A Savage Journey: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
I know how this started.
INT: PRODUCTION OFFICE, 1998
Producer: Right, lads, who should we get to direct Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream?
Other producer: The adaptation of that Hunter S. Thompson novel full of drugs? Well, to make a tale of drug abuse and its subsequent psychological trauma in a satisfactorily chaotic and hilarious manner, we need to hire someone who has spent their entire life trying to reconcile the strangeness in their head with the reality of the world around them.
Terry Gilliam (entering with armfuls of concept art and a copy of the novel covered with his notes): Someone say m’name?
Producer: This chap looks right.
Hunter S. Thompson (crashing through the window with an electric cattle prod in one hand): You better fucking believe it.
Hunter S. Thompson, alias Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp) and his attorney Dr. Gonzo (Benicio del Toro) hightail it from California to Las Vegas with enough drugs in their car and their bodies to last a lifetime. Duke is meant to be covering a race in the desert for his job, but you will soon discover that anyone stupid enough to employ that man as a reliable sports journalist deserves to have him screw them over. He and Gonzo take on Vegas charged with every illegal substance you could think of, and all hell breaks loose. Talking to madmen, threatening maids, buying orangutans, terrorizing the circus and almost murdering a waitress – it’s the original Hangover, one for the more artistically inclined of us.
This is a Savage Journey into the Heart of The American Dream; do not take that lightly. Hunter S. Thompson turns his incisive, insane eye on the hollowness of success and excess in the Land Of The Free And The Home Of The Brave. That Dream, the grotesque side of a life we’re all used to. Delusion and disillusion are strong a drug as any of our heroes’ mescaline or ether. As Duke says while he regards Vegas through hallucinogenic-warped eyes, “A drugged person can learn to cope with things like seeing their dead grandmother crawling up their leg with a knife in her teeth. But no one should be asked to handle this trip.” American society is on acid already; dripping with fermented patriotism, flashing with commercialized hope – combine that with actual drugs and you have an experience that’s 87 varieties of fucked up. By the end, Duke is trailing the tattered stars and stripes while Jack Flash jumps – Mick Jagger snarls “I was born in a crossfire hurricane” and all you can think is, Yeah, and Raoul Duke lives in one.
There is really no one better than former Python Terry Gilliam to tackle Hunter S. Thompson’s infamous semi-autobiographical novel. Gilliam can create a world that is absurd and familiar in the same breath. You’ll never look at casinos, tacky hotels or the plain old desert the same way again. Only he would be insane enough to put two very dedicated actors (who are playing drug addicts) in a red convertible, strap a camera to it and set them loose, so Christ bless whichever producer was stoned enough to let Gilliam make this film. His hand becomes shaky and elegant and frenzied and comely and creepy and deranged as the story does; he takes the audience into the world by our collar and he doesn’t let us go. This isn’t just a film, it’s an experience.
Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro seal themselves into cult film history with their roles as Duke and Gonzo – two people who bring new meaning to the phrase ‘off your face.’ This is drunk and drugged acting at its best, groaning and stumbling in all its glory. They carry all the mayhem on their shoulders so naturally and so well it makes me worry that there was something more than Evian in their between-scenes-refreshment glasses. Depp grabs and throttles us immediately; he is unforgettable within a moment; spitting crazed wisdom through a cigarette holder. His constantly wide eyes give a sense of someone out of control but trying his best to get it back. Thompson himself said - while thoroughly approving of Depp’s performance - that if he ever saw someone acting like that, he would hit them with a chair.
Benicio del Toro exudes the frightening energy of a psychopath, a psychopath on drugs, no less – if I ever saw someone acting like that, I’d hit them with a chair, shoot them in the throat and then run a mile. Tobey Macguire is satisfyingly spaced in his hitchhiker cameo; and Cameron Diaz seems like a red herring with all her blonde prettiness in such a fucked-up film, but I guess Miss Sweetie Pie USA suits acting being uppity journalist sharing a lift with Duke and Gonzo. Best of all, His Highness Hunter himself cameos in a nightclub that Duke recollects; staring at him while the voiceover says “Mother of God, there I am!” It is possibly the best wink-wink-nudge-nudge moment in cinema history.
Working from such unique material as a Thompson novel means at least one thing; your film will never be boring. The screenplay is as fast-paced and frenzied as our heroes’ sensibilities. Sometimes we don’t know what’s going on exactly, but when chaos trips over chaos, mistakes aren’t that visible. The stream-of-consciousness voiceover yields such gems as “Don’t go in the elevator, man, that’s just what they want us to do… trap us in a steel box and take us down to the basement…” Is that searing commentary on the homogenisation of people in modern society, or the idiotic ramblings of a person full of enough drugs to kill a small horse? We don’t know, and that’s the point.
The closest the film comes to tender or poignant is Duke’s nostalgia for the more innocent hedonism of the 1960s: “There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning… We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later… you can almost see the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.” Those occasional flashes of lucid genius are what keep your brain engaged through the other things that hardly make sense. Jesus, did he say that or just think it?
The much-remarked-upon visual style of the film bursts with strange angles, fluorescent colours, sinister lighting and a general aesthetic about as stable as a skateboard in a canoe. One minute you’re in the sprawling desert and the next in a pink hotel suite so trashed it looks like a home base for schizophrenic clowns. I’ve read that Gilliam and cinematographer Nicola Pecorini’s idea for the film was to make a given section look like how it would to a person on that drug – for example, when Duke and Gonzo are on mescaline, the world’s colours melt into each other and their temperatures warp, which is apparently what happens to your view while you’re on mescaline. This visuals-change-with-the-drugs approach is so effective that it makes me wonder whether the crew actually took them; seriously, these angles don’t occur to people in their right minds (that’s a joke). Wait on, Terry Gilliam in his right mind is the same as a normal person’s while they’re on drugs, so never mind. The rear projection of Vega$ streets behind Duke and Gonzo’s convertible is inspired – they aren’t seeing any of it as real, so neither should we.
There are enough twitches even in the ‘sober’ scenes – strange wide angles, icky pastel palettes, LA hellion murals, creepily pretty hotel suites – to create the unsettling worldview of an addict. The camerawork is as shaky as their minds; full of focus shifts, strange closeups, claustrophobia, weird aspect ratios and warped distances. These nuances in visuals ease you into the trip; so that by the time the carpet melts and the people turn into an orgy of lizards, those things seem almost to be expected. Alex McDowell’s palette of sinister fluorescents creates a stew of commercialism, like we’re soaking in those neon signs that burn advertisements into our brains; an effect perfect for tearing down The American Dream. His sets feel like a house of horrors, something haunted and seedy we must fight our way through.
Circuses and casinos turn into a rainbow nightmare; a Pepto-Bismol pink bathroom is the setting for Gonzo’s screaming overdose. It’s the hotel rooms that are the worst – they begin merely strange, oddly proportioned, something you’re used to, but you’re not seeing it the way you normally would. By the end they’re assaulting the eye in circular pans, chaotic and festering without the glitz of a drug trip (or, metaphorically, the American Dream - OOH TEN POINTS TO ME FOR SYMBOLIC INTERPRETATION). I think the lighting notes for that set were “make a disco party that looks like it was wired by someone with intermittent tremors”. The production design note may as well have been “Make a trashy hotel room. Good. Now buy decorations on special at Walmart, ransack a junk shop, throw all that stuff everywhere, get drunk, have a fight with water and ketchup, trash the place, sleep in it, then it’ll be ready.” Once all that was done, the camerawork aim could have been “hold the camera in one hand like it’s a thing you don’t care about, keep shooting if you trip over, and when an actor says something stupid, shove it in his face.” While all this goes on, Julie Weiss’ costume team is hard at work borrowing Hunter S. Thompson’s clothes and somehow succeeding in making Johnny Depp ugly. Kudos, kiddies.
Ray Cooper’s score and sound team make everything we hear as weird as what we see; there is screaming and muttering and growling and laughing from all directions. Again, I suspect the note to the foley artists was something like “Get smashed, stumble into the studio, hook up a mic and stay in there overnight. We’ll have all the awful noise we need.” On a more organised level, the soundtrack is killer, lurching from Debbie Reynolds to The Yardbirds, tying all the chaos together in a cool little package – a cool little package that thrashes and shrieks, that is. This is a film soaked in weirdness at every single stage of the production process. Told you they hired the right people.
You don’t need to be told any of this, of course. Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas has already taken its rightful place in the culture. All of us have a friend that sticks a straw in their mouth and hisses “Once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.” Or a friend that yells “We can’t stop here, this is bat country!” whenever you’re at a red light. I don’t know about you, but I am that friend. It might be annoying, but – holy Jesus, what are these goddamn animals? Goodbye, American Dream, nice knowing you, but I’m afraid cinematic acid-trip-field-trips are much more memorable.
