What happens in Vegas ... well, it’s sort of complicated

LAS VEGAS celebrated its 100th birthday last year with great fanfare. But this month marks a far more notable occasion: the 75th anniversary of Nevada’s March 19, 1931, decision to legalize casino gambling. The result reshaped a dusty railroad town into the Las Vegas of today, and it launched decades of discussion about what a city like this might be: Is it a mirror of the real America or is it the id-driven erzatz?

To those coming here to live (and for years this area has famously had the fastest-growing population in the nation), Las Vegas has always offered one of the last footholds for seekers of the American dream, either in the form of honest, blue-collar jobs that pay a living wage, or in the flashier proving grounds where entrepreneurs can test their mettle.

But to outsiders, thanks to its something-for-nothing ideal, lowest-common-dominator style of entertaining and aggressive materialism, Las Vegas perpetually seems to represent the American dream’s dark underbelly.

A highbrow debate on this question broke out recently when, in his new book, “American Vertigo,” French intellectual and journalist Bernard-Henri Levy took some shots at philosopher Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 “The End of History and the Last Man,” accusing it of everything from ripping off Hegel to representing the wrong approach to the war on terrorism. But it was “American Vertigo’s” passing depiction of Las Vegas (Levy visited only a brothel and a topless bar) that prompted Fukuyama to respond.

The two duke it out in the spring issue of American Interest magazine. “You have this image of Las Vegas as ‘Sin City,’ and then you were disappointed with the poor quality of the sin,” Fukuyama wrote. “But this view of Las Vegas is at least 30 years out of date. Las Vegas is a real city with real people, not just sex workers, in it.”

(In a “real city” like Vegas, it’s worth pointing out, the sex workers are generally regarded as real people too.)

Levy, French philosopher that he is, offers his reply in the form of a rhetorical question: “Francis, are you implying that all this American grandeur, this fundamental belief, this dream that has inspired so many generations of men and women throughout the world is to find its truth in this empire of imposture, this triumph of tackiness and falsehood, which you cannot deny is the other reality of Las Vegas?”

In short, it’s the same old identity issue set in motion 75 years ago: Las Vegas, real or fake?

“I’ve lived here for 43 years,” says Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, “and I am not sure even to this moment if Las Vegas is the most real place in the world or the most unreal place in the world.”

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Doubling down

FOR most locals, the answer is obvious in a way it rarely is to visiting intellectuals: Las Vegas is both. They live every day in proximity to the unreal city established for tourists: the spectacle architecture, the big-name entertainment, the hint of darkness that gives the city its naughty allure -- the heavily marketed fantasy of Vegas.

At the same time, it’s possible for people who live here to largely ignore all that -- many only visit the Strip at the behest of out-of-town guests. Otherwise, they live their lives between the job, the family and the local shopping mall, just like folks do in, say, Des Moines, a town rarely subjected to the indignities of French philosophy.

“Intellectuals, when it comes to Las Vegas, can’t understand how someone can be from this place and not of it,” says Hal Rothman, a University of Nevada, Las Vegas history professor and author of “Neon Metropolis: How Las Vegas Started the Twenty-First Century.” “They get confused by our alchemy.”

And perhaps there’s a reason for that, says longtime Las Vegas resident Dayvid Figler, a lawyer and NPR commentator. “Las Vegas has done very well replicating other places. It is like the Yul Brynner movie ‘Westworld,’ except it is ‘Breastworld.’ We do a very good job at artifice. It is no wonder that some discerning people come here and see the robotic and sterile portion of that machine. But most of us who live here are in environments outside that box, even if we enjoy some of the same trappings the tourists do.

“But here is the thing: Unlike other places, the pace and structure and meaning of Las Vegas are all heavily dictated by people who don’t live here. We as residents have always been complicit in that because it serves our purposes, and so we also have let outsiders define Las Vegas.”

What he’s saying is: Seventy-five years after the real birth date of modern Las Vegas, the idea and meanings of this city have paid off every bit as much as the games that were legalized. Hey, it pays the bills.

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For more on what’s happening on and off the Strip, see latimes.com/movablebuffet.