With this weekend, capped by the Running of the Calendar Girls, one of the country's best-recognized brands buys into Vegas. I've come ostensibly to observe how Hooters has rebranded the San Remo, although as I enter from the parking garage and step uncertainly onto blonde wood, I realize I am without reference, never having set foot in either the San Remo, that tired-looking little hotel you whisked past on the way to McCarran, or a Hooters anywhere. But I assumed I knew the brand before entering the casino. The wood floors, I learn later, are trademark. Even the ductwork above terminates in orange domes. (Two years ago, in a Baltic Sea resort outside Gdansk, Poland, my hungry wife insisted we settle for a place called "Roosters" because it seemed to have American food. And it did: soggy spaghetti served by young women in athletic shorts and tight, logo-printed tops. That was as close as I'd come to a Hooters.) his or her own impresario. And then someone else will speak.
Mostly I am at Hooters Hotel and Casino because I have found myself probing the boundaries between branding and identity, and Hooters going Vegas seems like a forum on the topic. Are these "girls," bikini-bound in the calendar they will sign if you buy it, really "Hooters?" Oh sure, Hooterary through Babeuary, each works in a Hooters somewhere, but is that what they are? Or do they play the role, work the brand up the pageant ladder into hoped-for "success?" As what, and who? Are their "real" identities jealously guarded, with so much invested in the bargain of satisfying that most basic scrutiny? And what do they—or we—select from the smorgasbord of brands and branding opportunities, from chatroom avatars to famous-DJ ring tones, from Prada shades to Gucci shoes, from sports teams to ribboned causes to vanity license plates? How much of identity is self-branding, assembling your projected identity from the myriad selections, and how much are brands a shaper of self, or selves? Is it true, as some argue, that we are the sums of our labeled selves? And what does it mean to assemble an identity in a city without one? It's not that Las Vegas has no identity, of course—it is a brand unto itself. Several, really. But it is a city whose central narrative is a century of luring people to a lie in the desert, whose citizens nearly all came from somewhere else to buy into their corner of the story. In a world in which you no longer need to be anywhere, where else? In a world devoted to you, your attention and satisfaction, where better? his or her own impresario. And then someone else will speak.
It has become a commonplace of thinking about Las Vegas that it is a paradigm, if the not the paradigm, of 21st-century America, from the staking of prosperity on service and entertainment, to the patterns of its residential development. In their 1999 book, Las Vegas: The Social Production of the All-American City, authors Mark Gottdiener, sociology professor at SUNY-Buffalo, Claudia C. Collins of the University of Nevada Cooperative Extension, and UNLV sociology professor David R. Dickens observe that Las Vegas exaggerates the suburban and exurban development that typifies most American metro regions. Cities have always betrayed lines of class segregation, but in Las Vegas, "locationally distinct uneven development" means that when people arrive here, they disperse into discrete enclaves. Poorly paid service workers melt into the "notorious 89109 zip code," while middle- and upper-class emigrés buy into master-planned communities in Green Valley and Summerlin. his or her own impresario. And then someone else will speak.
"People's conception of where they live and allegiance to their neighborhoods has become increasingly fragmented as the entire region underwent rapid suburban development," the authors conclude. "Thus, construction of highly differentiated communities within the Las Vegas region has replaced a general, unifying Las Vegas identity with more localized conceptions ... Many of the planned developments actively promote this separation from the Las Vegas regional identity ..." his or her own impresario. And then someone else will speak.
So as the nation grows more mobile, the notion of community becomes increasingly localized, down to your master-planned development, which you might care about as long as you're there. Tribal communities of a sort gather in the ether of the Web, as isolated individuals butt heads or share secrets through blogs and forums such as MySpace.com. But a similarly abstract kind of community, comprising people from around the Las Vegas Valley, congeals around certain iconic moments—I'm thinking specifically of moments of shared sorrow, testifying perhaps to a need for urban belonging that some of us cannot overcome. I think of it as the small town obscured by the expanding, soulless assemblage of walled developments. It is small at least in the population, native and other, that takes seriously the idea of Las Vegas as a town—if only in moments when news intrudes to shatter the idea. It might be the city's most enduring illusion. his or her own impresario. And then someone else will speak.
•••
The week of Hooters' opening, Las Vegas got an unsettling taste of cosmopolitan life with the shooting death of Sgt. Henry Prendes, the first Las Vegas police officer slain in the line of duty in 17 years. Thousands packed Henderson's Central Christian Church for Prendes' February 7 funeral, while an overflow crowd observed the proceedings by video in another room at the church. A woman who brought her two children by stroller to Palm Memorial Park for Prendes' burial told the Review-Journal why she was moved to attend: "I felt like I knew him after I watched that funeral on TV." Las Vegas might constitute the 48th-and-growing television market, but its television news covers live the cortege and funeral of a murdered police officer. Typifying the reaction, KLAS-TV's anchors dressed in mourning and devoted almost the entire evening newscast to the funeral.
This isn't typical of larger, cosmopolitan cities, of course. In Palo Alto, California, police officer Richard May was gunned down on January 7. As with Prendes, thousands turned out for the funeral. But not everyone: "No TV stations in the Bay Area have ever covered any cop funeral in its entirety live," San Francisco Chronicle reporter Henry K. Lee, who covered the funeral, tells me via e-mail. They might have a live shot with a reporter, "assuming the newscast occurred at the time of the funeral."
As for Prendes' funeral, "I was quite honestly surprised at that outpouring," says Bruce Mendelsohn, spokesman for the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund in Washington, D.C. "But people who aren't in really tight-knit communities [don't understand] that the whole community really bands together" after the slaying of a police officer. Las Vegas, tight-knit community.
While it grieved over Prendes, Las Vegas also was absorbed by the miserable tale of a 3-year-old girl whose body had been found in a Dumpster in early January. When Crystal Figueroa's identity was discovered on February 24, and her mother and the mother's boyfriend were arrested for her murder, the Metro detective who managed the case commented, "Now our angel has a name, and that's a wonderful thing."
It was, of course, but the R-J's John L. Smith was moved to draw an unpleasant comparison. Noting the massive memorial that had accrued around the spot where the girl's body had been found, Smith was struck by the utter absence of one where gangland bullets had claimed a 12-year-old boy on January 15, three days after Crystal Figueroa's death. "The boy's name was Gregory Adams, and his only crime was trying to grow up in a bone-poor street gang shooting gallery. His story was forgotten even before he died of his wounds at University Medical Center."
And what, really, marked a difference in the two cases? Nine years of childhood? The Dumpster? Or was it identity? Perhaps the idea of a nameless child, discarded like trash, was too much for a city whose name is known worldwide but whose identity is uncertain even to those who live in it.
•••
"Identity" is a slippery term. It can refer to your literal identification—your papers, please—and to your personality. In the postcolonial world, it shapes "identity politics," at the core of which is the assumption that people of mixed or non-European ancestry need to assert a cultural identity against the hegemony of Western ideals. (This was big in the 1980s and 1990s, when the walls of art galleries sagged under the weight of self-declaring testaments, and art magazines bulged with blather about "The Other.")
Identity also describes the way you separate your selfhood from that of everyone else—from your family, from your community, from the world at large. At the same time, increasingly it is a matter of who and what you "identify with," in the cant phrase of pop psychology. The most perplexing irony of contemporary life might be that the more we focus on individual identity, the more we bind identity to other things and people. Once we sublimated the self in large, extended families tied to distinct communities, but we have freed the self from those associations, only to bind it to more abstract tribal fellowships. It is as if we have arrived at the center of the self, only to find, in Gertrude's oft-quoted remark about Oakland, California, "no there there."
In many ways this is a peculiarly American phenomenon. From the earliest days, people came to this land in flight from rigorously organized communal oppression, the top-down rule of kings and popes. Alexis de Tocqueville, the famed French chronicler of the early 19th-century America, noted the resulting individualistic strain to the American character. Although he celebrated American freedom and equality, he saw the two in tension, with efforts to support the one ever threatening the other—individual liberty inevitably revealed the inequalities among people, but attempts to level those inequalities ultimately restrained freedom.
It is easy to see how Tocqueville's Democracy in America is claimed by both political poles in this country, as Roger Kimball noted in reviewing a new translation of the work for The New Criterion in 2000. More important, Tocqueville saw that the individual's restless quest for material well-being could easily decline into mere materialism. Against this, as Kimball was eager to observe, Tocqueville posited religion, the spiritual anchor that would preserve Americans from materialism. Prescient as he was about many things, Tocqueville could not have predicted that Americans would manage to conflate piety and consumption, simultaneously marketing religion and investing goods and services with quasi-spiritual value.
Jean Baudrillard, the French theorist who made "simulacra" a household word, at least in intellectual households, noted the spiritual dimension of consumption in his book Passwords: "... [I]sn't everything always decided at the level of a symbolic exchange ... symbolic exchange has always been at the radical base of things, and that it is on that level that things are decided."
In this regard, we are like members of pre-modern "potlatch" societies, Baudrillard argues, investing meaning in objects and their exchange—except that we don't experience the spiritual dimension of exchange that such tribes did. Instead, the meaning we find in the goods and services we consume amounts to little more than the trumpeting of self. What Thorstein Veblen described as "conspicuous consumption" a century ago has become conspicuous identification. We define ourselves by what we buy—the (literal) labels we wear, the cars we drive and the messages with which we adorn them to proclaim our proclivities: "Support the troops," "My child is an honor student," "How Am I Driving? Dial 1-800-EAT-SHIT." By these tokens you shall know me.
•••
"Branding," too is a ticklish term. At heart, it means the way companies establish their goods and services in the minds of consumers, through design and marketing. A catchy slogan, a lively logo, association with celebrities or athletes—by these tokens you shall buy them. It's nothing new, of course. Some manufacturers positioned their products as the exemplars of luxury—Cadillac, Tiffany—while others proudly addressed middle-class sensibilities—Chevrolet, Timex. And between them, a range of products offered consumers ways to assert distinction, to prove they've moved up in the world by driving home in Buick, say, or turning the wrist to display a Bulova.
But the word most associated with "brand" was "loyalty," the idea that a product was so well-made, or such a bargain for the money, or that it so neatly encapsulated a consumer's self-image that he or she stuck with it. Sometimes loyalty was born of marketing. Cigarettes, after all, are just tobacco and paper, and brands needed to attract and keep consumers with promises of "smoothness" or "taste," or by linking their smokes to movie stars or ballplayers.
But, as writer James Surowiecki observed in Wired in 2004, old-fashioned brand loyalty has given way to the informed consumer, whose sense of quality and bargain have too long been underestimated by marketers. But he acknowledged that purchases are not entirely guided by good sense: "If once upon a time customers married brands—people who drove Fords drove Fords their whole lives—today they're more like serial monogamists who move on as soon as something sexier comes along."
Around the time Surowiecki wrote those words, as the country was selecting between well-marketed candidates for president, PBS aired a Frontline program titled "The Persuaders," which examined the sophistication of contemporary branding and marketing. Focus groups help corporations and candidates learn what picky consumers want. Some marketers even use brain MRI's to track what excites or disgusts consumers, the program pointed out. But its subtext was that marketers and campaign consultants are not responding to informed consumers. Rather, they have found new, sometimes insidious, ways to manipulate consumer needs and wants.
"What consumers want now is an emotional connection," the CEO of advertising giant Saatchi & Saatchi, Kevin Roberts, told Frontline. "They want to be able to connect with what's behind the brand, what's behind the promise. They're not going to buy simply rational." Roberts authored a popular book, Lovemarks, about making emotional connections.
One of the effects of plying these emotional connections is social fragmentation. A nation of confirmed individualists finds itself marketed to on a nearly individual basis—micromarketing. With so many varied means of reaching consumers and voters, marketers and campaigners appeal to the emotions of smaller and smaller groups, making a single brand or candidate mean different things to different individuals. Ohio State law professor Peter Swire succinctly summed up the danger:
"Instead of being Americans, we're sliced into 70 demographic groups. We might be sliced into hundreds of subcategories under that. And then the worry is that we don't share anything as a people. Some people think that democracy was enhanced in the three-network world that we grew up in, or four networks, because we were all watching the same shows. We all saw Gilligan's Island, and we all saw Walter Cronkite, and that way, as Americans, we shared certain things. Today, if there's 500 channels and five million websites, maybe we're not going to share so much as Americans. Maybe we'll lose the sense that we're all in this together."
•••
Las Vegas might be the 21st-century paradigm of what Swire described. "The community aspects simply are not here," says UNLV sociology professor Robert Parker. "It's not a city, it's a metropolitan statistical area."
And its most familiar statistic might be the most telling: 9,000 in, 3,000 out every month. As author and former Nevada Arts Council director William L. Fox noted in his book, The Desert of Desire: "This demographic fluidity does not inculcate a deep attachment to place, much less a willingness to donate a large percentage of one's income to local cultural amenities."
Parker scoffs at the idea of Las Vegas celebrating its centennial last year: "Give me a break. This city's been here since about 1980." All other obstacles to civic identity aside, that's simply not enough time "to put a community together." Still, the city is not without identity. "It's probably one of the most well-known identities in the world," says Parker. But it's an identity shaped by tourists, not by locals.
Writing in the journal Ecumene in 1999, University of Miami geography professor Jan Nijman observed how his hometown, Amsterdam, has seen its identity as a sober haven for tolerance morph into another identity altogether, as a no-holds-barred haven for "moral permissiveness." Much like Las Vegas, Amsterdam consciously markets itself as place to cut loose—and unlike Las Vegas, it officially tolerates marijuana and prostitution.
With no Golden Age like Amsterdam's, no "local culture" to uproot, is Las Vegas simply the Mecca of image-mongering? (Fox notes that the city outdraws the Hajj nowadays.)
Maybe. Still, it's clear that some people live, and stay, here. They leave toys at an impromptu shrine to a discarded baby, they turn out en masse (or in their living rooms) for the funeral of a murdered policeman. They work in casinos or build houses, go to church and send their kids to school. They shop at Vons or Albertsons, eat at Denny's. Or Hooters. And they might have more in common with their 38 million annual visitors than most people suspect.
"If you look at the demographics, the majority of them are middle-America," says Richard Langlois, senior vice president of marketing for Hooters hotel-casino. Hooters' market research indicated that the basic Vegas visitor is the same as its own, the 60 million people who eat at the 380 Hooters restaurants around the country. It's the NASCAR crowd, the National Finals Rodeo fans, he says. "We brought to Las Vegas a piece of what they enjoy back home." Langlois identifies that as "wholesome sex appeal—it's not intimidating."
Hooters has had no problem, and Langlois anticipates no problem, keeping the former San Remo's 700 rooms full. It doesn't hurt that you can book a room at your favorite Hooters restaurant. And, he says, "the walk-in business has been incredible ... exceeding our expectations."
Perhaps Hooters has brought Las Vegas—the real Las Vegas—to Las Vegas.