Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Well, they got the loathing part right anyway. Fear and Loathing in Las
Vegas, directed by Terry Gilliam, is very nearly as unwatchable as the book
by Hunter S. Thompson on which it is based is unreadable. In spite of the
presence of Johnny Depp, for whose talent I have considerable respect, in the
Raul Duke/Hunter Thompson role, the film is as much of a mess as the hotel rooms
he and Dr. Gonzo (Benicio Del Toro) leave in their wake. I suppose that Depp’s
own history of trashing hotel rooms may be ironically present here—another
in-joke like having the convicted drug-user Gary Busey appear as a highway
patrolman. But the presence of in-jokes is itself just another sign of the
druggie’s self-indulgence.

For this is a film to make one believe that the chief argument against
recreational drugs is not that they damage the health of the user, nor even that
they are somehow contaminants of the general social hygiene but that they
encourage people with too much money and not enough brains to think themselves
funny and profound (or, as the case may be, profound and funny) when in fact
they are nothing of the kind—except to other druggies like themselves. My
natural libertarian impulses are overcome by the need to put some sort of rein
on such an obvious public nuisance as Hunter-Thompsonesque profundities. A film
like this, or like Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, is the
cinematic equivalent of a boom-box carried through the street at full
volume.

We need to retain the legal authority to pull the plug on such people, if not
by denying them drugs, then by throwing them in jail if they insist on telling
us what wonderful or terrible—it comes to the same thing with
druggies—things the drugs have done for them. Or if they represent for us
a supposed political sagacity by intercutting scenes of their own intoxication
with TV clips of soldiers in Vietnam fighting or anti-war demonstrations. Or if
they are generational chauvinists talking in voiceover narration of the “energy”
of the young overpowering all that is “old and evil.” Unlike Timothy Leary, whom
they dismiss as the apostle of “peace and love for $3 a tab,” Thompson-Gilliam
are not pharmacological utopians. They understand the sinister and frightening
aspects of drugs and with anarchic spirit celebrate precisely that. But for
those not already as brain-burnt as themselves, there seems no point to it but
self-pity, which is yet another form of narcissism.