Review of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) by Al M — 24 Jun 2011

Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is one of the great homages to the hippie generation and the death of the hippie dream. It is a hallucinogenic road trip across California and Nevada that is as hilarious as it is brilliantly satirical not just of conservative American society but of the hippies themselves.

Like other great drug-induced novels (Naked Lunch, etc.), Fear and Loathing would seem to be a virtually unfilmmable novel because of its rambling narration and its lack of real "events." However, the novel finds a perfect match in Terry Gilliam, who learned his satirical comedy with Monty Python before honing it to perfection as a director of bizarro, arthouse genre films.

Having developed his distinctive aesthetic in films like Brazil, Time Bandits, The Fisher King, and 12 Monkeys, Gilliam brings his unique sensibility to Thompson's novel but he also stays faithful to his source material's voice.

The film also works perfectly because of the brilliant casting of Johnny Depp in the role of Raoul Duke/Hunter S. Thompson and Benicio Del Toro as Dr. Gonzo, Raoul's hilarious but also scary lawyer who accompanies him on his hallucinatory journey into the heart of American in this "foul year of our lord.

" Depp and Del Toro both turn in Oscar-worthy performances--they transform themselves in ways few actors ever could. And they are supported by a pantheon of stellar supporting actors ranging from Gary Busey to Cameron Diaz.

A hilarious, weird, and at times almost scary look beneath the superficial layers of consumerism and conservative rhetoric that comprise American society, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas--the title of which refers to Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling--represents a truly outstanding achievement in transforming literature in film.

It is an indictment of those in control as much as those who protest against it, for how can we change things when we choose instead to succumb to our own individual opiate of the masses, whether it be religion as Marx maintains or more literal opiates as Duke and Dr.

Gonzo indulge in. It is a film about masking the superficial core that resides at the heart of America, but it also a sorrowful dirge for the death of the hippie dream, the dream that those masks could be pulled away and that something new and genuinely free could replace them.

But, as Thompson writes and the film depicts, the "wave broke" and hippie idealists gave into capitalist conversion. Now, there are retirement plan commercials specifically directed towards people who went to Grateful Dead concerts back in the day.

As William S. Burroughs once said, "All agents defect and all resistors sell out.".