Will Sorg-
The only thing I’ve ever read from the famous Hunter S. Thompson was his obituary of Richard Nixon. In it, Thompson recommends burning Nixon’s body in a trash bin and jettisoning his coffin into the LA sewage system. This leaves a strong impression of the kind of writer and person Thompson was. An incredibly cool one.
Hunter S. Thompson invented Gonzo Journalism, a style of journalism personally involving the journalist in the narrative of whatever piece they were working on. One of his crowning works is the book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to The Heart of The American Dream. In the book, Thompson details a writing assignment gone haywire as he and an attorney/activist go on a drug binge in the middle of Las Vegas. Then 20 years later, his book was adapted into a film.
With Monty Python member Terry Gilliam serving as director, the film adaptation of Thompson’s book was a critical and box office failure. It isn’t really a surprise that the film didn’t do well in the late 90s when it first came out. The film is so idiosyncratic and bizarre to the point that it is nearly a fantasy film. It is a non-narrative drug film about two men tearing through Las Vegas while simultaneously having a dual mental breakdown. It is an inscrutable, hostile movie and for a lot of its early critics and audience members, it sucked. Of course, with a filmmaker like Gilliam behind the camera and a career-defining performance by Johnny Depp as Thompson, the film was bound to become a cult classic.
The film is the cinematic equivalent of a panic attack. It is a film that is constantly stabbing into its viewers’ brains with visual chaos, paranoia-fueled characters, and audio filled with 70s insanity. We’re brought into the world by the unreliable narrator of Raoul Duke (Thompson’s pseudonym in the book) played perfectly by Johnny Depp. The film is filled with unhinged ramblings and hysterical side tangents by Duke. The amount of time spent hanging out with Duke and his lawyer friend, Dr. Gonzo, feels less like a hangout and more like a kidnapping. That viewers, much like many of the people they encounter, are just swept up in their chaotic lives and spat out on the other end. What makes this so genius is that the two leads are also seemingly devoid of any true free will. They feel dragged along by their own primal instincts and hedonistic desires, oscillating between manic drug-induced hysteria and deeply unsettled despair.
What truly makes this film phenomenal is the way it is firmly planted within Raoul Duke’s brain. While the pair drives through Vegas high out of their minds, the camera sits on the hood of their car, slowly swaying back and forth as if the camera itself is intoxicated. The lighting shifts sharply during hallucination scenes, bathing the scene in harsh light and adding to the surreal nature of the moments. Even the narration messes with the audience. Duke will say something in his head while simultaneously saying it out loud, and then question if he said it out loud. Sometimes the dialogue will be interrupted by the narration, and often the narration becomes dialogue as his interior thoughts are verbalized almost unwillingly.
So what’s it all about? That drugs are awesome? Kinda. It’s also about the decadence of America. It’s set in the 70s. The death throes of the hippie movement, the failure of Vietnam, Nixon, the Cold War, and all the anxieties of the 20th century are built on the back of this film. It’s a film about the relative calm felt in the 90s and how it will someday end, ultimately pushing us to be thrown back into the confusion, paranoia, fear, and loathing of American culture.