Fear And Loathing

The thesis of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (carried over directly from the Hunter S. Thompson novel) is made poetically explicit near the end by Raoul Duke (Thompson's alias):

"We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled the '60s. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling 'consciousness expansion' without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously... All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody... or at least some force - is tending the light at the end of the tunnel."

Duke laments the 1960s at great length, saying that it's difficult to understand if you weren't there and mentions how "we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back." Whatever it was that was powering the '60s, it's gone now. The charge of the decade was deeply rooted in naivety and foolish optimism, things that, after all, never last for long.

The film begins with a quote by "Dr. Johnson": "The man who makes an animal of himself takes away the pain of being a man." This puts Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas into its proper context. Duke and Gonzo do not wish to assault Las Vegas with their excesses; rather they wish to assimilate into it. Duke is very upfront with the fact that he and his attorney Dr. Gonzo are not products of the sixties but rather products of the seventies. That is "products," mind you; these are not heroes and these are not rebels, with or without a cause. When they buy and eat a tab of acid, they have no delusions about finding Peace and Understanding through the experience.

The idea of becoming an animal to take away the pain of being a man reminds of Gilliam's most famous film, the 1985 Brazil, where the protagonist Sam Lowry escapes from his totalitarian government into fantasy and "forbidden" bread-and-circus entertainments while others around him initiate actual revolutionary change. Although I have in fact read the original Hunter S. Thompson novel as well his collection "The Great Shark Hunt," I am not terribly well-versed in the life of Oscar Zeta Acosta, the real-life attorney who served as the inspiration for Dr. Gonzo. Some modest research reveals that Acosta was in fact a vocal Chicano activist from 1968 to 1973. He gained both great notoriety and great support in defending various Chicano protest groups. Acosta disappeared in the summer of 1974, the victim, Thompson believes, of either political opponents or drug dealers. None, repeat none of this is present in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Dr. Gonzo is utterly without any socio-political consciousness.

Del Toro, who plays him, claims that he was blacklisted after Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. People in the business thought that his acting had become far too indulgent. Del Toro's defense for the performance was that he was simply doing an interpretation of the character, and the character was "an animal." Indeed. Del Toro's Dr. Gonzo is so bestial that at times it seems that he may have been created to make Duke sympathetic in comparison. When Dr. Gonzo hooks up with "Lucy," an underage teenage runaway who paints portraits of Barbara Streisand, Duke plays on Gonzo's drug-addled paranoia to convince him to abandon her. We're meant to believe that Duke is paranoid as well, I guess. But as the two men walk out into the hall to discuss the matter at hand, Lucy flashes Duke a peace sign or its rough equivalent (didn't he say it was "the one world" symbol in the novel?). We can read embarrassment on his face; Lucy is a throwback to a more innocent age, the sixties, and that seems to mean little else to these two men but liability and perhaps a kinky turn-on.

Later, they go in a diner where Dr. Gonzo hands the waitress a napkin with the words "Back Door Beauty?" written on it. The waitress is outraged; she says she's had to take a lot of shit from people but she sure doesn't need to take it from some spic pimp. Dr. Gonzo takes out a knife and coolly cuts the phone line so she cannot call the police, then moves behind the counter and asks