In Walter Benjamin's short section on gambling in the massive Arcade Projects, there is a note by Alain, a early 20th century French philosopher and journalist, that describes the "basic principle... of gambling" as consisting "in this: that each round is independent of the one preceding it." For Alain, an addiction to gambling is explained the absence of history, and therefore the future, at the roulette table, or in the slot machines. A casino in a state of perfection floods every round into eternity. There is no yesterday. There is only the now, the moment, the pull, the throw, roll of the ball, the tumble of the dice, the spin of the wheels, the result. The end.
New York Times video on Stephen Paddock's preparation for the worst mass shooting in modern US history shows a man basically doing three things: eating, loading his room with suitcases filled with guns and ammunition, and playing slot machines. His game of choice is high-limit video poker. He is shown sitting alone, sometimes in the dead of night, playing round after round, emptiness after emptiness, nothing after nothing. After one session, he eats sushi.
"The surveillance footage is remarkable in its banality," says the video's narrator at its opening, which shows the monster calmly entering an elevator after two people carrying transparent inner tube floats exit it. They're going to have fun at the hotel's pool. He is going to plot a history-making mass shooting in his room. The video is as hypnotic as the spin of a slot machine. The monster watches TV at the bar. The monster leaves the hotel in a minivan. The monster returns to the hotel with more suitcases. The monster buys snacks. The monster returns to the casino. The monster is so uninteresting that he actually sticks out. He is not just banal (in the Hannah Ardent sense), he is way too banal. It is said that Spinoza's metaphysics had so much God in it that it ended up being Godless. With this Stephen Paddock, there was so much every-man in him that he was no one at all. This nothingness should have been visible to anyone in the hotel. The surveillance camera captured it. This nothing on legs.
He presses the screen of a video machine one last time, enters an elevator that's crowded with happy-looking people, and reappears hours later as a gunman firing down at a concert, Route 91 Harvest music festival, from a window on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel. The horror begins at 10:05 p.m., lasts for only 10 minutes, expends 1,100 rounds; over 22,000 people exposed, 58 killed, and 422 injured. Finally, nothing turns a gun on nothing. The NYT video ends by saying the motive is unknown.
