Some Notes on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

"We had 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 multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls. But the only thing that worried me was the ether. There is nothing more irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge, and I knew we would be getting into that rotten stuff sooner or later."

With fierce words and fiercer drugs Hunter S. Thompson's 1971 Savage Journey to the Heart of American Dream jerks to a start. Despite the mythical proportions of this collection of narcotics, the story is largely true--Thompson/Duke and his enormous Samoan attorney did trek to the neon oasis of Vegas in search of the Mint 400 and (more importantly) The American Dream. And yes, they rode in a Red Shark filled with every stimulant, depressant, narcotic and hallucinogen known to man, with some cannabis packed in for good measure.

So we have two main themes: copious drugs and The American Dream. We can all relate to the former (if you can't, be sure to indoctrinate yourself around campus). However, the latter is more elusive. What does he mean by "The American Dream"? Where the hell did that idea come from?

Page twelve of our text: "But what was the story? Nobody had bothered to say. So we would have to drum it up on our own. Free Enterprise. The American Dream. Horatio Alger gone mad on drugs in Las Vegas. Do it now: pure Gonzo journalism." In a swirl of highs, lows, paranoias and hallucinationsf the Mint 400 assignment is dropped in favor of a holy mission: to drown oneself in the putrid, violent, carnal paradise that America had become and report back to those who could not or would not sample the water themselves. To gain what? Thompson quotes Dr. Johnson at the book's outset: "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."

"Hunter wrote [Fear and Loathing] as if he was a war correspondent. It just happened that the bombardment was a self-bombardment, with drugs, and his brain was the battleground. Rather than going where real guns were being fired and real people were dying, he goes to the heart of America: Vegas."
-- Terry Gilliam

Despite that Thompson always wanted Fear and Loathing to become a film and that the likes of Jack Nicholson and Larry McMurtry were interested in the story, nothing emerged for thirty years. Why? The two chief problems were the book's politics and unfilmability. Both have faded over time. As the '70s gets further away, its excesses seem more distant. And with visual creativity and digital effects even Thompson's drug trips can be shown on the screen. (Though before the Humane Society was in full force, one director proposed this solution for one scene: "We'll just get live alligators, we'll give them some quaaludes, and we'll nail their fucking paws to the bar.")

What more can be said? I leave you with two passages of Thompson and one of Dylan: