“Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” Review
Benicio Del Toro (Left) and Johnny Depp play two counterculture icons who go on a drug-fueled trip to Las Vegas in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” based on Hunter S. Thompson’s iconic work of Gonzo journalism.
“We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.” And with that, an incredible saga of depravity and drug-fueled mania emerges with a red Chevrolet speeding through the desert towards the city of Las Vegas. With these opening words, we know that the narrator of the film isn’t to be relied on for a factual account but, despite the drugs taking hold, the protagonist of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” as well as the man who inspired the story, relay much more truth to us than most sober writers can dream of. Not since “Easy Rider” has a film so effectively explored, dissected and portrayed the American counterculture and its like will not be seen for a long time. “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” is one of the greatest films that ever came out of the 1990s and its legacy is well preserved by its rabid cult following.
Based on Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson’s book of the same name, the film sees a stand-in for Thompson named Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp) and his “Samoan” attorney Dr. Gonzo (Benicio Del Toro) go to Las Vegas to cover a motorbike and dune buggy race for a sports magazine. With Las Vegas said to be the American Dream personified, where anyone can make it big, Duke and Gonzo take this assignment as an opportunity to discover the American Dream for themselves with a luxury car, the promise that their expenses will be covered and a massive collection of drugs. What follows is a lost weekend of drug trips, Vegas excess and a hellish wasteland of glitz that reveals the awful truth: the American Dream is not only dead, but it blew its brains out, unable to take the painful existence of greed, deceit and bigotry that flows through it.
Hunter S. Thompson’s novel is a harrowing piece of Gonzo journalism where, drawing on his own experiences, he wrote a book that combined truth and fiction into a beautifully grotesque narrative which is flawlessly replicated by Terry Gilliam’s direction. Despite the glamorous setting and the majesty of the desert Las Vegas resides in, the film has this captivating ugliness that shows the seedy underbelly of this city. All it took to reveal this scum-sucking truth was “two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... 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 locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.”
While the casual viewer might mistake him for a drug-fueled rambler that got a lot of attention, what I love about Thompson’s work is how much of a dedicated journalist he really was and with how much intelligence he conducted himself with. If you read Thompson’s books like “Hell’s Angels” or “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail,” you’ll understand how in tune he was with the cultural zeitgeist and how he could comprehensively report it.
“Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” was based on two trips to Vegas that Thompson took to the city with his friend and Chicano lawyer Oscar Zeta Acosta (who is the basis for Dr. Gonzo). The idea of a substance-fueled weekend in the city might not seem as socially relevant as covering a notorious motorcycle gang or covering the 1972 presidential election from the primaires to the second election of Richard Nixon, but “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” may be Thompson’s most important piece ever. Thompson isn’t taking on a person in this story, he’s examining an idea that is held to high esteem in America.
As Raoul Duke, Johnny Depp delivers his greatest performance, alongside his incredible work in “Ed Wood,” and accurately captures all of Thompson’s mannerisms and proclivities. The lengths that Depp went to so that he could embody Thompson were insane including studying all of Thompson’s manuscripts from his trips to Vegas, living with the author for four months and even letting Thompson shave his head to perfectly replicate the author’s hairline. While this might seem crazy, even for one of Depp’s characters, you can’t deny the results.
While preparing for and making the film, Johnny Depp grew close with Hunter S. Thompson, even allowing the writer to shave his head so that Depp could have an accurate version of Thompson’s baldness.
Benicio Del Toro also excels in his portrayal of Doctor Gonzo. While Gonzo is described as Samoan in the book, Del Toro’s Latino background is perfect for this character because Oscar Zeta Acosta, Thompson’s friend and the basis for Gonzo, was Latino and a strong activist of the Chicano movement. As Doctor Gonzo, Del Toro manages to craft a strong balance of being intensely powerful and slovenly brutish. He’s “one of God’s own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, too rare to die.”
Together, these two go on an odyssey to try and see if the American Dream can truly be found in Las Vegas only to be met by horrifying reality. Despite the hallucinations and acid trips, the truth is this: The American Dream is no more. Throughout the film, American symbols are frequently shown with Raoul Duke draping himself in the American flag at one point and they’re often depicted in an ugly manner.
Under the direction of Terry Gilliam, the film is shot to be purposefully ugly with unnatural colors and an intense use of the wide-angle lens. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the scene where Duke and Gonzo are sent to cover a district attorney’s convention on narcotics. As they watch a speaker (Michael Jeter) deliver a speech on the “dangers” of marijuana, they see the ugliness of it all. Not only does this speaker clearly have no idea what he’s talking about, but it’s clear that the cops in attendance aren’t interested in helping people suffering from drug addiction. They look more like they want to beat the next hippie they see like it’s Chicago during the ‘68 Democratic Convention.
Much like Duke and Gonzo invading the “respectable” Las Vegas, the film’s incredible soundtrack mixes more swank, Rat Pack tunes with counterculture songs by Bob Dylan, Big Brother and The Holding Company and The Rolling Stones. With this music, we understand just how differently people living in the same country at the same time can see things. While the suits are listening to Debbie Reyonlds and Frank Sinatra while turning a blind eye as Nixon bombs villages in Cambodia, Duke and Gonzo are tripping out to “White Rabbit” by The Jefferson Airplane, amazed at how insane being normal truly is.
Like “The Big Lebowski,” another cult classic released the same year, so many of the film’s events feel delightfully pointless at first. So many of the film’s events come right out of nowhere and disappear without much reason like the hitchhiker (Tobey Maguire) Duke and Gonzo encounter at the beginning of the film, the narcotics conference, a young girl (Christina Ricci) who paints portraits of Barbara Streisand and a bizarre encounter with a highway patrolman (Gary Busey). Even the race that Duke is assigned to cover and that gets the story rolling fizzles out with Thompson not even sure who won.
The characters of Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo are based on Hunter S. Thompson (Left), the author of the book “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” and Oscar Zeta Acosta, Thompson’s friend and an activist for Mexican-American empowerment.
However, each of these encounters tie into the central themes of Thompson’s story: the death of 1960s idealism and the societal acceptance of 1970s greed, excess and fear. In the beginning of the film, the hitchhiker could be viewed as a representation of how this innocent way of travel has become twisted by the sick time these characters now live in. Gone were the days of the Haight-Ashbury, Students for a Democratic Society and Woodstock. Now, everyone was fueled by paranoia and dread invoked by the onslaught of assassinations, the lies and deceit surrounding the Vietnam War, the disastrous Altamont concert and the actions of domestic terrorists like The Weather Underground and The Manson Family. It’s this death of counterculture that Duke mourns.
“Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” functions as a eulogy of the peace movement which was struck down by the government, in-fighting and what felt like foolish optimism. Despite a love of the ideals of people like Tom Hayden, Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey, Thompson shows that the ideals were flawed and, if left untreated, promised to undo all the hard work that went into taking on the conservative establishment of paranoid, wealthy buzzards.
“We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled that 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.”
It’s this philosophy that makes watching this feel far more meaningful as opposed to the idea that you’re watching insane shit for the sake of insane shit. As much as I love the philosophy and writings of Abbie Hoffman, he and his followers vowed to use psychic energy to levitate the Pentagon. However, I don’t think any thought was given as to what they would do if they actually achieved their goal. The only way to cope with this cruel, cold reality is, in the mind of Thompson, to experience as many depraved experiences as possible while on substances.
Even if you’re sober, you honestly feel like you’re high watching this film. With the weird camera angles and insane visual effects (including lizard creatures designed by the legendary Rob Bottin), “Fear and Loathing” does what many films about drugs have failed to do: accurately show the effects they have. Whether it’s mescaline, ether or LSD, Gilliam finds new ways to show insane trips. After talking to a friend (who has experimented with psychedelics in the past) about the film, he mentioned that the scene in the hotel where Duke is high on LSD, seeing the patterns of the rug move around and the floor looking wet, is completely on the nose.
In particular, the “ether” sequence is horrifically watchable as the substance makes Duke and Gonzo “behave like the village drunkard in some early Irish novel. Total loss of all basic motor skills. Blurred vision, no balance, numb tongue. The mind recoils in horror, unable to communicate with the spinal column. Which is interesting because you can actually watch yourself behaving in this terrible way, but you can't control it.”
Like a drug trip, sometimes the film will move at an agonizingly slow pace but there’s always crazy imagery keeping your attention as you hear Thompson’s intelligent words bringing a cracked logic to this world. As the trip goes on, the world becomes even more uncomfortable, depraved and meaningless to the point where we are completely relieved as Duke drives away from Vegas, with the American flag waving on the back of his shredded Cadillac as “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” plays in the background, ending the film.
Looking back on this film, it’s held up extraordinarily well and, quite frankly, shows how Thompson’s writing was so focused on the present that it somehow became timeless. While he wrote about The Hell’s Angels, Vietnam, Nixon and other timely issues, Thompson’s books and articles have wisdom in them that can be applied to modern times. When Thompson fans wonder what he would have thought of Donald Trump as president, I would argue that he already wrote it down. He wrote down exactly what Donald Trump was like when describing Nixon as a man who “speaks for the werewolf in us.” Both Nixon and Trump claimed to represent the morals of the “silent majority” but brought the darkest, most hateful and ignorant thoughts we have in some twisted corner of our brains to the mainstream.
With “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” I’m not sure this is a film that everyone will love. In fact, I know that this is a divisive film. However, people who understand Thompson’s writing and relish in the counterculture love this film as a lament for the now dead American spirit. It’s an experience that perfectly sums up Thompson’s Gonzo-style of writing, blending fiction and reality with the reader being led on an insane trip that mirrors the world around them.
