Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas

I love Terry Gilliam.
I remember first seeing Brazil at a friend's house for his birthday few years ago (that's the sort of thing my friends and I do for 13th birthday parties), then discovering for myself his earlier antics in Monty Python's Flying Circus, before seeing Twelve Monkeys, Lost In La Mancha, and Time Bandits. I've not seen his more recent efforts, specifically Tideland, which may or may not be worthy of the buzz (both good and bad) it has garnered since its release last year. However, this film is not for everyone, and it certainly does benefit from repeat viewings,
I had bought Fear And Loathing some months ago, but never got around to seeing it, and after mentioning my purchase of it, a friend said, "You need to see it. It's definitely your sort of movie; but you need a day or so afterwards to just be able to look at the world." It was perhaps good timing that I saw it Christmas Day this year.
I had read a few chapters of the book back when I still worked at Barnes and Noble (damn, it's been nearly a year since I'd worked there) and was immensely impressed by every single sentence in those pages. And after seeing the first 5 minutes I felt as if no one could pull off a film like that, in the tone the book described, other than Terry Gilliam.
The story is about Hunter S. Thompson's (here called Duke) attempt to cover a desert motorcycle race in Nevada for a magazine in the early 1970's, and his subsequent adventures in simultaneously looking for America. He and his lawyer, the Samoan Dr. Gonzo, played by Benecio del Toro, experience Las Vegas by following every single rule in the book about living in Vegas: they burn the locals, destroy or steal public property, disrespect and swindle tourists, and, well, live life beyonf the edge of sanity, fueled and fed by a steady diet of hard drugs, liquor, and heavy introspection bordering on insanity.
That's probably the best word to describe the movie: insane. I'm not sure if Mr. Gilliam managed to encapsulate the experience of a bender (I've not used any illicit narcotics at this point in my life), but it seems as if he himself had gone on the craziest bender, saw some of the most insane images the mind could imagine, and decided to film it (after listening to the commentary, I stand corrected: he never took any of the drugs in the film, but his colleagues who have commend him for "getting it right".) This film is less about a "story", and more about the ideas and images tied to living in the moment in drug-crazed America. In the end, the race, the Mint 400, is completely unimportant and carries no weight in the plot.
Duke and Dr. Gonzo spend two days in Vegas, gambling, sneaking into musical shows and casinos, and searching for what America "is". The film is rife with symbolism, both of the drug culture, but mostly of America (notice that there is often an American flag hung in the hotel rooms, or draped on Duke's shoulders), and the Bazooka Circus sequence is a microcosm of the entire country (old people throwing hypodermic needles at tied-up drug addicts? Glimpses of New Orleans? The Vortex of the American Dream being a merry-go-round? A monkey dressed as a ku klux klan member? Perfection!) And there are midgets...lots and lots of them (including Verne Troyer, in one of his first roles). The cameos and bit parts are also inspired casting: Tobey Maguire as a balding hitchhiker; Christina Ricci as Anna, an artist who paints portraits of Barbara Steisand; Woody Harrelson as a lonely highway patrolman. But, again, the show belongs to Depp and del Toro...especially del Toro, who is at turns both frightening, funny, and mesmerizing without ever being likeable. This isn't a man you ever want to meet, much less act as your lawyer. But he owns the world of Las Vegas.
The cinematography and the production design are beyond perfect for the film and become increasingly more unsettling as the film progresses. Canted angles abound in the film, with wide angle lenses being the primary choice, augmenting each angle into grotesque proportions. The production design throws everything at the screen (try taking in every single detail of the final hotel room Gonzo and Duke inhabit...yes, the flooded one with the ketchup smeared around a pinned-up portrait of Nixon). Even when the film is not in the grips of a drug-induced psychosis, one should marvel at how seamlessly Gilliam recreates 1970's Las Vegas, as well as how perfectly Johnny Depp channels Hunter S. Thompson (who himself shows up in a flashback...where his younger self, played by Depp, notices the older, real-life visage).
The film, as with the book, addresses the follwoing question: who are these people that come to Las Vegas? What are these masses with their big cars and nice clothes and pristine manners? Why do they expect instant respect and prestige just for visiting? For being cops? For being lonely? For being mature? For being married? For being a Las Vegas native? For being a tourist? For being American? Who are these people surrounding us in every street, what is their American Dream, and how do they live within the confines of that concept?
Duke's means for living the American Dream, again, is a smorgasborde of drugs, cocktailed and cooked and eaten and drunk in a manner that, in real life, would leave anyone dead in 2 hours. But here Gilliam and Duke use drugs to illustrate to ugly depravity underlying Sin City and, essentially, our way of living. (On the commentary, Gilliam noted that he didn't really know what his film was truly about, but, as the film progressed and he reflected he realized how sickening it was to live in a world that is so politically correct that anyone saying anything must sanitize their words to avoid offending anyone, and that that very act of sanitizing thoughts is a dangerous progression...or regression.)
By sugarcoating one's words, you're hiding exactly what you mean to say, and anyone can take anything away from your comments. You have no say, no opinion, no truth, and once you lost that you lose the very thing that makes you human. This film cuts out all the bullshit and sugarcoating and tiptoeing and gets right to the point: the world is a scary, fucked up place and the only way you can survive within it is to be more crazy and fucked up. You must go beyond fucked up, to a point of depravity so beyond imagining that they ("They" being the cops, the authorities, your friends, anyone) can never bring you down.
That is the American Dream.
That is Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas.





By the by, this is a great short film I worked on back in the early months of 2006:

Killing Killian by Andrzej Rattinger

Killing Killian from Andy Rattinger on Vimeo.