Swingers

This poster is not what the movie is about. It's about the complete inscrutability of the female mind and about bunnies and NHL '98. Also, I've never been to Vegas and this is starting to upset me. Koko, how come you never take me whoring in Vegas?

Koko: Errata: 1) Cocktail waitresses serving you drinks at five in the morning in a casino off Fremont St or Las Vegas Blvd south of Sahara do not agree to a date or disclose their thespian ambitions in a trailer somewhere west of Blue Diamond, near that Volkswagen repair shack my brother used to take his Karmen Ghia. They do, however, throw you discouraging looks of ennui that communicate, in some intuitive cosmic way, the very essence of "fuck you."

2) Only assholes drive to Las Vegas from L.A. for the weekend in order to spend money and get laid. Savage troubadours like Hunter Thompson, on the other hand, discover themselves in Las Vegas, broke, buying on credit, desperate to document or, in the likely event that the object exceed its representation and thereby explode all meaning or mimesis, rendering truth relative and unnecessary, escape. Las Vegas is something you leave, not visit. A weekend jaunt to Clark County is like touring Dante's inferno.

3) LA--the white parts--is exactly as shown. Go to Thousand Oaks or La Canada, or Burbank, God help you, and see for yourself. Ron Livingston in a Disney suit? That is the Southern California experience.

4) A thirty second goof on Reservoir Dogs, those chain wallets, competitive video hockey, and "A Boy Named Sue" transform this flick and its slacker, faux-pimpery into the gentlest of all possible satire. And that makes LA this best of all possible worlds, which is why at the Santa Monica pier a gigantic statue of Pangloss presides over the blue Pacific.

There is an undeniable truth about this movie: known from a particular frame of mind, LA actually can be the dizzy, gratifying, dangerous place we all pretend it is--not block after block of broken chain link fence, dank air, and dull, depressing concrete. Alas, that frame of mind means you're clinically mad, and if you can't spook up in your darkest mind a better place than LA, not only are you insane, but you lack imagination. Some cities are ugly. Detroit, for example, or Atlanta. But some are tedious, which is worse. Houston is tedious. So is San Jose or Phoenix. But among those courtiers of bore, LA is king. Something like twenty million people live amid the doom of Greater Los Angeles. Swingers mocks them. Mocks and loves them. For that I am grateful. Mostly for the mocking.

So in answer to your question, Slothrop, LA is for whoring. Las Vegas is for fire sermons.