Their Vegas hotel room starts to feel very claustrophobic. Richard and Florence are initially so complete in their parallel aloneness and repeated efforts to seduce and then reject one another, that it looks like you won't even see another character. In the script's clunkiest device, Richard and Florence are each is assigned a drop-in friend who sheds light on his or her motivations. Beaten by her thuggish boyfriend, Jerri arrives at Florence's door, her face bloody and bruised. Jerri asks, between tearful gurgles.
Truth is elusive, a matter of faith more than proof.
While both Richard and Florence's mutual attractions are based on personal needs rather than external, observable realities, or even much recognition of one another in that hotel room, his projections have a power that hers do not. He has options and can make decisions that she cannot. This difference between them is crucial, and underlines the violence of fantasy when it concerns someone else. Taking the film on its own terms, what appears to matter is the inevitably developing emotional bond between Florence and Richard. That she resists this bond is predictable.