Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

There’s a scene in Terry Gilliam’s ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ where Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp) and Dr Gonzo (Benicio del Toro) – thinly fictionalised versions of Hunter S Thompson and Samoan attorney Oscar Acosta – are driving through the neon-lit artifice of Las Vegas in a convertible. They pull up next to a car full of straight-laced, middle-aged, middle-class white people (let’s call them ‘squares’ for short). Duke is hunched over the steering wheel, under the influence of just about every narcotic substance known to mankind; Dr Gonzo is hanging out the window, whining and blubbering pathetically, his moustache and the side of the car pebble-dashed with vomit.

The squares try heroically to ignore him. Then Dr Gonzo addresses them directly: “You folks wanna buy some heroin? God damn it, I’m serious. All I’m trying to sell you is some pure fucking smack. This is the real stuff. You won’t get hooked. I just got back from Vietnam ... I wanna sell you some pure fucking smack ... puuuuure ... fuuuuuuck ...”

One of them snaps: “God damn it, you bastards!” he yells, hammering on the car window with his fist. “Pull over! I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you.”

Which was pretty much how the critics reacted when ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ was originally released in 1998. “Simply unwatchable” opined Mike Clarke in USA Today and he wasn’t alone in that opinion. The majority of the film-going public didn’t even have an opinion – ‘F&L in LV’ did about $10 million at the American box office, earning back just over half of its budget.

I saw it on the big screen back in ’98 and loved it. Bought the video – loved it. Wore the VHS out and bought the DVD – still love it. And yet most people I talk to haven’t seen it; many have never heard of it. It came as pleasant and long-awaited validation, when I started the new job a few weeks ago, to find that one of my colleagues had not only seen the film but loves it wholeheartedly, and we had a grand time comparing our favourite scenes.

‘F&L in LV’ is zonked-out, screwed-up film-making with an emphasis on self-destructive behaviour, illicit substances and the over-consumption thereof. Politically incorrect? Hell, yeah. Irresponsible? Probably, but who’s counting? Not me. There’s a case to be made that we need a few more films to be irresponsible and politically incorrect – otherwise cinema, as with any art form that’s not given a thorough shaking up every so often, stagnates.

‘F&L in LV’ sets out its stall in the first scene, Duke and Dr Gonzo cutting through the desert in a big open-top car with fins and whitewall tyres and a flame red paint job. They’re on the outskirts of Barstow and the drugs have just kicked in. “We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a saltshaker half-full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-coloured uppers, downers, screamers and laughers,” Duke enumerates (Depp’s pitch-perfect voiceover is one of the chief joys of the film). “Also, a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get into locked a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge, and I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon.”

By this time the pair have hallucinated a sky full of attacking bats. It gets worse: checking into a plush hotel, Duke’s base of operations while he ostensibly covers a motorcycle race in the desert, the psychedelically patterned carpet comes bleeding to life. A lounge full of bloated gamblers turns into a rutting grotesquery of giant lizards.

It gets worse: Duke and Dr Gonzo freak out, run up epic room service bills, destroy said hotel rooms, skip paying for both, damage cars, terrorize the innocent, insult authority, brandish weapons, rail against a government and a country going to hell, and merrily drink, snort and in any way possible ingest everything they can get their hands on, all the while encountering any number of other oddballs from an underage and possibly mentally deficient artist (Christina Ricci) who paints nothing but portraits of Barbara Streisand (Duke warns Dr Gonzo off her thusly: “in a few hours, she'll probably be sane enough to work herself into some kind of towering Jesus-based rage at the hazy recollection of being seduced by some kind of cruel Samoan who fed her liquor and LSD, dragged her to a Vegas hotel room and then savagely penetrated every orifice in her little body with his throbbing, uncircumcised member”) to a traffic cop (Gary Busey) who enthusiastically pursues a way over-the-limit* Duke only to let him off with a warning and ask for a kiss (“I’m very lonely here”).

For all that the critics didn’t get it and the majority of cinema-goers didn’t bother with it, ‘F&L in LV’ achieves a perfect marriage of source material, cast and director. It’s a blast, a trip and a head-fuck. Anyone whose sensibilities are easily offended would do best to avoid. But to anyone who likes cinema in the fast lane, 100mph, drunk in charge and not wearing a seatbelt, all I can say is: buy the ticket, take the ride.



*In both senses.

Gonzo: the Life and Work of Dr Hunter S Thompson

Having gone out to bat against corporate evil and political evil in, respectively, ‘Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room’ and ‘Taxi to the Dark Side’, documentarist Alex Gibney’s latest is a change of direction – a celebration of someone who was on the side of the angels … if, that is, your definition of the side of the angels is elastic enough to admit a heavy-drinking dope fiend with a predilection for political agitation and gun ownership.

‘Gonzo: the Life and Work of Dr Hunter S Thompson’ is about … well, the clue’s in the title. Hunter S Thompson was the enfant terrible of American journalism – and the patron saint of Gonzo journalism. He didn’t coin the term, but he certainly invented the concept. Gonzo is a style of reporting where the reporter is at the centre of the story, their experiences reported subjectively, in the first person and informed by personal opinion, instead of objectively and in the third person.

Thompson made an early impact with a non-fiction book on the Hell’s Angels, research for which entailed ingratiating himself into a local chapter and immersing himself in their lifestyle, but it was his article “The Kentucky Derby is Depraved and Decadent” – with illustrations by the incomparable Ralph Steadman – that truly defined his literary style.

It opened the door for his key works, ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ and ‘Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail’, the former a thinly fictionalised account of Thompson’s hallucinogenic attempt to find the American dream (he finds fear and loathing instead), the latter an account of the 1972 election campaign – one of the most coruscating and jaw-droppingly brilliant pieces of political writing in print.

Then there was the little matter of Thompson’s own electoral campaign, when he stood for Sheriff of his home town of Aspen, Colorado. He shaved his head just so he could refer to his opponent, who sported a sharp military buzz-cut, as “a long-hair”, and went after what he called the “freak power” vote, ie. appealing to the sensibilities of students, hippies, dopers and basically anyone from whom the prevailing white middle-class Aspen citizenry would run in fear. The surprise is not that he lost, but that he lost by such a small margin.

Of course, there was a price to be paid. You don’t bait the establishment for most of your career without becoming a legend – and it’s awfully hard to remain a legend unless you die young. Thompson was defined by his Gonzo image, and the line between the man and his public persona quickly blurred. There were those who thought he’d done his best work by the ’70s and what remained was a cliché of himself.

I’ve probably not read enough of Thompson’s work to call it. What I will say, on the basis of Gibney’s documentary is that he was a complete one-off: by turns a man of great integrity and a raving loon, a liberal and gun nut, penetrating insightful and fiercely dedicated to proscribed substances, a man of the people and a collector of celebrity friends.

It was one of the most iconoclastic of these friends, Johnny Depp, who paid for Thompson’s typically flamboyant funeral, his ashes fired from a 150ft tube amidst a blaze of fireworks.

Depp also contributes to the documentary, giving wonderfully resonant readings from Thompson’s work. Footage of the good doctor is plentiful, friends and family are forthcoming, colleagues are candid and the Hell's Angels (in the form of Ralph “Sonny” Barger) are hellishly antagonistic. There are anecdotes, particularly from Ralph Steadman and Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner, that are screamingly funny. A sense of the absurd lingers over the entire film.

And the soundtrack - featuring just about the best of everything from the ’60s and ’70s - is freakin’ awesome.