Believing Las Vegas

What may be the emblematic Las Vegas moment occurred almost half a century ago. Oddly enough, it happened 1,400 miles from the Strip, but that's part of what makes the moment emblematic: Las Vegas has never been a location so much as a state of mind.

At least the moment involved Elvis Presley, who holds a place of high honor in the Vegas pantheon, right up there with Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack, Liberace, Wayne Newton, Siegfried and Roy, and Celine Dion, who's currently packing them in 200 nights a year at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace.

On Dec. 4, 1956, Elvis stopped by Sun Records, in Memphis, where Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis were recording. Later, Johnny Cash showed up. Thus was born the Million Dollar Quartet, an impromptu gathering of the gods. Celine gets a top ticket of $225. Imagine what Caesars could have charged for them.

At one point, Elvis described a recent visit to Las Vegas, where he'd heard Billy Ward and the Dominoes. The group's repertoire included ''Don't Be Cruel," performed by lead singer Jackie Wilson. ''He sung the hell out of the song," marveled Elvis, who declared Wilson's version superior to his own. To demonstrate the point, Elvis (in Memphis) imitated Wilson (in Vegas) imitating Elvis (on vinyl).

What makes this such a Vegas moment is the way it illustrates the fundamental condition to which the city aspires: the abolition of category. In his rendition of Jackie Wilson's version of ''Don't Be Cruel," we hear Elvis collapsing together black and white, recorded and live, here and there, past and present. Las Vegas eagerly elides them all, too, just as it does profit and loss, day and night, reality and illusion, nature and artifice. It's the city's special genius: There's no need to split the difference when you refuse to recognize a difference. ''Vive la difference!" say the French. ''Viva Las Vegas!" say Americans.

How could we not? Vegas, which this year celebrates the 100th anniversary of its founding, is the most American place on the planet. Ronald Reagan, who played four weeks at the Frontier in 1954, liked to describe America as a shining city on a hill. Vegas is a shining city in a valley. (Hills offer less acreage for development.) It thrives on a uniquely made-in-the-USA mix of excess, can-do spirit, and intense awareness of man's inherent fallibility. ''There are no places that better capture the spirit of American culture, for better or worse, than Las Vegas," says Marc Cooper, author of ''The Last Honest Place: Paradise and Perdition in the New Las Vegas."

Cooper makes that statement in ''Las Vegas: An Unconventional History," a two-part ''American Experience" documentary. Part one, ''Sin City," airs on WGBH tomorrow at 9 p.m., and part two, ''American Mecca," Tuesday at 9 p.m.

Cooper is among the talking heads interviewed in the documentary. Others include casino magnate Steve Wynn, film scholar David Thomson, art critic Dave Hickey, and author Nicholas Pileggi. The documentary, which was produced and directed by Stephen Ives, recounts the Las Vegas story in more or less chronological fashion, interspersing the historical narrative with brief contemporary segments on representative locals: a hotel chambermaid, a minister who's officiated at 37,000 weddings, a rancher, a realtor, a dancer/bartender, a compulsive gambler, an aspiring blackjack dealer, and so on.

One of the strengths of the documentary is its awareness that while the Strip may be what makes Las Vegas the most visited place on earth, it's not what makes it the fastest-growing US city or the nation's fifth-largest school district. It's a place where people come to live as well as go to indulge, and the nuts-and-bolts sociology of Las Vegas is every bit as astonishing as its anything-goes mythology.

Not that ''Las Vegas: An Unconventional History" stints on the mythology. The recurring aerial shots of the Strip at night are stunning, but no less so than the vintage footage, which is abundant. The annual Miss Atomic Bomb Beauty Contest, sponsored by the Sands, has to be seen to be disbelieved. And there's even a glimpse of US senator John F. Kennedy getting up to take a bow at a Rat Pack performance. Kennedy's image is blurred because the camera stayed focused on Frank and company. The cameraman -- no fool he! -- knew where the real action was.

Discovered by the Spanish in the early 18th century, the Las Vegas Valley was an oasis in the Mojave. The Mormons built a small fort there in 1855. Las Vegas's relatively central location between Utah and Southern California made it an ideal watering station when the San Pedro, Los Angeles, and Salt Lake Railroad was built at the beginning of the last century. Railroad gave birth to city. Already one can see how Las Vegas turns the natural order of things on its head.

Nevada being Nevada, gambling was present in Las Vegas from the beginning. It wasn't until after World War II that the city took off, though, thanks largely to the financial backing of organized crime. Another factor in Vegas's growth was the show business contacts the mob maintained. Big names in the big rooms made for big business on casino floors. Las Vegas's proximity to the Nevada Test Site also helped. The flash of nuclear blasts was visible on the Strip, 65 miles away. Legalized gambling, top-name entertainment, mushroom clouds: It was an irresistible package.

So Vegas flourished as a kind of sump hole for the American id: a wide-open town of slot machines and neon, gangsters and showgirls, prizefights and all-you-can-eat everything. Yet depravity appeals to a narrower demographic than leisure does. Without ever jettisoning its cheerful traffic in vice, Vegas began to evolve into a more conventional -- and, ultimately, even more profitable -- destination resort.

The place began to change in 1966. Caesars, the first themed hotel-casino, opened, and Howard Hughes, whose own weirdness made Vegas's pale by comparison, began buying up casinos. Hughes, with some not-inconsiderable help from the Justice Department, was the key figure in initiating the transition from mob Vegas to corporate Vegas, a transition completed when Wynn opened the Mirage hotel and casino in 1989. The Mirage drastically upped the ante on themed hotel-casinos, ushering in a new era of opulence (and profitability).

Unfortunately, the documentary tries to have it both ways with Vegas. Piggybacking on the city's flash and excitement, it nonetheless keeps itself aloof. The repetition of slow-motion and high-speed shots of the Strip becomes tedious, as do such heavy-handed touches as hearing Tony Bennett singing ''The Good Life" over slow-motion footage of the Dunes casino being imploded.

As narrator, actor Michael Murphy feels miscast. He lacks the requisite gusto for the material. Did anyone put in a call to Billy Crystal? Tony Danza? Jiminy Glick? Murphy maintains a slightly pained tone throughout, as if fearful that all this talk of living it up is unworthy of PBS. Worthiness can be a tricky issue, though. Among the underwriters for the documentary are the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors' Authority and the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. Caesar's wife must be above suspicion -- but not, apparently, in the vicinity of Caesars.

Still, it's only fitting that a documentary about Las Vegas should have a somewhat complaisant attitude toward propriety. ''This is a city where the only currency is currency," says Cooper. It's also a city that itself specializes in having it both ways -- once again, abolishing categories -- in this case, the thrill of the illicit with the reassurance of the domestic.

Anyone who thinks otherwise wasn't watching ''The Tonight Show" on May 19, 2004. Jay Leno was on his most unctuous best behavior. He'd landed a very big guest, Laura Bush, who'd been in Las Vegas the night before. Jay couldn't resist this opening (not that Laura wanted him to). Putting on his most respectful impish leer, he asked, ''Did you pull a slot machine? Did you go to a Chippendales show?" The audience tittered. The first lady of the land had her answer ready. ''Jay," she said, smiling with all her former-librarian sweetness, ''what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas." The audience roared.

What is art?

A city is defined as much by its art as by its boundaries. That's especially true of a city like Las Vegas, which prides itself on an absence of boundaries -- or at least limits.

Of course, art can take surprising forms in the casinos' shadow. It's as likely to be a gaudy ribbon of road as a painting, a vocational school as a symphony. Here are 10 works of art, however broadly construed, that help define Las Vegas.

There are many strips in the world: Sunset Strip, strip malls, stripteases, strip-searches, strip steaks, strip poker -- and not a few of them have some relevance to the Strip. Still, the only strip that requires a definite article is the thoroughfare whose official name is South Las Vegas Boulevard, Nevada state highway 604. Most of the Strip's 4-mile length isn't even in Las Vegas proper (a ''proper" Las Vegas, now there's a thought), but rather in the adjoining township of Paradise. What better location for the most essential part of Las Vegas than a place called Paradise?

Just 30 miles from Las Vegas, the dam is its spiritual counterweight -- rigid, austere, serene -- a restraining solid against the city's giddy void. In its supremely functional way, the dam's magnificent Deco bulk outdoes even the Strip as a spectacle. That, and it's the power source of the Strip's spectacle. The electricity generated by the mighty Hoover turbines is what keeps all that neon from being so many unlit miles of gas, glass, and metal.

This 1991 biopic about gangster Bugsy Siegel is really more about Los Angeles than Las Vegas (and even more about Warren Beatty's ego). But it puts up on the screen two crucial aspects of the Las Vegas story: how much the idea of the place preceded the actuality, and how important the mob was to making the idea actual.

Englishman meets mad dogs, as Coward goes out into the midday sun -- and pockets $15,000 a week for performing each night at the Desert Inn. Mass met class -- but class is a relative term. In his diary, Coward described his audiences as ''masses of earnest morons flinging their money down the drain."

Yes, it's cheesy. Yes, it has that ricky-tick guitar. Yes, the rhythm section plays a kind of amphetamine mariachi. So? Note all those yeses. This is a song sung completely in the affirmative. It's an anthem, and what it affirms better than anything else ever has is the simultaneous silliness and allure of that ''bright-lights city."

It's 1966, and Frank is past his peak -- not much past, but enough so that you can hear his artistry congealing into shtick. Even accompanied by the Basie band, Sinatra sounds bloated and suffers from a quasi-imperial self-regard. The man's metaphorical tux has grown a mite too tight in the cummerbund. But that's the whole coo-coo, ring-a-ding point: Vegas has made it, Jack.

The concept of Las Vegas can be embraced or rejected as one sees fit, but that it is a concept must be acknowledged for any fruitful discussion of the city to take place. Which is what Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour's landmark work of architectural criticism did in 1972.

What is it about Vietnam, artistic burnout, and Las Vegas? After ''Apocalypse Now," Francis Ford Coppola made ''One From the Heart." After ''Dispatches," Michael Herr wrote ''The Big Room." His 1986 book is a meditation, at once sorrowful and awe-struck, on the thrill and nullity that is showbiz, an enterprise that is to Vegas as its very distant kin, salvation, is to the Vatican.

It's easy to forget that Las Vegas is a place where people live as well as visit. Its residents, especially those who are union members, can attain a very different kind of American dream from the one sought by tourists. Founded in 1993, the Culinary Training Academy is a job-training school run by Culinary Workers Local 226 and completely funded by hotel management. The academy teaches hospitality workers how to improve their skills and get higher-paying jobs. It's Vegas's love of the big score seen at its best. ''If you want to get rich, make little people feel like big people," said legendary casino owner Benny Binion. If you want to get even richer, make poor people into middle-class people.

There is the perfect simplicity of the name ''CSI: Crime Scene Investigation." Of course a series with that name would be set in Las Vegas. Isn't the city simply one big crime scene (it's just that some crimes are considered illegal as well as immoral)? Conversely, there is the ease with which the series has spun itself off geographically. ''Law & Order," the other big network franchise, is unthinkable outside New York, and its various permutations have all remained in the five boroughs. By contrast, there is a ''CSI: Miami," a ''CSI: NY" . . . and maybe someday a ''CSI: Salt Lake" or ''CSI: Sioux Falls." What happens in Vegas doesn't have to stay in Vegas, because Vegas has in so many ways become the American common denominator, albeit with a lot more gambling and a lot less precipitation.

MARK FEENEY

Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.