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Rating: Sure, Jann Wenner had seen some strange types since 1967 when he launched the first modern-era music magazine in a Frisco warehouse with $7500 borrowed.
But the one who walked into the Rolling Stone editorial office in early 1971 was really an out-of-the-ordinary guy. Imagine a lanky figure with a long neck and a pear-shaped head, baldness hidden by a blondish wig, short pants, and Converse on his feet, smoky sunglasses, and a Dunhill cigarette with a holder permanently stuck in the corner of his mouth. His appearance was made even more bizarre by the fact that he walked with stiff legs spread semicircularly due to an injury sustained in an American football game.
The doctor in journalism (but it wasn't true, he only had a correspondence degree in theology) Hunter S. Thompson thus made his entrance into the most successful magazine of the early seventies, the newspaper that perfectly captured the disillusioned spirit of the summer of love with masterful articles on the Charlie Manson family and the bloody brawl at the Altamont concert.
Thompson was already famous in his own way for his reportage on the Hell's Angels, obtained by infiltrating the notorious biker gang, and Wenner needed young people who represented the new way of doing journalism. Hunter was the ideal subject with his ideas of Gonzo journalism, the style that involved diving directly into the story being told, perhaps with an alter ego like Raul Duke, and setting aside the main event to then overflow with one's own impressions of the people around the event itself and consequently about the disgusting conformist and reactionary American society that could only be endured by ingesting large quantities of drugs and alcohol.
"Fear and Loathing" is nothing more than a road trip just like the beloved Kerouac. Sent to luxurious Las Vegas to comment on a motorcycle race, Thompson becomes completely disinterested in the event and talks about the surroundings. The enormous quantity of drugs loaded into the rented convertible with his enormous Samoan lawyer friend Oscar Zeta Acosta, the disgusting people crowding that greedy and consumeristic capital of vice, and therefore the need to make oneself a beast to rid oneself of the pain of being a man.
Between tragedy, with the wasted lawyer asking to be killed in an electric way ("... lying in the tub with his head full of acid and holding the sharpest knife I had ever seen, totally unable to reason, asking for White Rabbit...here we are, I thought... this time it's a suicide trip"), and comedy, with the invitation to the Anti-Drug Conference of District Attorneys ("what the hell are these people saying? One must be as high as kites to think a joint looks like a cockroach!"), Hunter S. Thompson always emerges as the hero who is there by chance.
Hero in a manner of speaking, but in the end, the perpetually high reporter is the only one who is truly real in an America hypocritically adrift in casinos that operate twenty-four hours a day. Where reading newspaper headlines like "THREE ARRESTED FOR THE DEATH OF A BEAUTIFUL GIRL" or "SOLDIERS IN VIETNAM DIE FROM DRUGS" or "TESTIMONIES OF TORTURE BEFORE A COMMISSION OF INQUIRY" make his own offenses seem bland and insignificant.
And in Las Vegas the American Dream ends, whose search is the true motivation of the trip of Duke and Dr. Gonzo in that immense Red Shark, the rented and never paid convertible Chevrolet. A hallucinogenic trip with quotes that compel one to learn more about the sub-culture of the era: mescaline, speed, poppers, methedrine, Big Sur, Sonny Barger, Memphis Blues Again, Om, Joe Frazier, Romilar, SDS, Iron Boy, Chuck Taylor, Lieutenant Calley, Impossible Mission, the siege of Vicksburg, Waco, Eldrige Cleaver, California Highway Patrol, Spiro Agnew, Gerber Mini Magnum, Greasers, PCP, Interstate 15, Bob Hope, Jesus Freaks, Marshal Ky, Sandy Bull, Timothy Leary, Mace spray, Manson Family, Hell's Angels.
"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" talks about the disappointment of discovering that in the sixties people seemed to be different but in reality, it was always the same: disgusting.
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