Americans have abused the American Dream to make it most convenient for their lives. Instead of being guided by Horatio Alger's "rags-to-riches " theory by means of hard work, determination, and honesty, Americans have become increasingly more concerned with just the material wealth part of the idea not the honest work. Las Vegas epitomizes this disfigurement of the idea of the American Dream making it a perfect setting for this movie. Vegas is where people look to fulfill their idea of the Dream, but only by trying their luck over and over until six-thirty in the morning without really doing any work at all. .
The events in the movie occur in 1971 during the height of the Vietnam War and right after the decline of the hippie zeitgeist in the West. This was during the time Richard Nixon was president and only a few years after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. It was a depressing time in America with much unrest and turmoil as everyone was looking for answers. For many, the answer was the American Dream. The American Dream, almost everyone has heard of it, but there have been so many different renditions of it and variations of each definition that it does not necessarily have one concrete meaning. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the American Dream was the topic of much speculation, mainly by authors and journalists. America became infatuated with this idea of achieving great wealth no matter what socioeconomic class they belonged to as long as they had the right attitude and enough self-motivation. However, as everyone began trying to coin their own definition of the American Dream it became obvious that it mean something different to each individual. Their definition depended on the period in American history during which it was defined, the part of the country that the creator lived, and just the personality of the definer in general. That being said there were still some definitions that were more widely accepted than others, such as Horatio Alger's idea of a "rags-to-riches " lifestyle which were the topic of most of his writing.
