Let me just confess right off the bat that I watched the movie first.
Yes, the movie with Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro that was directed by Terry Gilliam. I was about 19 years old. My sophomore year in college. I had no idea that it was an adaptation of a book. And I had never heard of Hunter S. Thompson before, either.
My brother had rented the movie and was watching it in my downstairs basement. I happened to walk in the room and I saw an actor who looked familiar. “Is that Johnny Depp?” I asked him. He said that it was, indeed, Depp. This immediately intrigued me because I was a fan of Depp’s but had never seen this particular movie of his before.
I stayed in the room for a few minutes and I liked what I was watching, although I had no idea what was going on. The movie made little sense to me. It seemed more like an experience than a movie with a coherent story that was easy to follow. But, yes, I did like what I saw.
I know I didn’t watch the whole movie at that time and I don’t think I even watched it later. I think my brother returned the movie to the video store without me ever seeing it in its entirety. My memory is hazy about all this, but I think it wasn’t until I actually saw the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas VHS, maybe for sale at Walmart or something, that I decided to just up and buy it. I already knew I liked Johnny Depp. And I knew I had liked the few minutes or so of what I had seen when my brother was watching the movie in the basement. So I said, screw it, I’m just going to blindly buy this thing.
And that’s exactly what I did.
This is when I’m pretty sure I first saw the movie in full. I still had no idea what was going on. Hardly understood any of it. So I watched it again.
And again.
And again.
I still didn’t really understand the movie at all, but for some reason I still loved it. I kept watching it so many times and I never got sick of it, not even a little bit. I must have watched the movie more than a dozen times.
I eventually did come to realize, of course, that this movie was based on a book by a writer named Hunter S. Thompson. Since I liked the movie so much, I figured I should probably read the book that it was based on. I also figured the book would help me better understand the movie.
So I went to my local library, took out a copy of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas …
And, from that point forward, my life got divided into two clearly-demarcated parts. There was pre-Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. And there was post-Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
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| The original first edition cover art for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. |
I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that this book changed my life. It was seriously the best book I had ever read up to that point in my life and remains the best book I have ever read to this day.
Not that there aren’t “better” books out there. I’m sure that books by Herman Melville or Henry James or Ernest Hemingway are better than Thompson’s book. The difference, however, is that Fear and Loathing is, indeed, “serious literature,” yes, but it is more enjoyable to read than any other work of fine literature I have ever read before.
See, I am not a good reader by nature. Reading has always been a struggle for me. Although my skills have improved over the years, I was always a slow reader in school and had terrible reading comprehension skills. I was one of those readers who had to read a paragraph twice or even three times to fully absorb what I was reading. I usually did well in my English classes, but this was just because I made the extra effort to make sure I understood what I was reading. I found most works of literature that I read in these classes to be absolutely boring and I’m ashamed to admit this because most of these books were brilliant works of literature. But they were still boring to me!
Then came along Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I can honestly say without any exaggeration that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was the first work of literature I ever read that I didn’t struggle reading. Well, not only did I not struggle with it, but I genuinely enjoyed reading it, had genuine FUN reading it, and genuinely had trouble putting it down. It was the first actual page-turner I had ever read.
It was also the first book that ever made me laugh out loud.
Seriously, I can’t remember any book actually making me laugh out loud like Hunter Thompson’s book did. And I’m talking uncontrollable bursts of laughter. I have a distinct memory of being on the commuter rail train circa 2001, coming or going to BU (i.e. Boston University), and trying to hold in my laughter so I didn’t look like a weirdo howling out loud. I think what I did was hide the laughter with coughs or maybe even a fake sneeze.
Overall, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas taught me a very important lesson. Literature can be fun, not boring. It can also be cool. It can be serious while at the same time being wacky. And weird.
But, yes, the book is definitely “serious” literature—no doubt about that.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is basically about America coming down from the high it was on in the 1960s. In the book, there is Thompson’s famous “wave speech” that analogizes the late-1960s hippie culture—one of peace, love and idealism—to a great wave that came ashore with so much positive energy but then broke, left a high-water mark, and rolled back. Woodstock in 1969 may have been the peak of this “wave.” But then, a few months later, there was Altamont, the free Rolling Stones concert that hoped to be a sequel to Woodstock. Everything went south at that festival; there were fights, rapes, a murder and an overall different, more negative vibe.[i] Some people say that Altamont marked the official end of the hippie movement, the peace and the love.
The "wave speech."
The decade of the 1970s was essentially the aftermath of the wave’s break. Nixon was president. Vietnam continued to go sideways. The Manson murders and the Kent State shootings left everyone feeling rattled. Downers became more popular within the drug culture. People abandoned an American Dream filled with peace, love and unity, and instead, basically said “fuck it” and put their faith back into money. People no longer went to a place like Woodstock to find the dream. They went to Las Vegas instead.
And this is really what Hunter’s book documents so well. This cultural shift from the Age of Aquarius to the age of the casino.
Well, sort of.
Although Hunter’s book does accurately reveal how America had “lost its way” in the 1970s, I think the book also suggests, perhaps more subtly and maybe even subconsciously, that it may not be as bad as it all seems.
Part of what makes the book so funny is how paranoid the characters of Raoul Duke and his sidekick Dr. Gonzo are. These characters are walking embodiments of fear and loathing, always convinced that the people around them are out to get them, that the cops almost have them cornered, that their arrest is imminent, that the axe is always about to fall.
"Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas... with the music at top volume and at least a pint of ether."
"No! Fuck! Don't go near the elevator, man, that's just what they want us to do. Trap us in a steel box, take us down to the basement. Come here. Don't run, man. They'd like any excuse to shoot us."
But the funny thing is that this is not really true, no one is out to get them. Nobody is onto their schemes. There are no cops after them. In fact, when one highway patrolman does pull Duke over, he is actually pretty cool with Duke, even gives him a break. The people in Las Vegas mostly just keep to themselves. They’re focused more on winning big in Vegas than anything Duke and Gonzo are up to.
One of my early interpretations of the book saw Duke, a journalist, as a personification of the media. Just like the media, Duke constantly exists in a state of fear and loathing because he is hyper-focused on all the bad things in the world. He often broods over negative current events through newspaper articles and TV news reports while ignoring the overall banality that surrounds him on a daily basis. If you think about it, how much less fearful would we all be without the media constantly trying to get us to focus on all the bad things happening in the world?
Looking at the book through a more philosophical lens, however, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas can also be seen as a book that simply warns us about the destructive nature of fear. You know, it’s like what FDR said: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” There are always horrible things happening in the world all the time. The media would have us believe that these horrible things are happening in our immediate surroundings. But this is not usually true. Our biggest enemy is not the horrible things that the media tells us are happening in the world, but, rather, our biggest enemy is really the FEAR of these horrible things.
This may be a controversial reading of Fear and Loathing, but I would argue that Duke and Gonzo are not simply victims of the fucked-up society around them, although I think, to some degree, that they definitely are. They are mostly victims of themselves and their own fear. They do obscene amounts of drugs simply because they are afraid, but in doing so, they ironically become more degenerate than the very people around them that they fear. Maybe some fear and loathing of how fucked up America had become in the 1970s was justified, but at the end of the day, their choice to become junkies is a direct result of allowing their fear to dominate them.
"Arming themselves to the teeth." The obscene amounts of drugs that Duke and Gonzo do in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
There is a quote at the beginning of the book by Dr. Samuel Johnson: “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” This quote is basically saying that becoming a junky—which is essentially becoming a beast—is a kind of copout. And maybe Hunter put this quote at the beginning of his book because he thought this to be true of the 1970s drug culture … but also, deep down, maybe he even knew this was true of himself. Maybe Thompson, who famously used drugs to numb his “pain of being a man,” knew that he was really just copping out at the end of the day.
Not that he can be blamed. I certainly don’t judge him or anybody for “copping out.” It’s tough being a man, especially in a screwed-up world, and I’ve certainly done my share of numbing over the years. Yes, I’ve certainly copped out at times. It’s hard not to.
Anyway, all of the above is just my way of saying there are deep, “serious” things going on in the wacky, weird book that is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. In fact, the absurd wackiness of the book sometimes ends up overshadowing just how much there is to appreciate about this work of fine literature. Not just the work’s content …
But also the form itself.
I think people think of Fear and Loathing as being “below” other books of fine literature because it is written in such a strange, irreverent manner. This, however, is not the case. The writing is so crisp, so punchy, so to-the-point, flows so fluidly and is so easy to read. No wordy sentences. No long descriptions. And especially no adverbs. Yes, the prose isn’t easy to read because it’s low art; it’s easy to read because it’s simply so well-written.
From what I understand, Hunter learned from the best. He taught himself how to write novels by literally retyping books by Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner and other great writers. I believe he said that he wanted to know what it felt like to write a great work of literature. Reading the books is one thing, but the actual process of typing them out, word-for-word, helped Hunter get a sense of the prose’s rhythm and style.[ii]
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| Hunter S. Thompson on his typewriter. |
Ironically, I learned from Hunter in the same way he learned from Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and others. Ok, I didn’t go so far as to actually retype his book, but I must have read Fear and Loathing countless times. I spent a great deal of time studying how he constructed his paragraphs and seamlessly wove in the characters’ dialogue. One night, I actually read much of the book out loud to myself, very slowly, so I could micro-analyze the way in which he constructed his prose.
In fact, I don’t even know if I would have had the courage to try my hand at writing a novel if it hadn’t been for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The biggest thing that the book taught me is that you can write in a completely liberated, irreverent—even punk-ish—manner and still be writing actual “fine” literature. Fear and Loathing taught me that there don’t have to be any rules and that “fine literature” doesn’t have to be boring. It sounds so silly to say, but Thompson’s writing made me realize that I can write a book that is written in a way that I always wanted one to be written. You know what I mean? I didn’t have to conform to what I thought a book should be like. I could literally just be myself and write a book the way myself wanted to write a book. Once I got that into my head, the idea of writing suddenly became exciting to me. What?! I can write a book like THIS (i.e. like Fear and Loathing)?! Why didn’t you say so?! I’m all in!
And the rest is history. Over the past 20 years, I’ve written more than a dozen novels (about 14, to be exact, but who’s counting?).
For all the above reasons, I think I can safely say that the book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is not only my favorite book of all time, but it is also the book that inspired me the most as a writer. Aside from a couple of movies (Repo Man, for example), I don’t think there is another work of art that has played such a profound role in shaping me as a creative person.
There is no other book in existence that I have read more times than Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. No book even comes close. Other than Fear and Loathing, I actually can’t think of any book out there that I have read more than twice. With Fear and Loathing, I have read that book God knows how many times.
Whenever I am in need of inspiration or encouragement, I read Fear and Loathing. Whenever I feel like I need to ground myself, I read Fear and Loathing. It may sound strange to say this, but reading the book gives me a feeling of going home for some reason. Yes, I don’t know why, but I feel like I’m “at home” when I read the book.
Which is odd. Because why would a drug-fueled book about the dark side of the American dream make me feel “at home”?
I don’t know.
But it does.
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MATT BURNS is the author of several novels, including Johnny Cruise, Supermarket Zombies!, The Woman and the Dragon and Weird Monster. He’s also written numerous memoirs, including GARAGE MOVIE: My Adventures Making Weird Films, Lymey Bastard, My Raging Case of Beastie Fever, Jungle F’ng Fever: My 30-Year Love Affair with Guns N’ Roses, Bostonwood and I Turned into a Misfit! Check out these books (and many more) on his Amazon author page HERE.
Other trending articles by Matt Burns that may be of interest to you:
Writing Tips/Advice:
THE AUDIO BOOK EXPERIMENT: Tips and Advice on How to Record Your First Audio Book
Making Your Good Writing Great
No-No, Learn to Love the Rejection: Some Sage Advice for Writers in Search of an Agent or Publisher
The Story Behind Supermarket Zombies!
The Story Behind The Woman and the Dragon
Film-related articles:
REPO MAN: It’s Not Just a Movie, It’s a Way of Life
WET HOT AMERICAN SUMMER TURNS 25 (and it’s only gotten better)
NOT PLAYING IT SAFE: How Todd Haynes’ Film Was Used to ‘Deprogram’ Me and My Fellow Film Students
How I Got into the Films of John Cassavetes
If I May Say a Few Words About FLIGHT OF THE NAVIGATOR
35 YEARS OF TURTLE POWER: A Tribute to 1990’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Movie
Revisiting the Blair Witch Project
My Childhood Obsession with Rambo
Heeeeeeeeeeeeeere’s Charlie (a story about Burns’ recurring nightmares featuring Charlie Chaplin)
Short memoirs/nostalgia:
BOGGLED BY THE BELL: How I tried to write an episode of Saved by the Bell and ultimately failed
Some Wicked Good Times: A Love Letter to Newbury Comics
A Love Letter to the Emerald Square Mall (about the death of the shopping mall age)
I Dream of Dream Machine (a memoir of the local video arcade)
I USED TO BE A GAMER: The 8-bit Nintendo Years
NEVER FORGET the Fun-O-Rama (a traveling carnival memoir)
CAPE CODDING IT: A Cape Cod Vacation Memoir
GREYHOUNDING IT, BABY! A Guide to taking a Greyhound Bus Long Distances
Visiting Mom in the ICU (short story contest winner)
Remembering That Time I Tried to Stop a Shoplifter at the Wrentham Outlets
Gaming/computers nostalgia:
PROXOS IN THE PLEX: A Goldeneye 007 N64 Retrospective
100 DAYS of ZELDA: Revisiting Ocarina of Time
[i] Gimme Shelter. Directed by Albert Maysles, et al., Maysles Films, 1970.
[ii] Rose, Charlie. “Hunter S. Thompson / Isabella Rossellini | Charlie Rose.” YouTube, uploaded by Charlie Rose, 31 October 2013, https://youtu.be/JVcrimSicek?si=oG4l_JF8x_fKFMN8.
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