march 2005

On writing Lyrics
For Warren ZevonWhat Hunter Thompson remarked when we were working, he said, 'I see it's like headline writing. Every word counts like headline writing.' I said, 'That's it!'"

FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS
1.
Review by Paul Theroux

Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century
by Hunter S Thompson
384pp, Penguin, £16

Kingdom of Fear combines memoir, polemic, satire, abuse, diablerie, and something new for Hunter Thompson - a nice line in prophecy. It opens with a memory of childhood, but this being Thompson's childhood the memory is of a nine-year-old's battle with the FBI "in the case of a federal mailbox being turned over in the path of a speeding bus". This was in Louisville, Kentucky, where the author spent his formative years. New York, San Francisco, Big Sur and Rio de Janeiro came later.

After Rio, "suffering from amoebic dysentery and culture shock", he retired at the age of 29 to hunt elk and breed Doberman pinschers in a fortified compound at Woody Creek, Colorado, where much later he beat a rap for sexual assault and also ran for county sheriff - the memoir elements of this present book. No one can accuse Thompson of not living his philosophy: "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."

Little Hunter and his school friends were guilty of the mailbox crime. As a federal offence, mailbox vandalism carried a five-year sentence. But this was not mindless violence, it was purposeful. Even then, it seems, he adhered to the Bob Dylan dictum he loves to quote: "To live outside the law, you must be honest." The mailbox was part of an elaborate scheme to get "revenge on a rude and stupid bus driver who got a kick out of closing his doors and pulling away just as we staggered to the top of the hill and begged him to let us on".

The avengers, using ingenuity and speed, ropes and pulleys, created a booby-trap with the mailbox. When the bus driver sped away, he became an agent of his own destruction, smashing into the mailbox that was yanked into the path of his bus. Subsequently, refusing to confess or crack under questioning, Hunter ("What witnesses?") is declared innocent, and everything works out fine. A new bus driver is hired, and a lesson is learned: "Never believe the first thing an FBI agent tells you about anything."

This is more of a Huck Finn than a Tom Sawyer story, but the tone is unmistakable, which is to say that when he is in the zone, in full flow, there is no one like him. "I have seen thousands of priests and bishops and even the pope himself transmogrified in front of our eyes into a worldwide network of thieves and perverts and sodomites who relentlessly penetrate children of all genders and call it holy penance for being born guilty in the eyes of the church. Whoops! I have wandered off on some kind of vengeful tangent here."

Reviewers have despairingly characterised Thompson's persona as a coked-out prophet in the Book of Revelation, a hillbilly bookworm on speed, a psycho-path with an arsenal of high-powered weapons, a paranoid gun junkie, a womaniser, a drunk and worse. While all these descriptions are provable in various degrees, the truth is far weirder: most of the time Hunter Thompson is a strangely modest man, a serious thinker, a great wit, a superb satirist and a sports fan. He is 60-something, and he grew up, as I did, at a time when the greatest American writers were remote and powerful figures.

It is impossible now for any American under the age of 60 to understand the literary world just after the second world war, the magic that fiction writers exerted on the public, and how they bewitched the imaginations of those of us who wished to be writers ourselves.

The modern equivalent would be a rock star but the comparison doesn't work, because the rock star is an ephemeral public figure, and the writer-heroes of Thompson's youth were famous recluses and disreputable heroes. Henry Miller comes to mind. He was one of many borderline outlaws, but in an age of censorship - the Chatterley ban and all that - all writing is a dodgy business. Until the past 20 years or so, writers were not accessible to the reading public; they did not turn up for readings at Borders, they did not give free talks at the library, or sign your books. They were not visible, they were the more powerful for being somewhere else, only whispered about, outrageous things.

Thompson is probably the last American writer of that kind. "He is known as an avid reader, a relentless drinker and a fine hand with a .44 Magnum," ran the author's note on his first book, Hell's Angels (1966). But a kind of magic still attaches to Thompson.

My own feeling is that the magic arises not from the self-promotion, the publishing hype, or the living-legend stuff (two feature-length movies have been made of Thompson's life). I think Thompson has remained a writer of significance because, essentially a satirist, he has displayed an utter contempt for power - political power, financial power, even showbiz juice.

He chose for his first book-length subject the Hell's Angels motorcyclists. He rode with them, chronicled their lives and their customs. They were an outlaw tribe, living at the edge of society, and he identified with their need for space, their love of binges and their hatred of authority.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, probably the best book ever written about that city in the desert, began as an assignment to write about a motorcycle race. The prospect of writing about the Honolulu marathon induced Thompson to visit Hawaii, and the result was personal history, Hawaiian mythology and the usual mayhem in The Curse of Lono .

Last year, well before the Iraq war, Thompson wrote: "We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world - a nation of bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts. We are human scum, and that is how history will judge us. George W Bush does not speak for me or my son or my mother or my friends or the people I respect in this world."

That is included in his new book, along with another prescient piece, written on September 12 2001, in which he predicted "a religious war, a sort of Christian jihad, fuelled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerrilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines. We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once."

One of my favourite Thompson pieces (reprinted in his collection Better than Sex ) was written after the death of Richard Nixon. As the funeral orations were being delivered and everyone was praising Nixon, Thompson wrote "He Was a Crook", one of the best, the funniest, the most sustained polemics I have ever read. Midway through it, in a burst of candour, Thompson reflects on his harsh words and says, "but I have written worse things about Nixon many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it."

Kingdom of Fear is angry, prophetic, full of vitality and enormously funny. In almost 40 years of battling the Confederacy of Dunces, Thompson's energy has not flagged. He is not coy about his choice of poisons, but asked specifically about it in a piece here ("Yesterday's Weirdness is Tomorrow's Reason Why") he makes a nice reply: "I haven't found a drug yet that can get you anywhere near as high as a sitting at a desk writing, trying to imagine a story no matter how bizarre it is, as much as going out and getting into the weirdness of reality and doing a little time on the Proud Highway."

Paul Theroux's novella Palazzo d'Oro is published next month (Hamish Hamilton).

2.Film Review
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FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS is an ugly film.

Intentionally so.

That's one of the key facts you learn from the new Criterion Collection release of the film, care of director Terry Gilliam's lively audio commentary track. From Benicio Del Toro singing "One Toke Over the Line," free of any adherence to conventional musical notation while speeding through the desert in a red convertible, to the succession of debris-filled hotel rooms that the main characters methodically trash, FEAR is a museum of ugliness, a catalog of the worst excesses of American culture, its fast-food packaging, cigarette filters, Hawaiian shirts, hats, sunglasses, visors, aluminum beer cans, flyers, papers, cords, swizzle sticks, and sports pages, all heaped in a living landfill generated by the film's pack rat heroes.

Originally a Universal-Rhino release, produced by long-time Hunter S. Thompson associate Laila Nabulsi, FEAR AND LOATHING was rather unpopular when it was first released. Naturally, it has acquired a cult following, and seeing the film again after five years, the originally skeptical or repulsed viewer can better appreciate its time capsule qualities, especially with the help of the lavish scholarly apparatus pressed onto this two disc set.

FEAR AND LOATHING is, of course, the tale of Hunter S. Thompson, calling himself Raoul Duke, and a friend named Dr. Gonzo, in reality a civil rights lawyer named Oscar "Zeta" Acosta, taking a quick trip to Las Vegas to cover the Mint 400 motorcycle race. The background, according to Thompson's straightforward account in the text "Jacket Copy for FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS," included on the disc, is that Thompson had an assignment from SPORTS ILLUSTRATED to cover the race, but ended up writing about his more expanded experiences for ROLLING STONE in a two-part story, illustrated by Ralph Steadman and later republished as a book. In large part, Thompson was really trying to get his friend Acosta out of Los Angeles so that they could talk about matters relevant to the slaying of a journalist name Ruben Salazar, which Thompson was also writing about. If alone with Acosta over the weekend, Thompson felt he could talk about the case with some frankness. The original book and its illustrations, along with Thompson's Salazar story, and the "jacket copy" are all available in the Modern Library's edition of the book, FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS AND OTHER AMERICAN STORIES (283 pages, $15, ISBN 0 679 60298 4).

Of course, Vegas and the Hollywood movie industry have had an ongoing mutually cannibalistic relationship, each thinking that they are really like the other: one (Vegas) believes it is an entertainment industry and the other (Hollywood) thinks it is a haven for ballsy gamblers. There are even some American movies that go "Vegas" without even actually going there (such as NATURAL BORN KILLERS, another convertible-in-the-desert movie, or A.I.'s pallid Rouge City), and Vegas brings out the showman in otherwise classical directors, such as Coppola (we sometimes forget how important Nevada is to the GODFATHER series, and that Coppola has a whole other Vegas movie).

It's not exactly clear how much of Thompson's account is true. But that doesn't matter because the important element of the book is Thompson's impressionistic dissection of American in the early '70s. Fun as FEAR is, in some ways it is a defeatist book (like the film) because Thompson is waking up from an American exceptionalism that has gone awry thanks to the Vietnam war, swinish political leaders, and Baptists. What most young contemporary readers got out of it, of course, was the drug use and the comical flouting of authority. Sometimes you wonder if the rabid Thompson fans even really understand the writer. The real Thompson is a Kentucky gentleman, a gun-fancying sportswriter turned Gonzo journalist, not at all as media savvy as his fans. Thompson's letters, collected in two volumes so far, are fun and fascinating, but they evince a writer's grimy daily concerns, getting assignments and getting paid (the second volume, FEAR AND LOATHING IN AMERICA, is especially relevant to the events in FEAR). Like cartoonist R. Crumb, Thompson was in the '60s but not of it, least of all in the way he dressed. While everyone else had long hair and beads, Thompson dressed like a tourist, the Ugly American.

In fact, the enduring fascination the book has for a certain section of the public probably has more to do with its true kinship with American literature. A reading of the late Leslie Fiedler's LOVE AND DEATH IN THE AMERICAN NOVEL (recently cited in THE SOPRANOS) provides insight. For those unfamiliar with Fiedler, the critic noticed a strange pattern going through the great American novels from the beginning. They were all about a white guy coupled in a quasi-homo-erotic quest with a larger, more competent ethnic person, usually an Indian, but sometimes a black. Fiedler traces this pattern through Cooper's novels, MOBY DICK, HUCKLEBERRY FINN, and all the way up to ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST. The implied homosexuality and the implicit misogyny, which Fiedler thought said a great deal about the sociological and psychological milieu out of which almost all American novels come, can also be found in many movies, and maybe even journalism, if FEAR AND LOATHING can be viewed as fact rather than fiction. Acosta/Gonzo is the book's Chingachgook, its Nigger Jim, its Queequeg, its Chief Bromden, to Thompson's Ishmael, Natty Bumpo, Huck, and McMurphy. Thompson's Duke is the last of the frontiersmen, going out west (via Los Angeles) in search of freedom and quiet and escape from the enveloping pincers of society (and to make some money on a writing assignment). Gonzo is his strong, silent partner, but unlike in the books Fiedler explores, Gonzo needs as much help from his white partner (to sober up, to stop from killing himself) as Duke needs to get out of tight situations. None of this is explored in the DVD, however, though many of the observers talking on the discs sensed that something homoerotic was going on in either Gilliam's mind or the approach of the actors.

The movie's version of Gonzo is much more menacing, and much less charming, than the one in the book. Which isn't to knock Del Toro. In a way it is perfect casting. But perhaps taking his cue from the script, or the whole creative team's slight misunderstanding of the book, he plays the character exclusively as a dark, easily enraged, uncaged beast whom Duke needs to frequently hold at bay with whip and chair.

The real Acosta appears in one of this set's wealth of supplements. He is shown in a video reading from his own book, THE REVOLT OF THE COCKROACH PEOPLE, at a Chicano festival in 1974. He doesn't seem very gonzo. He's a laid back but interested fellow with a belly hanging out of a mesh shirt. He reads his excerpt well, but he is not the mad, out-of-control person that Thompson created, perhaps for narrative interest, on the page. Nor is he wearing a black glove on one hand.

The "real" Hunter S. Thompson also appears extensively on the disc. First it is in the form of a quasi commentary track recorded in 2002 with producer Nabulsi, Thompson's companion Anita Bejmuk, and others, including the answering machines of some stars he calls, and another person who calls Thompson while they are in the middle of recording. With the ice in his drink clinking throughout, Thompson proceeds to not take anything very seriously. He begins by noting the moment where Depp throws a waiter's tip on the floor. Thompson views this as "a horrible insult to me," and complains for a while and then refuses to discuss it any further. Occasionally, Thompson will erupt into a horrible squealing noise, and the auditor isn't quite sure what he's doing it. Certainly the others in the room think the squealing is hilarious, "laugh men" whose job is to cackle over everything the grumpy Thompson does even if they don't understand it. But you wonder if Thompson is necessarily always joking. He thinks the "Circus Circus" scene "sucks," and remarks concerning Johnny Depp that "that bastard wanted everything once he knew he could get a few clothes out of me." At 11 minutes and 59 seconds, he reveals that the hippie they picked up in the desert wasn't really bald, as in the movie. And he tells us that "we came to find the American dream," which at this late date doesn't really ring true. Most interesting are Thompson's remarks on Timothy Leary, a "horrible goddamn person," whom he characterizes as a "blade in the back of my whole generation." Finally, though, even the film's producer, Nabulsi, an old girlfriend of Thompson's, gets exasperated with the guru of gonzo, as he continually tries to evade her questions about why he thinks the book had such an impact on a generation.

Thompson pops up again in "Hunter Goes to Hollywood," a short selection of scenes by Wayne Ewing, who has been chronicling Thompson's life on film. It shows Thompson arriving in L.A. to visit the set, giving Depp some tribal headgear, and hanging out with Del Toro, Harry Dean Stanton, and Gilliam (in the audio track, Nabulsi completely rejects Thompson's rather different view of his day on the set). And there is "Fear and Loathing on the Road to Hollywood," an hour long documentary made for the BBC's Omnibus series in 1978. It follows Thompson and Ralph Steadman around Hollywood, where the writer is rarely without a bottle of Heineken.

Depp, clearly one of the screen's great actors, really does quite a turn of mimicry with Thompson. He has the bad clothes, the mumble-mouthed growl, the strange sounds, the very bad clothes, and the erectile cigarette holder, which has just as much dialogue as the actors. Depp even has Thompson's strangled, spasmodic walk down. It forms an interesting contrast with Bill Murray's version of Thompson in WHERE THE BUFFALO ROAM (where Peter Boyle plays the Acosta role).

The film itself comes in an excellent and sharp widescreen (2.35:1) transfer, enhanced for widescreen televisions, supervised by Gilliam, according to the box, and the audio track— a new Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround, and a new DTS 5.1— have been cleaned up.

Other supplementary materials from disc one include a yak track from director Gilliam. He gives a joyous account of its making, and his cheerfulness belies all the difficulties he has had on not only FEAR but BRAZIL and other movies. Gilliam chortles over his own film, and his laughter is infectious. He makes an interesting point about CGI, which he seems not to like in theory. He notes that "thousands of people make the real world," while only one or two people make a CGI image, thus limiting its freshness and unpredictability. He mentions that the "typewriter" sequence in the movie is from a section cut from the book that Depp found while riffling around in Thompson's papers. He also reminds us that there is little actual story in the film, and that the paranoia is really the plot. Also, once he points out that the same Steadman-esque cactus appears in all the exterior shots, you can't help but notice it. The only thing that Gilliam doesn't go into is the Rhino end of the production team, which he does on pages 250 - 251 of GILLIAM ON GILLIAM, the indispensable Faber and Faber interview book with the director.

There is also an edited audio commentary by Johnny Depp, Benicio Del Toro, and producer Laila Nabulsi, which is informative, and though filled with the usual "happy chatter" (so-and-so is great to work with), it seems more sincere here than most other tracks.

Finally on disc one there are three deleted scenes with optional director commentary. "The Mint 400" is an extension of an existing scene with more cameos from visiting actors and more of the Tim Thomerson. "The DA from GA" is a long conversation in a casino bar among Duke, Gonzo, and a DA whom they try to scare into thinking that California is rife with blood drinking cultists. "The Hardware Barn" is the original closing scene of the film, a quiet end to the story that links up with Thompson's occasional somberness. It's also one of the few scenes that is actually critical of Thompson, and Gilliam's comments on it are very interesting. These three scenes appeared earlier on the U DVD.

Disc two is all supplements. It is divided into two sections, the film, and the source. Highlights include Depp reading out loud from the letters between him and Thompson. Recorded on video in the summer of 2002, it's presented in widescreen and takes up a sizable chunk of an hour.

The genesis of the film is discussed extensively in "Not the Screenplay," a 15 minutes audio-only recording among Gilliam, Tony Grisoni, and Laila Nabulsi. Essentially, Alex Cox and another guy wrote a script that Cox was going to direct. Then Cox got fired, and Gilliam stepped in. He and Grisoni track the absurdities of the Writers Guild's procedures for the assignment of authorship. In connection with that "The Dress Pattern" is a short black and white full frame film that Gilliam made in response to the Writers Guild's deliberations.

Other movie related material includes storyboards and production illustrations, production design art, the original theatrical trailer, in wide screen, with optional director commentary, and seven TV spots.

The remaining material in the Source half of the disc is a photo and essay gallery about Oscar Acosta; "Thompson on Acosta," which is an audio-only track of Thompson reading his 1989 foreword to a re-issue of Acosta's books; a gallery of Ralph Steadman's illustrations; And "Breakdown on Paradise Boulevard," an excerpt from the 1996 audio book with Jim Jarmusch (as Thompson), Maury Chaykin (as Acosta), Glenn Headley, Laurie Metcalf, and Thompson pal Harry Dean Stanton, all reading/enacting a scene not used in the movie.

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