Death in Vegas: Seduction, Kitsch, and Sacrifice

Special Issue

Abstract

This paper considers the connections between pleasure and death, and the erotic force of desire which bridges them, using the work of Jean Baudrillard and Georges Bataille among others. It begins with a consideration of why people risk or desire their own annihilation, raising the issue of why Las Vegas is a place, symbolically, to which people go to die, functioning this way in particular in feature films, two of which are analysed here. The paper argues that in the valorization of the fake which becomes more real than the real, cities like Las Vegas kill the real, and are thus not sites of real pleasure or fulfilment but are mausoleums where the real is sold short. Participants in the Vegas experience participate in a spurious sense of self. The paper discusses the processes of seduction through which this is achieved, and argues that death is always present in Las Vegas because of the kitsch nature of the place, a quality of death-in-life, or living death. In the end, the only way to break through to the real is through sacrifice, a tragic endeavour involving the loss of the spurious sense of self but which may involve the loss of self altogether by risking death. Two films are analysed—one from the US and one from the UK—to illustrate how this redemptive sacrifical process may function.