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Popular Culture Review
destructive immaturity, sexual impotency, infidelity, and deification of Sera into
his “Angel.” All of this, including Sera, is part and parcel of the masculine death
drive that begins in the Hollywood of Los Angeles and ends in virtual reality of
Las Vegas.
The critique of Ben’s dead-end masculinity, as well as the associated
critique of woman as spectacular simulacrum and Hollywood’s relationship to it,
is extended through the character of Yuri (Julian Sands), Sera’s Russian pimp.
At first Yuri’s role as the bad pimp who extorts and beats his woman seems to
contrast with Ben’s role as the boyishly lovable John who just can’t get it
together to save the woman he loves. Beneath the cliched roles that suggest a
reassuring difference, however , there are disturbing similarities. Yuri, like Ben,
has left Los Angeles and come to Las Vegas to die. Because of their destructive
self-absorption, whether it is the man who sells her or the man who buys her,
neither can protect her, let alone love her. Despite the overt hypocrisy and
cruelty of Yuri, the viewer has to wonder if Ben is any better especially because
of the narrative sequencing. In an apparent effort to end the relationship because
Sera has started to put “demands” on him, Ben sleeps with another woman in
Sera’s apartment. This precedes, and seems to indirectly cause, her brutal rape
by three of those younger visitors whose business Las Vegas hotels so eagerly
seek.
It is also at this point that the movie’s critique of the simulacrum
becomes more explicit. The youths, before beating and raping Sera, are busy
trying to film her with a hand-held video camera because, they say, it is the first
time for one of them. Outside of the video frame when Sera talks back—
basically telling them they should go screw themselves—she exposes the lie
behind this spectacle of homosocial bonding. Ben and Uri’s attitude towards
Sera, the fantasy object, reflects an older and, in some ways, safer form of
reification that is ultimately represented by Hollywood and film. The youths, on
the other hand, represent the emerging reality of Las Vegas and video. There is a
qualitative difference between the two, but central to both is their inhumanity;
and, the more benign form of Ben and Yuri’s inhumanity cannot protect Sera
from the inhumanity of the new video-wdelding rat pack. Furthermore, if we
think of Yuri as the purveyor and Ben as the consumer of Sera—^the dream girl
made real, or, that perfect copy of an original that never existed—then it is a
small step from the fantasies Yuri pimps to those that Ben and other Hollywood
writers sell.
Unlike the dramatic tragedy of Leaving Las Vegas, which buries Ben’s
Oedipal complex under heavy layers of uncertainty, the romantic comedy
Honeymoon in Vegas presents it openly, almost cheerfully, at the film’s
beginning as the motive for the complicating action that follows. The hero. Jack
Springer (Nicholas Cage), is tenderly visiting his mother in a hospital bed. She
asks him never to marry since he’ll never find a girl to love him as she does.