What is it about Las Vegas and the movies? Why are they so seemingly and increasingly inseparable? This year alone, we’ve barely recovered from the bullet-ridden antics of the Vegas-set mobster flick Smokin’ Aces when we get another dose of Vegas-set heist action in Ocean’s Thirteen, which itself is followed closely by the Vegas-set gambling drama Lucky You. And that’s not forgetting the forthcoming Vegas-set romantic comedy Three Days to Vegas, or the Vegas-set Cameron Diaz vehicle What Happens in Vegas.

In each case Vegas isn’t just some arbitrary shooting location. It’s not just an atmospheric American back-lot like New York or LA. No, Vegas in the movies is more than that. It’s a title character, a dramatic player, and indeed a star. Just like, say, “a Tom Cruise movie” or “a Steven Spielberg film”, the word “Vegas” in the title provides these movies with instant access to a stylistic and emotional terrain that’s familiar to us all. Here “Vegas” speaks to us of sharp suits and hipster cool, of Rat Pack insouciance, of seedy underworld connections, and of the life-altering high-stakes poker game. In this world, as we all know, you can sell your wife for a one-night-only offer of $1 million ( Indecent Proposal). You can have your eyes squeezed out of your skull for not paying gambling debts ( Casino). And you can lose $65,000 plus the hand of your fiancée on the turn of a single poker card ( Honeymoon in Vegas).

How ironic, then, that the mainstream movie industry’s love affair with Vegas should culminate in an era when the city itself, the “real Vegas”, is virtually unrecognisable to purveyors of movie fantasy. Las Vegas today, sadly to some, is a family-friendly tourist trap where nongambling revenue far exceeds casino income (and has done since the mid-Nineties, when it was a $10 billion to $8 billion split), It’s a place that has been defined by kiddie thrill rides on the famous Stratosphere Tower and by a family day out on the artificial beach at the Mandalay Bay Resort. And as far as Rat Pack chic goes, it has now become, according to Michael Ferrari, author of An Unconventional History of Las Vegas, “the last plateau of the downward slope to cultural obscurity, a magnet for every cheesy mainstream act and washed-up has-been to have ever taken centre stage”. Hence the recent boasting of city publicists that they had secured both Pamela Anderson and, er, the Dutch illusionist Hans Klok for their magic show at the Planet Hollywood Resort.

Hollywood itself, of course, has never been too bothered by the disconnect between Vegas the place and Vegas on film. In early Vegas movies, such as the MGM musical Meet Me in Las Vegas (1956) or the Mamie Van Doren versus Jayne Mansfield breast-fest The Las Vegas Hillbillys (1966), the city was presented as a place where a rundown nightclub could be easily transformed into a thriving success story, and where a backwoods girl could become a star-let through grit and determination alone. Never mind that the city at the time was entirely in the grip of such legendary gangsters as Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel and their shady mobster outfit, the Syndicate, or that landmark hotels such as Caesars Palace were not built by individual homespun ambition but by cash from the Teamsters’ pension fund.

Even so-called “iconic” Vegas movies such as the Elvis and Ann-Margret romance Viva Las Vegas (1964) were nothing more than sanitised promotional montages for a city of the imagination. Here, incredibly, and yet typically, our lovelorn heroes take a helicopter trip over the Hoover Dam, go water-skiing on Lake Mead, have a howl of a time dressed up in western garb in a mock frontier town, then manage to fit in some clay-pigeon shooting and a heady amount of jive-dancing in a local gym – all in one day! (The travelogue instinct would return in movies such as Swingers and Honeymoon in Vegas, but with a tad more subtlety.)

And while cinema matured and darkened through the Seventies and Eighties, Vegas on film continued to remain a somewhat metaphorical place. In Leaving Las Vegas, the city is depicted as a gloomy and lonely stand-in for the psyche of the alcoholic protagonist Ben Sanderson (Nicolas Cage). “I am not here to force my twisted soul into your life,” sighs Cage, lying prone on his Vegas deathbed. In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the city was at its most symbolic, acting as a twin-engine metaphor for both the decay of the American dream and for the very nihilistic emptiness of existence itself. So, after three drug-infused days in Vegas, Johnny Depp’s Raoul Duke bemoans the pathetic human assumption “that someone, or some force, is tending to the light at the end of the tunnel”. It was perhaps with this in mind that Tim Burton simply let rip and demolished the town with cartoon relish in his 1996 comedy sci-fi Mars Attacks!

It is, of course, especially telling that when Hollywood finally, 30 years later, decided to tackle the story of Siegel, Lansky and Mob-era Vegas in Warren Beatty’s Bugsy and then Martin Scorsese’s Casino, the movies were dripping with nostalgia for a bygone time of glamorous gangsters and unfettered progress. These movies tried to put on film a Vegas that had clearly vanished, but in doing so they simply contributed to the myth of Vegas as a fantasy place – Scorsese famously had to redress buildings and hotels in the city when shooting Casino. He complained that they weren’t “Vegas” enough.

Perhaps that’s the point about Vegas, on film and off. It can be argued that it doesn’t really exist. The city was a famous test case for the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who described it as a place of “hyper-reality” – a city full of ersatz buildings, copies of landmarks, fake flora, and plastic monuments, all of which attempt to emulate other places, buildings and monuments via a garish blast of sensory overload. It is a plastic copy of every city and no city, of everywhere and nowhere. It’s sweetly appropriate that Vegas even has its own monument to Baudrillard now, called Monument to the Simulacrum, and cast not from plastic but from stainless steel. In other words, Vegas is like The Matrix. You jack in and you lose yourself in whatever Ancient Roman, Venetian, Saharan or modern American fantasy appeals to you, and then you jack out again. But you don’t actually go anywhere.

Consequently, free from the need to stay loyal to any notion of lived “reality”, movies about Vegas continue to mine the rich seam of myth and metaphor that the idealised city provides. And who can blame them? For, given a choice between a trip to a fake beach, a fun ride on a fake gondola or selling your loved one for $1 million in a card game, which one would you chose?

Ocean’s Thirteen is on general release; Lucky You is out on Friday

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