The Bafler - No. 69 July/August 2023

IT’S BEEN TWENTY YEARS since Las Vegas debuted “What happens here, stays here.” The slogan is a winking celebration of self-containment that, of course, has never quite been true. (Hence, perhaps, the marvelously redundant update three years ago: “What happens here, only happens here.”) If Las Vegas is, as writer and resident Amanda Fortini has written, “a place about which people have ideas”—i.e. a locale whose specificity is often ignored for received narratives—the Nevadan mecca has at this point also sublated into an idea in and of itself. A beacon “more brighter than the sun,” to quote the Cocteau Twins’s “Heaven or Las Vegas,” the city’s icons and ethos are unbounded by geography and suffuse the rest of the country, if not the world.