Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

When I first heard of this project, I was skeptical. See, I'm a big fan of the book, and the book strikes me as being totally unfilmable -- not just in terms of structure and narrative, but in terms of the basic concept. Hell, if I were producing this thing, the closest I could come to a faithful adaptation would be to take a film crew, load them down with a copy of the book, film equipment, and a fuckload of drugs, and send them out into the Nevada desert to see what they come up with. And even then, the story is so much a product of its place and time -- the disillusionment immediately following the sixties -- that it's impossible to re-create. The whole exercise of making a movie at all just seems intellectually bankrupt, offering little more than an opportunity to show some visual inventiveness.

But then they gave the project to Terry Gilliam, and visual invention is kind of his thing. What makes the movie work is how carefully it builds a world -- yeah, there's the really memorable visual gimmicks like the floor being covered with blood and the lounge full of bloodthirsty reptiles -- but that sense of the world being constantly off-kilter, shifting in subtle and almost subliminal ways, is what fills the two-hour running time. To complain that it lacks a cohesive narrative seems to me to be utterly missing the point -- this isn't a story so much as it's a really horrible trip, in every sense of the word.

If there is an underlying point, it's the implication that the lunacy they create and inhabit is nothing compared to the grand lunacy of the country in which they're trying to survive, to the agreed-upon fiction of normality. Their pointless self-destruction is held up to ridicule -- but is it really any more pointless than the plastic, unfeeling existence of those who pretend to be disgusted with them? The apparent sanity of mainstream culture is so self-evidently absurd that the brutality with which they attempt to destroy it in their own lives actually makes a terrifying kind of sense. And lately, maybe it's not so hard to re-create that context in our own time.