desert, epitomised a quintessentially American notion - that through vision and sheer determination, a man (always a man) can conquer nature and impose his will on the wilderness. In reality, Siegel's partner Meyer Lansky was more prosaic: "The choice of the desert was deliberate. Once you got tourists there, after they had eaten and drunk all they could, there was only one thing left - to go gambling."

The Flamingo lost $300,000 on its gambling operations during the first two weeks of operation, breaking the founding principle of Vegas - the house never loses. Siegel's profligacy earned him a bullet in the head from his erstwhile partners, who promptly cleared four million dollars profit in their first year.

When Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack cronies Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr and Peter Lawford wanted to promote their new investments in Las Vegas in the early 1960s, they did the obvious thing - they made a movie. Ocean's Eleven is the first film that explicitly revels in the neon fantasies rising out of the desert. It's too long and self indulgent, but at least it's better than the feeble Elvis vehicle Viva Las Vegas! This was chiefly notable as the start of a long connection between Presley and the city, cemented by his comeback concerts there in the late 1960s, recorded in Denis Sanders's 1970 documentary Elvis - That's The Way It Is, and reinforced in 1992's Honeymoon in Las Vegas, where a troop of Elvis impersonators skydive over the city. It was Presley and his fans who established the long standing link between Vegas and drip dry synthetic pant suits.

Francis Ford Coppola's One From the Heart in 1982 proved to be the director's own Flamingo Hotel, a hugely expensive labour of love that bombed at the box office. Coppola, a fan of classic MGM musicals, saw Vegas as the ideal setting for a modern version, although not one frame of the film was shot there. It's an indication of one part of the city's allure for film makers - the sheer theatricality of the setting, the opportunity to shoot night scenes against all that dazzling neon. It's also attractive as the one place you can set a contemporary film without any reference to popular music of the last 30 years - smoky jazz is still king on the soundtracks of One From The Heart and Leaving Las Vegas.

Rival casinos have sprouted across the United States in the last decade, turning legal gambling into one of America's largest industries. In response to the competition, Las Vegas has reinvented itself as a family friendly theme park boasting extravagant and expensive historical tableaux. But you won't find much sign of this new Las Vegas in the current crop of movies. Scorsese has cannily set his film in the glory days of the early Seventies, when the casinos were still run by the Mafia rather than the multi nationals.

Figgis's film has Elisabeth Shue streetwalking and cruising the hotels for conventioneers, but prostitution is actually illegal in the city these days, and johns are bussed out to brothels across the county boundaries. Showgirls, ludicrously, claims to be the side of Vegas you were never meant to see but what you're really never meant to see in the movies is the grim sight of thousands of Roseanne lookalikes in bad leisurewear pumping coins into one armed bandits at three o'clock in the morning. In Adrian Lyne's abominable Indecent Proposal, Demi Moore and Woody Harrelson are the updated versions of the good girl and the farm boy. The question is: what is an Armani clad smoothie like Robert Redford doing in Las Vegas, where natural fibres are not usually a wardrobe option?

But, for film makers, the city is still the Last Resort, a place where the desperate and the damned make their final stand amidst their tattered dreams, where a roll of the dice is the difference between the penthouse and the gutter. As Mike Figgis's film makes plain, there's only one way to leave Las Vegas, and that's in a box.