print January 1996

Lost Los Vegas

IS IT JUST A COINCIDENCE that Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls, Mike Figgis’ Leaving Las Vegas, and Martin Scorsese’s Casino, three would-be down-and-dirty 1995 Hollywood tributes to lost Vegas, all went into production at more or less the moment when, led by the refurbished MGM Grand Hotel, America’s fastest-growing metropolis began promoting itself as the new Orlando? Lost Vegas became Vegasland, a wholesome middle-American theme-park resort or, as Nick Tosches calls it in his intro to the recently published, elegiac anthology Literary Las Vegas, “a corporate-run nightmare draped in the cotton candy

print November 1995

a New Contract with America

BY THE TIME A JURY of his peers declared O.J. Simpson not guilty last month, his long-running “first”(?) trial had cost California taxpayers upwards of $8.3 million while generating programming so astonishingly popular it supported several cable channels for most of 1995. The afternoon soaps, meanwhile, lost more than a million households since the beginning of the trial.

Talk about your state-subsidized art. More than a trial-of-the-century event or a sociosemiotic sign fest, the O.J . show was a cultural dynamo—spinning off all manner of new stars, celebs, and entrepreneurs, not to mention a

print December 1995

J. Hoberman

☝ PAID PARADISE

Atom Egoyan’s EXOTICA unfolds in several sites at once—most spectacularly in the eponymous table-dance emporium. The main attraction in this mock harem of Roman pillars and potted palms is the enigmatic Christina—lithe, solemn, and dressed in a schoolgirl’s uniform—who wanders out under the blue lights and breaks into a slow-motion, spastic performance, raising her tartan skirt and gyrating to Leonard Cohen’s sepulchral drone. This ceremonial performance informs a series of repeated set pieces, connected by dreamy sound bridges and interspersed with flashbacks. The narrative inches

print April 1995

Talk Radio

BEFORE THERE WAS CYBERSPACE, there was the logosphere—as Gaston Bachelard dubbed the world-enveloping “ionized layer” of the babble transmitted on the radio. For the early century’s avant-garde, radio promised a new common language, a unified consciousness, Whitman’s Body Electric: it was the “immensification of space. . . . No longer visible and framable the stage becomes universal and cosmic” (F. T. Marinetti). If it were possible to broadcast music, some reasoned, why not refined sensations of taste? “People will drink water and think they are drinking wine” (Velimir Khlebnikov).

As sound,

print January 1995

the Election Season

THE DELIGHTFUL TRUISM that sign supersedes that which is signified, and, consequently, that image rules in America, received additional support during the unusually self-conscious midterm election. This time around, the most popular political special-effect was the morph that transformed Democratic congressional candidates, despite their best efforts, into a sinister image of President Bill Clinton. Late ’94 was a political season when the likelihood of the comprehensive national medical plan that was to be the Clinton administration’s chef d’oeuvre vanished even as NBC’s high-powered hospital

print December 1994

FILM

RICHARD FLOOD

High Travoltage
Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs was a perfect little movie. It aspired to nothing that it didn’t do, brilliantly. Tarantino knew how to keep the camera moving while the actors tossed their lines like they were grenades: he fast-forwarded the gangster genre way past the previous innovations of Brian DePalma and Martin Scorsese. Reservoir Dogs was wildly funny, unremittingly brutal, and heroically human. It also knew how to stay small while trying out some big ideas.

Pulp Fiction is an imperfect big movie. But imperfection has seldom felt so liberatingly giddy. The

print October 1994

Catch-22 Redux

ACCORDING TO THE MAD bureaucratic premise of Joseph Heller’s World War II novel Catch-22, a bomber pilot—such as the book’s antihero, John Yossarian—might be relieved from active duty by claiming insanity, were it not for the fact that the attempt to avoid further missions itself proved the pilot’s sanity.

Part theater of the absurd, part Phil Silvers sitcom, Catch-22 added a concept to the American vernacular and a word to the dictionary: “a difficult situation or problem whose seemingly alternative solutions are logically invalid.” Scarcely a week goes by when the phrase is not invoked by

print Summer 1994

the Summer of '69

“THERE WAS A MELANCHOLY to the end of a century,” Norman Mailer sighed in his paean to the space race, Of a Fire on the Moon. “The French, who were the first to specify a state for every emotion, would speak of the fin de siècle. It was the only name to give his own mood, for Aquarius [as Mailer was calling himself] was in a depression which would not lift for the rest of the summer, a curious depression full of fevers, forebodings, and a general sense that the century was done—it had ended in the summer of 1969.” Yes, with a portrait of Aquarius on the cover of Life magazine.

For those going

print April 1994

Jawsⁿ

INHUMAN, UNSLEEPING, omnivorous, a machine triggered by the scent of blood. . . . It was with Jaws that the culture industry truly began to contemplate itself.

Twenty years ago this month, a week before Steven Spielberg’s movie went into production on Martha’s Vineyard using three mechanical sharks—collectively nicknamed “Bruce”—powered with pneumatic engines and launchable by a 65-foot catapult, The New York Times Magazine ran a detailed analysis of “the making of a best-seller.” The article tracked the development of the novel Jaws, from Peter Benchley’s initial one-page outline

print January 1994

Marilyn Monroe

MARILYN MONROE, OUR FAVORITE goddess, was born to bridge the gap between life and death, innocence and experience, high culture and low. This fall alone, while the New York Opera was celebrating its golden anniversary with the world premiere of an opera based on her last day, the USA cable-TV network was screening yet another scurrilous docudrama, Marilyn and Bobby: Her Final Affair. Just business as usual: Monroe’s image graced the first issue of Playboy (December 1953) even as Willem de Kooning was painting his own Marilyn, 1954.

This year, devotees can celebrate the 40th anniversary of Marilyn’s

print November 1993

the Dallas/Houston Complex

Issued a dogtag (hey neat) on entering kindergarten, I always assumed the Bomb would fall during the school day. For years, each time a teacher was interrupted by the ominous cracking of the public address system, I routinely wondered—was this It? And so, when the disembodied voice of a high-school principal disrupted geometry to announce that the president had been shot, I experienced a thrill of vindicated relief. The catastrophe had happened—or, at least, a version of it—yet I was still alive!

OK, I admit it. I wonder if the many commemorations of the 30th anniversary of the day I learned the

print October 1993

SOCIAL REALISM FROM STALIN TO SOTS

Scientific socialism is the most religious of all religions.
—Anatoli Lunacharsky, 1907

The proletariat keeps away from those gloomy and tedious personalities who fear laughter, joking, gaiety, and joie de vivre. For the beauty of Socialist art is the beauty of the fight which millions and again millions are waging under the leadership of the genius Stalin. It is a strong and heroic beauty which pictures the stormy course of events, yet does not sweep the artist away, but uplifts his ideas and brings strength to his arm and courage to his heart.
—Sergei Dinamov, 1937

THE BEAUTY (or is it the