BRIGHT LIGHT CITY: Las Vegas in Popular Culture by Larry Gragg (review)

As historian Larry Gragg notes in Bright Light City: Las Vegas in Popular Culture, writers view Las Vegas through their preconceptions, describing it as everything from the dank epitome of American capitalism to a democratic space of self-invention. As this suggests, Vegas is more than a city: it is a magic mirror in which Americans have understood our nation and ourselves. Befitting such a place, novelists, filmmakers, and journalists have repeatedly used Las Vegas in their work. Gragg examines these hundreds of images to understand its “extraordinary appeal” (5).

Trained as a historian of colonial and Revolutionary America, Gragg brings an appealing passion to his topic. He argues that these multiple representations shape the experiences of visitors, though there is little analysis of reception. Arranged around themes such as “images of gambling” and “images of luxury,” Gragg weaves the city’s history into discussion of the cultural images. His best chapters utilize archival sources to show how town leaders constructed its image. Decades before Caesar’s Palace, officials wooed tourists with spurious history, like the Helldorado, an annual festival of the frontier past begun in 1935. A few years later, “the chamber of commerce urged residents to wear Western clothing because the frontier theme indeed was attracting more tourists” (35). However, there is little in the remainder of the book carrying this thread because, as Gragg mentions, he is writing another book on the role of developers and others.

Colorful stories of Frank Sinatra driving a golf cart through a window and Bugsy Siegel’s death pepper the chapters, which otherwise chronicle the images he has found. However, the lack of critical analysis begins to weigh the book down. His chapter on images of women in Las Vegas, for example, begins by discussing how the city came to be known for quickie divorces in part because Ria Gable, Clark Gable’s wife, went there to happily wait out the residency requirement before divorcing him. But after this anecdote that shows how elite women had agency in determining their sexual relationships, the rest of the chapter argues that all cultural representations of women in Las Vegas simply objectified them. Certainly this can be said for most cultural representations of women, but Gragg ignores opportunities for deeper analysis of race and gender, as when he skips over a quote from a travel columnist that mentioned meeting “a buxom lass of doubtful color” (166) or when he puts his discussion of images of elderly women gamblers into another chapter. Race is another problematically unexamined topic. The African-American experience in Vegas is mentioned only in a short section near the end of the book while Latinos, Native Americans, and Asians are mainly ignored.

The book’s strength is its breadth—the sheer amount of material that Gragg has accumulated in his search for representations of Las Vegas is impressive. However, this ends up giving the book an episodic quality, as numerous examples are catalogued to support each of his themes, but none are examined with serious depth, making it seem as if all images were equally important.