The book and the movie titled Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas are, fittingly, two of the most iconic cult classics of their respective artistic mediums. One is Hunter S. Thompson’s infamous drug-filled semi-autobiographical Gonzo journalism odyssey through Las Vegas, the other a Terry Gilliam-directed, Johnny Depp starring film that brings Thompson's ramblings and the profanity to freakish life on the silver screen.
But despite its faithful adaptation of the odd-ball book, there is thematic resonance between the wild discourse and vivid depictions of narcotics that the film ultimately fails to capture. Though Gilliam does an excellent job of transcribing the manic voice and kinetic, outlandish descriptions of Thompson’s writings into visual chaos that reflects the atmosphere of the book, something difficult—perhaps impossible—to capture was left behind in Thompson’s book.
Gilliam’s portrayal of Thompson’s chaotic writing truly is no small feat. Thompson’s paragraph extending sentences and blending of metaphor, hallucination, and anecdote with present reality makes the book purposefully disorienting. The lines are blurred between Duke, the drugs, and the insanity of Las Vegas. Gilliam represents this with a visual style of dizzying camera effects, lighting, shot composition, sound design, camera movement, and editing to create a vast, eclectic cinematic lexicon of strangeness that instills the book’s unease and hazy surrealism.
Raoul Duke, Thompson’s part-time pseudonym part-time alter ego and the main character of the book is a heightened, fantastical version of Thompson, and so Depp plays him that way in a truly iconic performance.
However, the source material is more than the equally strange, brutal, and hilarious sojourn through Las Vegas that Gilliam successfully captures. The journey of Raoul Duke is an exploration of a specific period in American history that dives cranium first into the blighted wasteland of a failed revolution, and the hulking, blackened society that crushed it, epitomized in the bottomless pit of Las Vegas. As Thompson would later describe in The Great Shark Hunt, Fear and Loathing is “a vile epitaph for the Drug Culture of the Sixties,” and, “a reluctant salute to that decade that started so high and then went so brutally sour.”
Integral to the themes of the book is Thompson’s exposition of the failures of the Sixties and of drug culture, and how those failures led directly to the “doomstruck [sic] era of Nixon” that Thompson waded through in 1971, the year the book was written.
After a particularly harrowing episode in the first half of the book, the Duke reads a series of newspaper headlines depicting an America riddled with heroin overdoses, senseless murders, police brutality, and greed. Upon reading the articles, Duke began to “feel a lot better” because, “against that heinous background, my crimes were pale and meaningless,” and that ultimately “in a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught.”
The movie isn’t nearly as blistering—its satire is more simple, its invectives less focused. A few spare lines mention the pathetic search for the American Dream by the sad denizens of Las Vegas. But it never stops to consider, when so much of Thompson’s genius is found in the moments of reflection. Perhaps impossible to capture in a two-hour running time but vital to the potency of Thompson’s meditation are these long tangential asides both eulogizing and castigating the failed idealistic generational mindset of the Sixties.
Half-bitter and half-nostalgic, Thompson lambasts how the vague ideals of the Sixties slowly corrupted into indolence, passivity, and inaction, becoming “the same cruel and paradoxically benevolent bullshit that has kept the Catholic Church going.” While the film does have Duke recite some of the more famous quotes from the book about the death of the Sixties and drug culture, they aren’t given any context or weight. The film does not quite manage to draw the thematic connection between the absurdity of Las Vegas, which is laboriously portrayed, to the absurdity of a nation that killed and coopted its own revolution.
To put it simply, the movie perfectly portrayed the first half of the book’s title, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but not the equally important second half, A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream.
In Roger Ebert’s infamous one-star review of the movie, he concludes that the film simply “can’t communicate the genius beneath the madness.” But I don’t think that’s entirely fair. Perhaps it truly was impossible to expect a fictionalized film adaptation of a semi-fictional Gonzo-journalism experiment to capture both the insanity and the lucidity of Thompson's written work.
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To read the book the film is adapted from, order Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream by clicking here.
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