If Cheever depicts swimming pools with some caution, their nature as a heterotopian space suffused with a timely unease and idealism, the ensuing decades are less coded as to the darkness within swimming pools. In an era in which the purported meritocracy of earlier generations is replaced by a more aggressive Reaganomic free market, the utopia of the pool is now greatly distorted. Here, I make the transition from literature to film, as the ambiguities of the pool can be succinctly conveyed by the visual language of cinema. Across the 1970s and 80s, owing to the freedom of the camera, cultural depictions of the pool skewed towards the fantastical. Whilst teen films like 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off of 1986 see pools as dreamlike spaces, often playing out male sexual fantasies, grittier genre pieces such as 1982’s Poltergeist and 1984’s Gremlins depict pools specifically through the lens of suburban anxiety, the pool representing white guilt and dangerous metamorphosis respectively. These depictions are an apt premonition for the pool culture of the 1990s, in which depictions of pools revel in their own artifice and grandeur. Here, I relocate my analysis to the Mecca of artifice, Las Vegas.
Las Vegas, as with the USA’s other desert cities, has a historical preoccupation with water. Not limited to the famous Bellagio Water fountain, whose output equals that of 2000 swimming pools (although its water is chlorinated and reused), almost all of the city’s hotels feature large pools, most notably the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino, whose pools cover 6 ½ acres of land. The possibility of this aqueous extravagance in the desert of Nevada is a considerable feat of engineering: the majority of Vegas’ drinking water is sourced from Lake Mead, a reservoir created by the Colorado River. The average Vegas resident uses 219 gallons of water per day, a figure significantly higher than any other city in the USA. Water ‘powers’ the city in other senses: it was the Hoover Dam, which began construction in 1931, which created both an influx of male workers, and a need to entertain them, happily granted by the Mafia, who opened casinos and entertainment spaces. Moreover, when the dam was completed in 1935, the cheapness of electricity enabled Vegas to be lit by neon by 1937, and played a role in its unique landscape.
Moreover, akin to the water in its pools, Las Vegas as a place is itself a simulacrum. Occupied by the Southern Paiute tribe for hundreds of years, it was not ‘discovered’ until 1826 when Spanish traders began using the area as a trade route. By 1848, the United States had taken over the land, and it was only occasionally frequented until the early 1900s, when ranch worker Helen J. Stewart established a thriving community in the land. As such, the land of Las Vegas remains the ill-defined territory of the Civil War era: the Las Vegas Strip and the majority of its iconic hotels are really within Paradise, an unincorporated town established to circumvent state laws about gambling, which Nevada outlawed between 1910 to 1931. The name Paradise is itself a lexical uncertainty: paradise is a concept universally agreed upon, but it exists only in the mind of the beholder, suffused with uncertainty and interpretation. Placelessness and ambiguity is thus built into the land of Las Vegas itself. I return to Didion, who writes evocatively in ‘Marrying Absurd’:
‘Almost everyone notes that there is no “time” in Las Vegas, no night and no day and no past and no future;...neither is there any logical sense of where one is.’
The impossibility for Las Vegas to be defined by spatial, geographic or temporal totalising, as well as its ‘unnatural’ construction, shares textualities with the many pools it is home to. Las Vegas is a symbol of the almost Biblical success of manifest destiny, of the American Adam’s power to continue capitalism even in the most inhospitable environments. Yet the notion of Las Vegas as miraculous promised land jars with its ‘Sin City’ reputation as a den of 24-hour gambling, shotgun weddings, prostitution and inane extravagance. Las Vegas fits closely with Foucault’s theorisation of heterotopias as ‘display[ing] a juxtaposition of different incompatible places within one space’: it exists in the present, yet draws upon differing simulated spaces (Paris, Medieval England, Venice), offering them in a nonlinear fashion.