Haven't we got enough to worry about? The year opened under a cloud of terror-fear, threatening New Year's festivities. Lake Mead's down 75 feet and the feds are planning to ship high-level nuclear waste through our back yards.
But once you've fried these larger fish to a crisp, don't you worry sometimes, just a little, that Las Vegas' 15 minutes might be nearly up? That we might have jumped the shark, or are, at least, flexing for the leap? That Paris might find a funner place? That Britney might get married somewhere else next time?
I got a head start troubling myself over this last fall, when Vanity Fair ran London writer A.A. Gill's withering dis, which seized upon Celine Dion's show as the centerpiece of all that is horridly tacky about Las Vegas. Remember? "Where irony just curls up and dies," Gill snickered. It made me feel like a wounded dog who wants to crawl under the porch but can't because the house is built on a concrete slab.
Or something like that. It sure got up a bunch of dander locally, although Gill said little that hasn't been said already. Long-timers are used to the rest of the world thinking our town a dollar-chip short on irony. But that's all been part of the fun, and we've played along, as long as tourists kept paying our taxes for us.
And lately—for what, maybe the last five years or so?—Las Vegas, its disparity disability notwithstanding, has been hot. It's enjoying something of a second glory age, the Rat Pack Redux, with all the young celebrities hitting the high-limit tables and cruising the clubs. Steven Soderbergh remade Ocean's Eleven, a film superior to its original by a factor of 10, easily, with Vegas playing a seductive supporting role. The city's resorts shifted the family-friendly facade behind the back lot to erect Skin City, and the clubs are packed every weekend with slickly dressed Real Life refugees.
Why, TV's most popular crime show has centered itself here and another has even taken the city's name—and without the vapid $. On the other hand, Las Vegas, righteous James Caan and all, could be our lurking hammerhead. I mean, once network prime time has found you, hasn't the shark already returned to the deep? When Vanity Fair, that astringent index of eminence, takes a gratuitous (and unironic) swipe at you, have you not had, as they say, it? Does not the hours-long marriage of a post-teen pop tart leave a farcical stain? Has not the ship left port, the horse fled the barn, Brunhilde hit her last high C, when copter-cams track a withered wraith on his post-arraignment SUV tour?
An ominous clue, perhaps, impends within the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority 2003 Visitor Profile. For the fiscal year ending last June, nearly three-quarters of the city's visitors were 40 years old or older, an increase over the previous two years, when the proportion was roughly two-thirds. An aging visitor population does not bode well for enduring popularity among the club set.
I tried to ask futurist Faith Popcorn, the Cassandra of "cocooning" and "cashing out," among other social phenomena, but two calls to her NewYork-based "Brain Reserve" elicited no interest in tracing Las Vegas' trend-line. Her website, www.faithpopcorn.com, highlights a number of trends that seem to augur well, including "Fantasy Adventure," about Americans' craving for "over-the-top" getaways, and "Pleasure Revenge," on the taste for frowned-upon indulgences. Las Vegas scratches both of those itches vigorously.
Yet these trends speak only to the enduring lures of Las Vegas, and not to this particular moment of heightened popularity, this peculiar convergence of youth, skin and cool. Still a-Web, I sought any evidence that linked our city with those cliches of closure, "fifteen minutes" and "jump shark."
The latter led me to www.jumptheshark.com, which monitors, by votes, the death knells of TV shows. Here I discovered that four voters considered Paris Hilton's appearance on Las Vegas as its shark moment. The former found me the 15 Minute Poll on the website of Pittsburgh's Andy Warhol Museum (www.warhol.org/contest/contest.asp). Here, you can vote online for whatever person or event has reached the end of its 900 seconds. Las Vegas was not listed, but "Reality Overdose" was leading "Ralph Nader" late last week, 125 to 80.
Warhol Museum director Thomas Sokolowski says the poll changes every two weeks. Las Vegas hasn't figured in it yet, but he predicts the city's current 15 minutes will end. "How can it not? [the impulse to seek novelty] isn't Warholian, it's sort of Freudian. When you're talking about entertainment ... it's all about novelty."
But Las Vegas, says Sokolowski, will always offer sex, booze and gambling and thus will never lack for attractions. When its current cachet fades, it will simply have to re-brand: Every once in a while, you make a spicy ketchup.
This makes sense: The post-Pack days brought the young boomers with their kids. The boomers, of course, laughed at their parents' Vegas, but their kids came to love its reincarnation.
"The people who market Las Vegas have always been extremely creative," says Mark Gottdiener, sociogy professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo and co-author of Las Vegas: The Social Production of the All-American City (Blackwell Publishers, 1999). Gottdiener is not in the business of predictions, but he says Las Vegas goes through phases. It's always reinventing itself.
More to the point, it's developed such a range of amusements that it will always be, to some extent, both a playground for families and a party palace for singles. Gottdiener calls it "a complex experience for people, a lot of different kinds of people. And in this, it mirrors the nation that mimics it.
A key point of Las Vegas: The Social Production of the All-American City, which Gottdiener wrote with Claudia C. Collins of the University of Nevada Cooperative Extension and David R. Dickens of UNLV's sociology department, is that the U.S. has been learning from Las Vegas since in the 1950s, says Gottdiener. Even after shark-jumping, we can console ourselves that other cities across the nation are imitating us in myriad ways, from themed redevelopment to riverboat gambling.
Perhaps that means that the phase we're in will pass when it passes nationally, when this generation of young singles grows up and moves on to new amusements. We might trace the passing of Cool Vegas to Tom and Nicole splitting, or Ben and Jen getting cold feet. But the forces at work will be largely demographic. Each generation grows up, sort of, and Vegas gets something new ready for their kids.
Do not, however, underestimate the town's ability to adapt. Gottdiener hesitates to soothsay but seems certain "there will be a new appeal coming down the road."
Will it ride a rodeo pony, or perhaps steer a well-sponsored stock car when it does? Will the World Series of Poker be its destination? Or will it be the tax-cut aristocracy, a crew not noted for craving the attention of buzz-makers and gossip columnists, that fills those gleaming new towers arising on the Strip? All of the above, most likely, along with the new family set, the former party boys and girls, their tots in tow, just like their parents before them.
After all, what happens here, stays here.