Psychotropic Cinema: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Psychotropic Cinema: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
It began as a Sports Illustrated assignment to cover The Mint 400, an off-road motorcycle race in the Nevada desert. Still, when Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson turned in his article, SI rejected it. Rolling Stone founding editor Jann Wenner agreed to publish it in installments and paid for Thompson to return to Las Vegas, this time for the annual District Attorney’s Convention. It is the purest distillation of Thompson’s iconoclastic style—half-reporting, half-fabricated fiction, exaggerating the drug use of the counterculture to absurd degrees.
The book achieved the status of instant classic, and Thompson himself became a writing legend. Since its publication in 1972, multiple attempts were made to adapt it, but it took 26 years and the brilliant Terry Gilliam to bring Thompson’s autopsy of The American Dream ™ to the screen.
It is the purest distillation of Thompson’s iconoclastic style—half-reporting, half-fabricated fiction, exaggerating the drug use of the counterculture to absurd degrees.
Released in 1998, the film was not financially successful or even rated that highly by critics. But it is a remarkable achievement, expertly capturing the anarchic spirit and lurching mood shifts of the novel. It is a distinctly lysergic film, mimicking the effects of an acid trip on the viewer. It can shift from hilarious slapstick to violent paranoia—and then mercilessly cut to the cold hungover reality of the morning after. But it also has something to say about the counterculture, Nixon’s “Silent Majority”, and the futility of participating in a degenerate society where the cards are stacked against you and The House always wins.
Gilliam is the perfect director for the material. The former Monty Python animator had made several films exploring the funhouse mirror reflection of human behavior. He reined in Robin Williams’ manic energy in The Fisher King and allowed Brad Pitt to flex his comedic chops (and chew some scenery) as the crazed Jeffrey Goines in 12 Monkeys. Aided by stellar performances by Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro, Gilliam indulges in an orgy of garish colors, trippy production design, and a camera that never stops moving, bobbing, and weaving, which affects the viewer. The film is inebriated (and inebriating) and can be exhausting to the viewer not in the proper frame of mind.
In real life, Thompson went to Vegas with his friend, lawyer, and civil rights organizer Oscar Acosta. In the book, they are given the alter egos of Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo. The two cause havoc, trash multiple hotel rooms, and take an enormous quantity of drugs, almost as a political act against the stifling airless conformity and conservatism of Nixon’s America. The two are constantly enacting routines—improvised riffing on cultural taboos, spinning fictional absurdist
Aided by stellar performances by Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro, Gilliam indulges in an orgy of garish colors, trippy production design, and a camera that never stops moving, bobbing, and weaving
stories to confuse the squares, amuse themselves, and befuddle the dull and stupid. Understanding this context helps to illuminate the abhorrent behavior of Duke and Gonzo. They did everything one is not supposed to do in Las Vegas: “Scam the Locals, Abuse the Staff, Scare the Tourists”.
Not unlike the caricatures of frequent Thompson collaborator Ralph Steadman, every character is grotesque, every scene filmed with a distorted wide-angle fisheye lens. There are many fantastic set pieces, whether the masterful slapstick of entering a casino on an ether binge or the violent menace of an off-strip greasy spoon diner.
The film is packed with surprising and effective cameos, from Gilliam regulars like Katherine Helmond and Michael Jeter, as well as Cameron Diaz, Christina Ricci (as a feral teenage runaway obsessed with Barbra Streisand), Harry Dean Stanton, Chris Meloni, Mark Harmon, Ellen Barkin, and an unforgettable Gary Busey.
One of my favorite scenes is a flashback to San Francisco at the dawn of the psychedelic age, where Depp as Thompson is wandering through the crowd at The Matrix while Jefferson Airplane is onstage, and he runs into the actual Hunter S. Thompson, making his own cameo. Depp’s voiceover states “Holy Shit—That’s Me!” After scoring some acid from chemist Lyle Lovett, he spills some onto his flannel shirtsleeve, where it is licked up by a stoned hippie played by Flea.
The entire film is hazy and trippy, but it is impressive that Gilliam, who professes to have never tried anything stronger than pot, got so many of the ineffable details of tripping accurately. To quote writer J. Hoberman, it is “…the definitive LSD sequence in Hollywood movies—a farrago of glacially-delayed responses, free-floating incomprehension, inadvertent word repetitions, and minor visual distortions that blossom into full-fledged hallucinations.”
The music is great throughout, and although there were some copyright issues with the studio that prevented Gilliam from using certain songs, overall, there is a well-chosen selection: Jefferson Airplane, Buffalo Springfield, Brewer and Shipley, Big Brother and The Holding Co., The Yardbirds, and Bob Dylan are all featured needle-drops, as well as cheesy Vegas numbers from Tom Jones, Wayne Newton, and Debbie Reynolds (covering “Sgt. Pepper”!).
In addition to being quintessentially psychedelic, what struck me when revisiting the film is the notion that Fear and Loathing is about Time. The events take place in 1971 when the conservative reaction to the seismic cultural shifts of the 60s was picking up steam. It was filmed in the late 90s when the world and the entertainment industry were completely different. Gilliam uses excellent CGI to recreate the Strip circa 1971 because the Vegas of the story—conservative, square, beholden to The Rat Pack, garish and lurid—no longer existed. Indeed, the Vegas of 1998 no longer exists. 54 years after writing, Thompson would find today many psychedelic experiences baked right into the Vegas scene (if you’ve ever been to Meow Wolf or The Neon Museum, you know what I mean). What Duke and Gonzo’s reflection of the American Dream shows is the ugly, atavistic underbelly of society. This darkness adds depth to the film’s color-saturated trippiness. Rather than being a simplistic celebration of mind-expanding hallucinogens, the film doesn’t flinch from showing the violence and paranoia that are often present, as well as multiple shots of Del Toro vomiting after overindulging. Viewers looking for just a trippy weird funny experience may be uncomfortable with this aspect, but the insight of Thompson’s best writing (well-used in copious narration by Depp) makes it worth the bummer. Thompson’s death 20 years ago also colors the 2025 viewing experience and adds to the air of melancholy and regret. Fear and Loathing has more on its mind than hedonistic excess and mythmaking. On one level, it is about the promise of Freedom, as well as its incapacity for transcendence. As Thompson noted elsewhere: “Freedom is something that dies unless it’s used.”
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is available to stream on Amazon Prime and Apple+. The Criterion Collection has a wonderful edition on both DVD and Blu-ray, with many noteworthy extras, including a commentary track by Thompson himself (recorded in 1999) that is as crazy and anarchic as his writing.
Gallery
Recent Articles
