Casinos succeed when they encourage gamblers to spend their money repeatedly in the hopes of winning big. As a result, the environment inside casinos must be designed with these goals in mind. Lighting, music, and visual media are all tools used to shape the atmosphere and create a feeling of excitement for guests.
Slot machines and roulette rely on chance, while poker, blackjack, and other table games require a high level of skill and strategy. Casinos strive to offer a variety of betting options so that gamblers of all ages and skill levels can enjoy the experience. While the game of choice is not always the same, there are certain characteristics that every casino must have in order to attract a large customer base and maintain its profitability.
Like Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls two years earlier, Casino is a movie set in Sin City, and it depicts that city as a kind of liminal space. It is neither Victorianist or Modernist, but rather a rough blur of old-school mafia operations and the antiseptic corporations that are sweeping up and displacing them.
The violence in the movie is intense, and it is difficult to ignore the many graphic scenes of torture-by-vice, including a popped eyeball and a baseball bat beating that were heavily trimmed in order to avoid an NC-17 rating. But Casino is more than a violent depiction of old-school Sin City; it is also a deeply felt conviction that the world in which we live is changing fast, and that what was once considered glamorous now looks rather sanitized.