Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas
Thanks largely to the movie, and more precisely, Johnny Depp’s
exaggerated portrait of Raoul Duke, this book and Thompson himself has ascended even higher in the ranks of Las Vegas Urban Legends, alongside The Rat Pack, Elvis and Howard Hughes with all the pop culture shenanigans attached to the whole package. An example of this can be seen on Halloween night, freakish Dukes stumble up and down the Strip and Downtown alongside the Elvis and parts of The Big Lebowski for your drunken attention.
Underneath this brand of “glamour” and the camp, Fear & Loathing’s importance and brilliance still bolts through like lightening. Though Universal Studios used that old clique of “a book that defined a generation” in the movie trailer, this commercial claim is not without a large block of truth; a crazed yet serious snap shot of a transitional period between the failures of the Summer Of Love and Vietnam and the aura that was Richard Nixon. And in the middle of this mess, there lies The American Dream….whatever it was during that time
Being that Vegas is one of the most American cities to grace this planet and considering the turbulence of the time, it seems an obvious that “the whims of the great magnet” would collide and fall on top of Thompson while he and his fake lawyer were looking for that Dream for some answers and maybe a dash of salvation on the side in the middle of this muck.
It’s worth noting that Thompson considered this tome a failure in his planned experimental technique called “gonzo journalism”; instant reporting as it happened, write it all down in a large notebook and mail it in to the publisher with no edits. As Is! It is an interesting idea, but I suspect if this tactic had worked for this book, Thompson would have gone totally gonzo, ride down the strip running down as many people as he can and THEN killed himself….or gottenhelp to end it all by those cops. Read ‘Jacket Copy For Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas’ for further details.
Parts of this book is dated and I’m sure younger readers will go on about the drug rampage and the ‘bad boy’
behavior than anything else, but this book still reminds us all that, no matter what era and generation comes along to replace the previous ones, desperately humping The Dream is still alive and well in Vegas and THAT part of human nature will never change.
P. S.: for further Fear & Loathing reading, hunt down ‘The Great
Shark Hunt: Gonzo Paper, Vol. 1’ where Hunter goes on in detail
about that fake lawyer in ‘The Banshee Screams For Buffalo
Meat’, his return visit (‘Last Tango In Vegas’) well as the ‘Jack
Copy’ piece.
P. P. S.: You might also want to find the audio play version that
was put out in 1996. Film director Jim Jamusch as Duke, Maury Chaykin as Gonzo and Harry Dean Stanton as the narrator leads in a fine cast and production! Oddly enough, this was released on Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville Records, but don't let that scare you. This is quite the UN-Buffett release.
