I’d Love To Turn You On At The Movies #233 - Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas (1998, dir. Terry Gilliam)

The first and foremost prerequisite for enjoying this movie is having read the source material. You simply have got to be acquainted with and appreciative of Hunter S. Thompson’s groundbreaking writing. Nobody excoriated the current state of American political culture in the late 60’s and early 70’s like Thompson. He spoke to the entire generation of drug taking rock and roll fanatics because he was one of them. Like so many of his generation, the double-edged sword of drug advocacy cut both ways within his life, opening avenues of incredible insight and hallucinatory description like no other, but later leaving him creatively impotent and looking like a sad reminder of past mistakes. In his glory though he captured the gestalt with razor precision and spewed his acid-tinged bile across the page with delirious abandon. It was both fun and enlightening to read of his drug-addled exploits while he dismantled conservative orthodoxy with the skill of a surgeon. Because his writing so vividly described states of chemical madness the desire to see it depicted on screen has always been on the short list of generational desires. Like other literary talismans of the era - Naked Lunch, Catch 22 or Slaughterhouse Five - the reality is often not what we saw in our mind’s eye. So to begin with, if you are not already a fan of Thompson’s work, or sympathetic to the psychedelic state of mind, turn back now! This is not some light-hearted comedic romp through goofball party time. This is a dark and disturbing trip into the politically charged wreckage left on the road leading out of the 1960s.

Based on the actual journalistic experiences of Hunter S. Thompson (played with leering glee by Johnny Depp), Fear And Loathing finds him being assigned to cover a motorcycle race in Las Vegas. He loads his crazed lawyer drug buddy Dr. Gonzo (Benecio Del Toro with a 50-pound gut) into a Cadillac convertible loaded with illegal drugs and guns and heads off across the desert to take on Sin City. The assignment itself quickly becomes secondary to the pair’s frenzied drug consumption and anti-social behavior. Much of their behavior is the cornerstone of the book and movie’s reputation, and it is actually not funny, but a super-exaggerated reaction to the hypocrisy and violence of the Nixon era. Thompson reviled middle class values and the macho, police-state culture of 20^th century America. The ugliness of Nixon, Vietnam, the war on drugs, and all that went with them was crystallized in Las Vegas and Thompson and Dr. Gonzo can only respond by outdoing the ugliness. As a result, much of the movie involves itself with the frenetic, disturbing, dangerous, often disgusting behavior of drug addled adult delinquents. The drug excess does not seem fun, but scary and sick-making; in fact Del Toro’s character spends much of his screen time vomiting, twitching, oozing and writhing like a stuck pig. This is not ribald humor it is savage satire. Thompson’s written word left many with unease while simultaneously confirming, reflecting and glorifying their youthful excesses - Gilliam’s movie does a woozy good job bringing the hallucinations to life.

Acclaimed for his work with Monty Python and then for his own movies like The Fisher King, Brazil, and 12 Monkeys, Terry Gilliam was clearly acquainted with the original material and the lifestyle it portrayed. He does a remarkable job smoothing the transition points between straight narrative and insane states of drug madness, thus putting the viewer squarely behind the rolling, red eyes of Thompson. He gets the most from his actors as well; Depp and Del Toro are both extraordinary - Depp slithering around like an anesthetically impaired iguana, mugging and dodging Del Toro’s wrecking ball of a character, who veers between utterly menacing and completely disgusting. The era was complex, ugly, and confusing, and Gilliam’s movie is equally so.

The biggest payoffs come in the few reflective scenes, when Gilliam dials back the insanity for a moment and allows Depp’s voiceover to revel in Thompson’s insightful prose. In one scene, Thompson stares out a window and reflects on the changes he has seen since the mid 60’s “We were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark, that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.” It is a poetic moment within the maelstrom of lunacy that surrounds it, and that ultimately is the power of Hunter S. Thompson’s writing and Gilliam’s movie - they both manage to find a kind of beauty within the madness that surrounds them.

- Paul Epstein

I'd Love To Turn You On: At the Movies #1 - Dead Man

Dead Man (1995, dir. Jim Jarmusch)
One of my favorite film critics described Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man as an “acid western.” It’s a fitting label, but misleading. It makes you expect lots of aggressive camera work, special effects and color. Dead Man has none of that. It’s black and white, and the pace is slow. But it’s a total trip just the same — one of those rare works of art that exists in four or five or eighteen different dimensions.

At its core, Dead Man is a simple story. A man sells everything for a train ticket to the western frontier to fill an accounting position he’s been offered. By the time he gets there, though, the job has gone to someone else. He spends his last dime on a bottle and winds up getting shot in a fight over a girl. He flees into the wilderness where an Indian finds him, tries to save him but is unable to remove the bullet from next to his heart. Duty bound, the Indian delivers him to the Pacific Ocean for a proper send off into the afterlife.

Where the film gets really heavy is in its cultural allusions. The biggest is the lead character’s name, William Blake (played by Johnny Depp). This William Blake knows nothing about the British poet, painter and printmaker. In fact, none of the film’s characters do except for the Indian, who, it turns out, actually studied Blake’s work in England after he was captured and hauled across the ocean in a cage and paraded around Europe as an oddity from the New World. When the Native character (who calls himself “Nobody” and is portrayed brilliantly by Gary Farmer) learns Blake’s name he assumes that he’s the real William Blake. He recites a chilling stanza: “Every night and every morn / Some to misery are born / Every morn and every night / Some are born to sweet delight / Some are born to sweet delight / some are born to endless night.” This moment in the film combines with others like it to suggest a theme or message that’s never exactly clear, but still makes sense on multiple levels.

Dead Man is about America and the Manifest Destiny, that much is obvious. During the early shoot-out scene, for instance, when Blake discovers a gun under his lover’s pillow and asks her why she has it she says, “Because this is America,” as if it’s the stupidest question she’s ever heard. Also, the film’s plot line clearly moves from east to west. And throughout the film, Nobody refers to European settlers (invaders) as “stupid fucking white men” and reveres Blake as “a killer of white men.” It gets really deep, though, when filthy fur trappers sit around campfire reading Bible verses about Philistines or when a cold-blooded bounty hunter finds a corpse looks like a “goddam religious icon” or even in the scenes with Robert Mitchum, which are clearly crafted in homage to all the cool and kind of cheesy Westerns he starred in as a young man. It’s funny, too — full of sight gags and inside jokes, including a couple that only people who speak Cree or Blackfoot languages would understand. (There also a lot of rock and roll nods: appearances by Iggy Pop and Gibby Haynes, characters named after musicians and songs.)

It sounds like a recipe for pretentious muddiness, I know, but Jarmusch pulls it all together artfully with the simplicity of the story and with a mesmerizing soundtrack by Neil Young (a must-have in its own right; it’s all solo guitar with a little bit of pump organ with a few key dialogue scenes from the movie and a Blake poem read by Depp mixed in). The slowness of the plot offers time and space for contemplation. I’ve owned a copy of the film for years, watched it dozens and dozens of times, and I always feel profoundly moved after the final scene — one of the most beautiful and poetic in all of cinema. I always walk away with a mixture of disgust and awe about America, which, to my way of thinking, is absolutely on point.

- Joe