Lecture date: 2000-11-10
Las Vegas has, historically, encoded the vicissitudes of the American attitude toward the city, an attitude whose surface evolution can be tracked through several decades of films set in the desert city. Learning from Las Vegas framed the city a certain way; but I argue that a relation of Hollywood to Vegas goes deeper than their accidental co-history and their current economic entanglements. Las Vegas is a cipher of global capitalist opposition to the city (Disneys difference from Vegas is discussed here). But Vegas also remakes space (in the way Lacan describes in Seminar VII) by exploiting certain unexpected properties of film.
Juliet Flower MacCannell, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at UC Irvine, is the author of Figuring Lacan; The Regime of the Brother; and The Hysterics Guide to the Future Female Subject. She founded (a): the journal of culture and the unconscious, published by the California Psychoanalytic Circle, which she co-chairs.
