Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

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In the book The Great Shark Hunt, Thompson refers to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as "a failed experiment in the gonzo journalism" he practiced, which was based on William Faulkner's idea that "the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism—and the best journalists have always known this". [1] Thompson's style blended the techniques of fictional story-telling and journalism. After months of quasi-public brooding on the Whys and Wherefores of the disastrous beating he absorbed last November, McGovern seems finally to have bought the Conventional Wisdom – that his campaign was doomed from the start: conceived in a fit of hubris, born in a momentary power-vacuum that was always more mirage than reality, borne along on a tide of frustration churned up by liberal lint-heads and elitist malcontents in the Eastern Media Establishment, and finally bashed into splinters on the reefs of at least two basic political realities that no candidate with good sense would ever have tried to cross in the first place…. To wit: I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway. No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough.” Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a wild, wild ride. You know that it is a fleeting moment. At the beginning of the book, the two are going along at 100 miles an hour in a convertible. These two are only going to get by with so much, but they are going to enjoy every single second of it. Duke and Doctor Gonzo must be admired for their sheer bravado, if condemned for the political unsoundness of their behaviour. The novel alternates hilarious scenes of madcap knavery with elegiac essays on the lost promise of the 1960s, but it does not become bogged down. This is because of its gleeful, manic energy.

HST: Yeah – the US Senate from Colorado. But I might end up running against Gary Hart in the primary. That would be interesting … I might not run as a Democrat, or I might not run at all. It’s a grueling, rotten ordeal to go through. Many critics have hailed Steadman's illustrations as another main character of the novel and companion to Thompson's disjointed narrative. The New York Times noted that "Steadman's drawings were stark and crazed and captured Thompson's sensibility, his notion that below the plastic American surface lurked something chaotic and violent. The drawings are the plastic torn away and the people seen as monsters." [22] The book also makes fun of society and formal education. For example, Dr. Gonzo would say, “As your attorney, I would advise…..” Or, Raoul would talk about being a doctor of journalism. They didn’t take themselves too seriously.

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McGovern: We were running a campaign that might have won in 1968. Might have won. Might have… You know, all of this is speculating, Hunter. I don’t think any of us really knows what’s going on. I think there’s always that pendulum action in American politics, and I expect Nixon to run into trouble in the next few years. I think there’s going to be disillusionment over his war settlement. I think the economic problems are not going to get better and the problems in the great cities are going to worsen, and it may be that by 76 somebody can come along and win on a kind of platform that I was running on in ’72. HST: I haven’t thought about it. But it would naturally have to involve a drastic change of some kind… Maybe just an atavistic endeavor, but there’s no point in getting into politics at all unless you plan to lash things around. Thompson, Hunter S. (1989). Fear and loathing in Las Vegas: a savage journey to the heart of the American dream. Internet Archive. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 978-0-679-72419-3. In terms of its plot, the book falls into two halves. In the first, Duke, a journalist, and Doctor Gonzo, his attorney, travel at high speed in a red convertible from LA to Las Vegas so Duke can cover the Mint 400 motorcycle race. He fails conspicuously to do so, and they wander in a drug-addled state among the various sensory intensities of Vegas. They behave despicably, “burning the locals, abusing the tourists and terrifying the help.” Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream is a 1971 novel by Hunter S. Thompson, illustrated by Ralph Steadman.

HST: Sure. They could all see it happening, but they couldn’t figure how to deal with it – because the damage was already done, and there was no way McGovern could prove that he was not as dangerously imcompetent as the Eagleton Affair made him seem to be. They couldn’t figure out… there was nothing they could do… no issue they could manufacture, no act that they could commit… or anything they could say… that would change people’s minds on the question of McGovern’s competence to get anything done, regardless of what he wanted to get done. In other words, there were a lot of people who liked him, liked what he said – but wouldn’t vote for him, because he seemed like a bumbler. There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning...HST: What the hell is the sense of trying to hold the Democratic party together, if it’s really a party of expediency, something that’s put together every four years? That’s one of the things I’ve been hammering on over and over: Where do we go from here? Is this the death knell of what we dimly or vaguely perceive as the new politics? The Kent State University protests against the Vietnam War, in which four students were killed when the National Guard opened fire, occurred a year before Thompson published Fear and Loathing. May 4 Collection/Kent State University Libraries/Special Collections and Archives/Handout via REUTERS The 1960s HST: Here’s a question you probably won’t like, but it’s something that’s kind of haunted me ever since it happened: What in the hell possessed you to offer the vice presidency to Humphrey in public? Did you think he would take it or if he did take it it would really help? This is the nut of the Pendulum Theory. It is also a recurring theme in McGovern’s personal analysis of why the voters rejected him so massively last November. The loss itself didn’t really surprise him. Not even the Eagleton debacle, he insisted, could explain away the fact that the American people had come within an eyelash of administering the worst defeat in the history of presidential politics to a gentle, soft-spoken and essentially conservative Methodist minister’s son from the plains of South Dakota.

McGovern: Well, it seemed to be something that had to be done to get a majority coalition, but maybe not. Hunter was a theatre. He was a roving kind of theatre. He was not just a writer … he was an actor. He was creating his own subject matter. Ed: So the Edge we’re talking about would be really the greatest if one were the candidate himself? Dr. Gonzo is based on Thompson's friend Oscar Zeta Acosta, who disappeared sometime in 1974. [10] Thompson changed Acosta's ethnic identity to "Samoan" to deflect suspicion from Acosta, who was in trouble with the Los Angeles County Bar Association. He was the "Chicano lawyer" notorious for his party binges. Wills, David S. (2021). High White Notes: The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism. Scotland: Beatdom Books. pp.271–280. ISBN 978-0993409981.The story follows its protagonist, Raoul Duke, and his attorney, Dr. Gonzo, as they descend on Las Vegas to chase the American Dream through a drug-induced haze, all the while ruminating on the failure of the 1960's counter cultural movement. The conference only serves to demonstrate how out of touch law enforcement is. The second half of the book follows much the same trajectory as the first, with the pair compounding their felonies of (statutory) rape, fraud and larceny. In the rear was a bar and a sort of mini press room where there were about five typewriters, a few phones – you could call from the plane to headquarters in Washington – you could call anywhere from the plane. But the atmosphere on the Dakota Queen was very… ah… very… reserved is the word. That whole opening narration sets the tone of chaos and comedy told in a perfect deadpan that defines this book.

a b Doss, Yvette C. (June 5, 1998). "The Lost Legend of the Real Dr. Gonzo". Los Angeles Times . Retrieved May 18, 2023. HST: Do you think it would be possible to, say, discount … if you could just wipe out the whole Eagleton thing, and assume that, say, Mondale or Nelson had taken it and there had been no real controversy, and try to remove the vice presidential thing as a factor. What do you think… HST: Well, unsettling periods of time. The selection of a replacement for Eagleton was one of the most heinous botches in the history of politics. Here he was calling Humphrey and Muskie and offering it to them publicly– and then being turned down … He had also offered it to Humphrey at the convention… I didn’t realize that until later. a b "Festival de Cannes: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas". festival-cannes.com. Archived from the original on July 28, 2011 . Retrieved September 29, 2009.HST: He promised it for about ten days and finally he said that the psychiatrists wouldn’t release them, the Mayo Clinic wouldn’t release them, the Barnes Hospital wouldn’t release them. Stubbs, Philip. "The conflict over Fear and Loathing's script credit". gilliamdreams.com . Retrieved February 17, 2017. However, Depp and Del Toro were also nominated by the Stinkers Bad Movie Awards for Worst On-Screen Couple, and during the same awards Del Toro's portrayal of Dr. Gonzo was also nominated for the Worst Supporting Actor. [51] See also [ edit ] The next day, they attend the drug convention, where they observe a comically out of touch presentation by a police "drug expert". Ed: What were Caddell’s statistical explanations for McGovern’s defeat? Why did he think McGovern lost?