No Ordinary Fool

We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug-collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.

Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

This documentary from Alex Gibney begins with an explanation that there were two Hunter S. Thompsons – the kind, caring one and the ill-tempered, angry one. By the end, though, it seems much more apparent that there are two better ways of viewing him – the myth and the man respectively.

The former is the notorious, hell-raising, super party animal inspired by his seminal work Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It is the popular image, whose legacy remains to this day in the form of Duke in the Doonesbury cartoon strip, as well as being immortalised by Johnny Depp in Terry Gillam’s film adaptaion of the aforementionned novel. Indeed, quite a few scenes from which are used in this documentary. However, the fact that Thompson felt the need to live up to this image is what essentially destroyed him. Worse, though, as is the case with all tragic heroes, he could see and understand that he was the harbringer of his own doomed destiny, yet could not stop it from happening.

This brings us to Thompson the man. Perhaps it is the presence of Depp in both films that triggered the memory, but there are some notably common characteristics between this documentary and Julien Temple’s The Future is Unwritten about the life of Joe Strummer. Both were angry young men who became major voices of their generation. They both burned brightly in those years and their output from then on would never come close to being the same. However, whereas Temple’s film left you with feelings of warmth and sadness for the life and passing respectively of Strummer, Gibney’s work fails to connect satisfactorily with who the writer really was and what inspired and motivated him.

Instead, his formative years are glossed over as briefly as possible and the film deals instead with the well-covered ground of Thompson’s three most famous works. This is a period that spans the late sixties and early seventies, before the film goes on to chart his decline in more whirlwind fashion once more. Indeed, more time is given over to US Presidential elections of the period than is to understanding who Thompson really was. Indeed, the truth would seem to be that the allure of discussing the period’s presidential candidates George Bush Richard Nixon, John Kerry George McGovern, and Barack Obama Jimmy Carter was too great to resist. Whilst Thompson flits in and out of these scenes and this subplot is an interesting one in itself, there is a definite spell in the film where Gibney seems to have forgotten the subject of his documentary!

That said, this remains a broadly accessible and hugely entertaining film to go see if you wish to gain a general sense for who the writer was. There are some pithy one-liners, some great comic stories, and then there are the scenes with the inimitable cartoonist Ralph Steadman. Steadman illustrated Thompson’s books and both were probably the biggest influences in each others’ lives. Thompson was pushed towards his ground-breaking first-person style of journalism by Steadman, whereas the latter admits to have been the shy and retiring type before Thompson introduced him to his world of personal mayhem.

On the whole, so, anyone with an interest in Thompson’s writings will certainly gain something from seeing this documentary. However, as much as I enjoyed certain aspects of the film, I ultimately felt disappointed by it too. It just felt too warm and fuzzy, too willing to emphasize certain parts of who the man was, whilst underplaying others, and, as discussed, it lacked discipline. In other words, the documentary did little to crack the stereotypical image of one of the great American personalities of the twentieth century and that is a shame.