You stride into a casino brimming with confidence and a wallet filled with cash. You have every intention of enjoying some enjoyable, sensible gaming and maybe two rounds of drinks. But before you know it, you’re at the ATM again. How do casinos manage to trick us, people who work hard for their money and make reasoned financial decisions on a daily basis? Casinos use sounds, lights, and physical design to manipulate us into spending more and more of our money. In this article, we will take a look at nine tricks casinos use to keep us gambling.
Few dispute the fact that Robert De Niro is one of cinema’s greatest actors, but Sharon Stone steals Casino. Her performance is a tour-de-force, both building on and inverting her work in Basic Instinct. As Ginger McKenna, Stone exults in her ability to seduce and control men (“Smart hustlers like her could keep a guy awake for two or three days”). She is a perpetual motion machine who holds and leads the camera’s gaze.
The movie itself is liminal, not between confident Victorianism and epistemologically uncertain Modernism (as the detective novel once was), but between finance and the frontier, with its attendant foibles and corruptions. It is also a portrait of Sin City, with its glitzy facade and ruthless inner circles. The tension between Ace and Nicky is a testament to the fact that competing modes of understanding—traditionally institutional and intuitive—are not reconciled in a figure of authority, just as they are not in Goodfellas’ Henry Hill or in Scorsese’s own torture-by-vice sequences, which had to be cut down to avoid an NC-17 rating.