Hunter S. Thompson - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas [1971]

Let this reviewer admit right off the bat that he saw Terry Gilliam’s wonderful film before reading Hunter S. Thompson’s hysterical roman á clef, which follows Raoul Duke and his attorney Dr. Gonzo as they fill their heads with acid and burn across the desert in search of the American Dream and the Mint 400—an absurd yet widely-acclaimed motorbike race. The bad news: because Gilliam’s adaption is so faithful, most casual fans will get their Gonzo fill just by watching Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro stumble around on screen. In fact, this reviewer found that some of the movie’s exclusions to be quite sensible in retrospect.

Now for the good news: for those of us who just couldn’t get enough substance-related absurdity, Thompson’s book might bring a new level of appreciation of Raoul Duke and Gonzo. One of the most striking aspects of Thompson’s prose style is its unrelenting journalistic edge. A lesser writer might have attempted to portray drug usage by falling into the mimetic fallacy—depicting an acid trip with trippy, disjointed prose. Not Thompson. From alcohol to cocaine to adrenochrome, he offers us the nittiest of gritties in stark cold realism.

Almost any novel offers a denser narrative than a feature-length film, and Thompson’s Fear and Loathing is no exception. Obviously, the book contains all the scenes that made the movie an underground classic, but many of these scenes, such as Duke’s acid-inspired dinosaur hallucination and the Circus Circus freakout incident, creep to life with new depth and vitality. By offering us more direct access to Duke’s (often warped) psyche, we pick up a number of important cultural references that might have felt contrived had they been added to the film. In lieu of Depp and Del Toro, the text offers Ralph Steadman’s twisted illustrations, which compliment the spirit of Thompson’s writing perfectly and must have certainly inspired Gilliam’s vision as well. To be fair, Gilliam’s film, in retrospect, antes up its own share of original wit and visual charm, including some great additions to the Narcotics Convention.

If you’re a fan of Gilliam, Thompson, or both, you owe it to yourself to spend some quality reading time with Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo. Beyond the “galaxy” of ingested drugs, these characters end up generating some very poignant statements about America and the drug culture. Perhaps what these two finally offer up is an image of the American Dream as it would actually appear—something twisted, distorted, and utterly absurd. They may be acidheads, but many of us will find Duke and Gonzo quite sane in comparison to the novel’s material-lusting outsiders.

Memorable line: “We can’t stop here. This is bat country!”

—Major Tom