Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is primarily about drugs. There's some other stuff going on, yes - Dick Nixon's face looms large in Raoul Duke's (Johnny Depp) hallucinations, and Vietnam is omnipresent. There are some musings on the rise and fall of the counter-culture movement. But this film is really about drugs. Director Terry Gilliam apparently intended for the film to feel like a drug trip from beginning to end. I was more than ready for it to wrap up, which I suppose is not exactly unlike a trip. The film is quite hallucinogenic and almost anti-plotted; it deliberately derails any attempts of the viewer to piece a story together. So to Gilliam's credit, he succeeded - Fear and Loathing is a trip.
Duke (a stand-in for source-material author Hunter S. Thompson) and his associate Dr. Gonzo (Benicio del Toro) are on a road trip to Las Vegas when the drugs hit. They're smoking and swerving in a top-down convertible, loaded to the breaking point with sheets of acid, quarts of liquor, sacks of grass and the feared ether, the only drug that worries Duke. In some films the audience might take that as a cue to worry about an ether-binge final act, but that would not be in keeping with the total lack of order in this film. They take the ether within a half-hour, and of course, it goes badly. Not to worry; in this universe, there's always a step up.
So what do drugs look like through Fear and Loathing's eyes? Sheer insanity on many levels. In the first cross-country road trip scene, Duke has relentless visions of bats, creatively evoked through swooping shadows on the hood of a car ("don't stop here! this is bat country!"). When they arrive at the hotel the receptionist turns into an eel and Duke can barely stammer out the reservation information (this is one of the funniest scenes in the film). A jam-packed bar turns into a reptile orgy. And when Duke and Gonzo arrive at the Bazooka Circus (probably a bad place to go on any drug), "the fear" hits, and things begin to spin horribly out of control.
I don't have an experience to compare Fear and Loathing to - I haven't read the book, or any Hunter S. Thompson for that matter, nor can I think of a film that so wholly attempts to embody the drug experience. I may be at a serious critical disadvantage having not experienced Thompson before. But this is not a part of the Thompson canon, this is Terry Gilliam's film. The film medium fully embodying drug-think is going to be a different thing than the written word doing so. And I don't think this is a trip much worth taking.
I'm pretty opposed to the mission of post-modernism, which this movie neatly falls into with its rejection of linearity and causality. I think that in general, doing this - rejecting things like story and meaning - makes a fucking mockery of art. Nothing is ever made in a vacuum, but post-modernism would hold that we live in a vacuum by going out of its way to reject all the trappings and constructs around us blah blah blah. Now, I don't wholesale reject post-modernist works (I like me some Borges, for example, though he's at a bit of a precipice rather than fully initiated). Anything structural/stylistic bit of creativity or wildness is fine as long as its in the service of a story, or in making some kind of point, and it is possible for post-modernist works to make powerful points.
Fear of Loathing has no point to make. It's a series of drug experiences. It has no story. Un-contextualized Vietnam flashbacks and a floating Richard Nixon head does not constitute a point - not that Fear and Loathing meant to make one by showing those things. Gonzo flits in and out of the plot with no sensible pattern. And I get it, that's the point. You're supposed to feel like you're on drugs. What I'm saying is not that the film has achieved its intents badly, but rather that its plan in the first place was a bad idea for a meaningful film.
All of which would be well and good if Fear and Loathing were actually fun but my god, its just exhausting. It's like being slapped in the face with a wet tie-die t-shirt for two hours, over and over and over again. Sure, there are some funny moments; I could watch a slobbering Benicio del Toro for a while. But not two hours. And there's nothing more to this film than fairly predictable tripping ideas, which are hard to sell in the first place because there's always a serious inauthenticity, for every viewer, to such a personalized experience as psychedelic use being portrayed on cinema. It rings false, and it numbs you into boredom.
And I think that's the most damnable offense for this film, which thinks of itself as anything but boring. There are inspired moments, but I looked them up, and most of them come start from Thompson - who, I remind you, I haven't read. So it seems to me that everything really interesting about this film is a second-hand interpretation of what I can only imagine is a superior work. And that's really all there is to this film. It's empty-headed and waffling, and not nearly as much fun as it thinks it is.
Duke (a stand-in for source-material author Hunter S. Thompson) and his associate Dr. Gonzo (Benicio del Toro) are on a road trip to Las Vegas when the drugs hit. They're smoking and swerving in a top-down convertible, loaded to the breaking point with sheets of acid, quarts of liquor, sacks of grass and the feared ether, the only drug that worries Duke. In some films the audience might take that as a cue to worry about an ether-binge final act, but that would not be in keeping with the total lack of order in this film. They take the ether within a half-hour, and of course, it goes badly. Not to worry; in this universe, there's always a step up.
So what do drugs look like through Fear and Loathing's eyes? Sheer insanity on many levels. In the first cross-country road trip scene, Duke has relentless visions of bats, creatively evoked through swooping shadows on the hood of a car ("don't stop here! this is bat country!"). When they arrive at the hotel the receptionist turns into an eel and Duke can barely stammer out the reservation information (this is one of the funniest scenes in the film). A jam-packed bar turns into a reptile orgy. And when Duke and Gonzo arrive at the Bazooka Circus (probably a bad place to go on any drug), "the fear" hits, and things begin to spin horribly out of control.
I don't have an experience to compare Fear and Loathing to - I haven't read the book, or any Hunter S. Thompson for that matter, nor can I think of a film that so wholly attempts to embody the drug experience. I may be at a serious critical disadvantage having not experienced Thompson before. But this is not a part of the Thompson canon, this is Terry Gilliam's film. The film medium fully embodying drug-think is going to be a different thing than the written word doing so. And I don't think this is a trip much worth taking.
I'm pretty opposed to the mission of post-modernism, which this movie neatly falls into with its rejection of linearity and causality. I think that in general, doing this - rejecting things like story and meaning - makes a fucking mockery of art. Nothing is ever made in a vacuum, but post-modernism would hold that we live in a vacuum by going out of its way to reject all the trappings and constructs around us blah blah blah. Now, I don't wholesale reject post-modernist works (I like me some Borges, for example, though he's at a bit of a precipice rather than fully initiated). Anything structural/stylistic bit of creativity or wildness is fine as long as its in the service of a story, or in making some kind of point, and it is possible for post-modernist works to make powerful points.
Fear of Loathing has no point to make. It's a series of drug experiences. It has no story. Un-contextualized Vietnam flashbacks and a floating Richard Nixon head does not constitute a point - not that Fear and Loathing meant to make one by showing those things. Gonzo flits in and out of the plot with no sensible pattern. And I get it, that's the point. You're supposed to feel like you're on drugs. What I'm saying is not that the film has achieved its intents badly, but rather that its plan in the first place was a bad idea for a meaningful film.
All of which would be well and good if Fear and Loathing were actually fun but my god, its just exhausting. It's like being slapped in the face with a wet tie-die t-shirt for two hours, over and over and over again. Sure, there are some funny moments; I could watch a slobbering Benicio del Toro for a while. But not two hours. And there's nothing more to this film than fairly predictable tripping ideas, which are hard to sell in the first place because there's always a serious inauthenticity, for every viewer, to such a personalized experience as psychedelic use being portrayed on cinema. It rings false, and it numbs you into boredom.
And I think that's the most damnable offense for this film, which thinks of itself as anything but boring. There are inspired moments, but I looked them up, and most of them come start from Thompson - who, I remind you, I haven't read. So it seems to me that everything really interesting about this film is a second-hand interpretation of what I can only imagine is a superior work. And that's really all there is to this film. It's empty-headed and waffling, and not nearly as much fun as it thinks it is.
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