| Rating: | ★★★★ |
| Category: | Movies |
| Genre: | Documentary |
He is also the man rightly credited with inventing "gonzo" journalism--a form which allows a reporter to cover a story using his imagination and making insights that go beyond the surface of a political campaign or a scandal to get at a deeper , often bitter, core truth about the events he/she is covering.
His books include my favorite work of American political campaigns, "Fear And Loathing On the Campaign Trail: 1972"; "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", "The Hell's Angels" (a book that grew out of his spending months with the most dangerous of the West Coast outlaw motorcycle clubs) and an anthology of his essays and articles called 'The Great Shark Hunt". Many of these books come with illustrations by Ralph Steadman, an inspired artist of twisted imagery in the spirit of the Wiemar-Era German master, George Groz.
This film is a fascinating glimpse into his life and those who loved and cared about him as a colleague. The saddest part of the story is how, after the mid-Seventies, he began a long decline and was almost swallowed up by his own legend.
Hunter Thompson, you see, was the consummate outsider looking in--and he was also a damn funny writer, as well, which makes me sad to think he's not around to give us his takes on the world for the ease of a pundit's chair. He was an original, a patriot, a bit of a kook, a genius with words when he was on his game, a gun nut, a bit paranoid, a romantic, a cynic, a dangerous man to drive in a car with, a passionate seeker and...did I mentioned he was damn funny?
Done well, this is a good thing. Done badly, this kind of "journalism" can be nothing more than muddled emotional twaddle. "The consummate outsider looking in" - that is a true sociologist stance. I have heard of his books but not read them. Thanks for an interesting post, as usual, Doug.
ReplyDeleteAll too true, Iri Ani. There's a fellow in the local paper who tries to write that way--like Thompson--but his columns come across very often as inane barroom ruminations. He's had such an effect on journalism that just about every major newspaper has a "gonzo" columnist. But Dr. Thompson, in America at least, is where this form begins.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comments.
Here's a late interview from HST, featuring his views on the media and the aftermath of mass conformity many news outlets showed after the 9/11 attacks.
ReplyDeleteIf I'm not mistaken, I've read that guy's stuff.
ReplyDeleteThompson was one of a kind - often imitated; never duplicated. It ought to be remembered that toward the end, he was little more than a case of arrested-development; an overgrown teenager who never learned that the drugs and fart jokes and booze weren't funny any more....
His life story didn't have a good last couple chapters, that's for sure.
ReplyDeleteThanks for this review of the contribution of Hunter S Thompson Doug. A counter culture 'hero' of the 1970s I read 'Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas' when I was a lad. Thomson was widely reviewed in both the British underground and corporate press at the time and sort of got mixed up with the Merry Pranksters and other American expressions of cultural criticism and drug crazed literary introspection.
ReplyDeleteI think he inherited much of this artistic anarchy from the earlier generation of Beat artists and writers and it is interesting to note that William Burroughs was also a bit of a gun fanatic that was a part of both of their quintessential Americaness, maybe?
It is this combination of the 'lovable rogue', the reckless adventurer and chemically reconfigured "fool" telling untellable truths about the American Dream whilst at the same time actually living it... that I think is Thompson's appeal and his greatest contribution.
An icon of a 'devil may care' individualism that flourished in the post-war economic boom. Hunter S Thomson warned us of what would come to pass, but could never be part of the political solution himself, he always had to be on the outside (unlike Ralph Steadman)
Ralph Steadman's wonderful caricatures are a British version of this anarchic rejection of the right of our rulers to evaporate us along with everybody and everything else and more or less at their whim.
Together with Thompson they represent the real 'special relationship' that is an inevitable consequence of the literary Anglosphere, creatively thinking and expressing ourselves through the medium of the English language.
Thanks for posting this tribute to this honest articulate dissenter and witty commentator on the American scene. Gore Vidal's delinquent brother and a guy who tells a very good tale... if you live long enough to hear the end of it?
I read F&L in Las Vegas about 20 years ago. It put me off for life.
ReplyDeleteRight on the gun business: it is quintessentially--and nauseatingly-- American.
ReplyDeleteThere is something of the fool in the Thompson persona, that's a very good insight. I guess it was calculated to give him leeway to write the stories of the festering excess and corruption: the bread and circuses of America politics; the shameless and empty glitter of Las Vegas; the casual brutality of the police in places like Chicago, 1968; the rancid red-faced alcohol-fueled madness of certain posh high-roller rednecks at the Kentucky Derby, et al. I think his two "Fear and Loathing" books were his best, although there were gems in his more casual writings as well. Here, for instance, is HST on show business:
"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."
Of Las Vegas or Hunter Thompson, Ian? ;-)
ReplyDelete<<== thinking : the ying and yang of the hippy days
ReplyDeletegood post
Thanks Good Stuff.
ReplyDeleteDr. Thompson is a great inspiration; he captured a good chunk of the zeitgeist of those times.