I’ve had my two biggest heroes of my early college career die in the past two months. I’m not quite ready to talk about why I think Hunter S. Thompson was maybe the most important journalist of the second half of the 20th century. Nor am I quite ready to talk about his inheritance of the F. Scott Fitzgerald mantle (my BA topic #1). But I can say that he helped me frame my ideas around the reëlection of George W. Bush. In fact, I turned to the good doctor a few times during the past year. His understanding of the early ’70s mirrors well what we’re experiencing now. It’s a little frightening.
Below the fold, I’m reprinting an article I published in The Chicago Maroon on 2 June 1998, a week after Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was released. It’s a bit over the top in its anger (and you thought I was angry now?). I pretty much stand by everything here—especially the conclusions. The article featured three pull quotes from the novel that I’ve also reproduced. The graphic I made here is also reproduced from a photocopy of the article.
Fear and Loathing in Suburbia
Cheeching the Doctor… Drugs:Funny::Thinking:Boring… Welcome to the Material
Driving, I see a lot of flatland between One Schaumburg Place, Rice Lake Square, and Orland Square—three westsuburb cinema gigaplexes showing Terry Gililam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Imagining an endless stream of stripmalls making a line of buildings stretching from Schaumburg to Wheaton to Orland Park (the golf capital of the United States) is easy, so the imagination can then quickly picture some 40 Barnes & Noble stores—one for every mile or so of strip mall—each of them holding a pile of the Modern Library edition of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Other American Stories with Johnny Depp’s face from the movie art replacing the contempative pticure of Thompson from the earlier edition, unbought.
Gilliam’s movie premiered last Friday at, among other places, the 900 North Michigan cinema, playing to near sell-out crowds even for the late show, as the theaters packed themselves with and audience mostly 10–15 years younger than Thompson was when, in 1971, he wrote his subtitled “Savage Journey into The Heart of The American Dream.” The look of the audience inspired a bit of contempt during the 10 p.m. showing, as many of them stumbled up to the ticket booth, tripping over their patchwork corduroys, pushing blond dreadlocks away from their bloodshot eyes so that they could address, punctuating clauses with “dude,” the ticketseller, turn to their friends, in clothing imported from the Forest Moon of Endor, give a goofy thumps up signal, and then go watch what “Newsweek” called “better living through chemsitry.”
There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning….
And that, I think was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; 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—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
“There’s a reason Cheech and Chong quite making movies,” writes Jeff Strickler, preparing to completely miss the point, “it’s because people quit buying tickets to shows about drugged-up characters acting goofy. And it’s the same reason to avoid buying a ticket to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” The print ads ask of the viewers, “Give us your brain for two hours and you’ll never be the same.” ABC, on the other hand, scared of the graphic presentation of drug use, also misses the point and pulled the ads from its network.
The audience in the theater—mostly my contemporaries—laughs uproariously nearly endlessly throughout the opening half hour. The hallucinations are greeted with guffaws drowning out popcorn chewing, and every sick, twisted, and surprisingly funny turn the movie takes (mirroring every turn the book takes, as Gilliam stuck ridiculously close to the text), precedes more laughter. Hoots and hollers erupt while Depp eats a blotter of acid or snorts amyls.
A problem arises: neither the text nor the film are actually funny. Nor are either about drugs. Each giggle cheapens the movie, cheapens the message, and turns Hunter Thompson and Terry Gilliam from visionaries eager to subvert either the mainstream or the counterculture to an author who is about nothing but drugs and a director who decided to film a movie all about drugs. Strickler’s wrong, though, in comparing the movie to a Cheech and Chong movie. He would have been much better off comparing it to 1996’s Trainspotting–itself an adaptation of a literary work about loss in modern society. Trainspotting, though filed under Comedy at most movie rental outlets, is ultimately dark and forboding. The dialogue was catchy and humourous moments did fill filmtime, but it wasn’t Night Shift. No character left well-off, not even the completely morally bankrupt Renton, as he jeeringly threatens his future neighbors by intoning that he’s “just like” them.
Similarly, Thompson wrote a somtimes wickedly funny (usually funny because of its gleeful, iconoclastic nature) masterpiece criticising the behaviour of the youth during the late 60s—criticising the people that still live under the suburban/Christian impression that no matter how many drugs they do, no matter how badly they fuck up, mommy/God will be there to pick up the pieces.
This thinking is bad craziness. It’s this thinking that makes girls in the Southwest suburbs think that they can polish off a fifth of Goldschläger and still be alive to pick up the winnings of the $80 bet. But this thinking pervades a time period like ours: riddled with unbridled optimism, white material comfort, and the overwhelming spread of capitalism to the point where morality and Fear have no place in our global marketplace.
It’s a philosophy of rampant egoism—cut by materialism and arrogance; we do smack and fail to notice anything around us—even the effect of the drug on our surroundings and relationships. Materialism fails to be different; there is no care that the Indonesian made only a dollar for the day’s worth of Air Jordans—we want the shoes cheaper still. Pay the wretched fifty cents!
Barely a page into Thompson’s book, the narrator asks “how long can we maintain?” He is covered by paranoia throughout the work, constantly afraid of being captured and ruined.
No doubt they all Got What Was Coming To Them. All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit … What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to 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 that Light at the end of the tunnel.
Edward Abbey writes about Thompson, “his style is mistaken for fantastic, drug-crazed exaggeration, but that was to be expected. As always in this country, they only laugh at you when you tell the truth.” But the laughter—that distracting laughter—was not discomfort at the telling of the truth. When Depp’s narration in the movie veered into a sharp criticism of the flower children in San Francisco in 1965, or a critcism of the greed that had overwhelmed the country since Nixon’s rise to power, there were no truth-sensing laughs. Just bored sighs and occasionally a brief spate of applause, indicating relief that finally the boring preaching was done and we—
—we could see more funnydrugstuff. The audience sits there as the narration mocks them, calls them pathetic children incapable of surviving in the sort of atavistic world that Las Vegas is, or that America was to become on the eve of Nixon’s reëlection. The audience sits there, not unlike their counterparts 30 years ago, convinced that they can sit and laugh at drug abuse, return home, drink a bottle of Robitussin, pass out, and wake up, again, still invincible.
Most volume dealers no longer even handle quality acid or mescaline except as a favor to special cutomers: Mainly jaded, over-thirty drug dilettantes—like me, and my attorney.
What sells, today, is whatever Fucks You Up—whatever short-circuits your brain and grounds it out for the longest possible time. The ghetto market has mushroomed into suburbia … “Consciousness Expansion” went out with LBJ … and it is worth noting, historically, that downers came in with Nixon.
Urge a skeptical eye to look at the recent surge in popularity of hard narcotics around us: pot, which is as dangerous as conjugating verbs, surrounds most college students, and save a tiny dip partly the fault of Nancy Reagan, has never left. But then there’s heroin and coke—the same drug that runs motyvically through the transcendentally egotistical and materialist late seventies and the eighties. As Thompson writes, “For every ex-speed freak who drifted, for relief, into smack, there are 200 kids who went straight to the needle off Seconal. They never even bothered to try speed.” Invulnerability, the need to seem as cool as possible by doing the hardest drugs imaginable, or maybe even a perverse longing for the junkie’s life lead the march here as we bow toward the end of the millenium. Pure Decadence.
It is clear from Thompson’s quick flashback to 1965 San Francisco, both in the text and in the movie (when he actually makes a cameo), that he and his peer group do not quite see the same. Everyone around, like he, is eager for LSD, but Thompson simply does not belong at the Fillmore watching Jefferson Airplane. For that audience, Peace, Love, withdrawal from Vietnam—those were the main concerns—an idealism grown out of upper-class suburban guilt, relieved in their own self-interest. Thompson likes to point out the failures of the New Left in recruiting the blue-collar Hell’s Angels.
A similar problem exists now among our young adults—our peer group. Many are content with their lives—they turn a blind eye to worker exploitation in the Third World, or buy leather interior red Jeep Grand Cherokees, gas mileage be damned. They turn to drugs as just something to do to alleviate boredom, or something to do to be cool. Gilliam hoped his movie would be a jolt to the complacency of this youth around us—too lazy to even submit opinion pieces to their student newspapers. His success is doubtful.
A hefty buffer zone of disposable income held by youths lines the City of Chicago, and when that income is spent watching a movie, and no thought ensues, just blind laughter and amazement and envy of Thompson’s mythic drug abuse, then the Fear that Oscar Acosta feels as he’s closing in on the American Dream at Circus-Circus refuses to die. Thompson and Gilliam are smart enough to know that the American Dream does not exist—and in a way the audience doesn’t need to know: their apathy yields the tobeovercome adversity consisting mostly of choosing between refrigerated pastas for dinner.
When paying $8 a head to giggle through hallucinations, the rich will always stay rich, and the poor will never have a chance, no matter what Horatio Alger thinks. But when the rich pay $8 a head and listen, actually, to the bite underneath the pabulum, only then will the fear and loathing melt away like the bad trip we’ve been on since capitalism staked out its final claim in the American psychoscape.
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