Acid Culture: Fear, Loathing and the American Dream
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Director: Terry Gilliam
Release: May 22, 1998
* 1.5/5
Speaking of incoherent messes of psychedelic gibberish…
I finally rented and watched Fear and Loathing in honor of my recent trip to Vegas. It seemed like the perfect time to do it, the perfect excuse to sit down and finally acquaint myself with a film that’s been on my list forever, its title on Top Whatevers left and right, deeming it a American staple. It’s one you almost have to see if you consider yourself any kind of film buff–but not because it’s a masterpiece. You see it more for a certain understanding of artistic merit that you might not have otherwise, to see how much balls Terry Gilliam has and how everything about his movie was a risk, and how he made it anyway. That’s the real achievement here, an achievement that, despite its good intentions, to me feels mostly technical and cold.
In all the movie’s confusion and noise, the non-plot and nonsense, there is a point to be made. It speaks about the degradation of the American Dream and the utter failure of so many movements in the ’60s, how so much hope and energy devolved so quickly into complacency and addiction. Johnny Depp’s character sums it up perfectly in 1 of the 2, maybe 3, pieces of substantive dialogue in the entire piece. He looks out of his hotel window seriously. His voice gets less cartoonish:
–
“And that, I think, was the handle – that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than 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.”
–
He closes out the film, too, with another powerful monologue. But that’s it. The rest is a trip, a blur of various events and exaggerated stages of being. And that’s the point – I get that. These are the “failed seekers,” the “generation of cripples.” It’s not supposed to make sense – okay. But to me that just doesn’t seem a worthwhile enough revelation to warrant sitting through a 2-hour-long social statement, another one of Gilliam’s cinematic experiments of weird where I’m expected to play the part of the willing guinea pig.
On some level, Gilliam’s films are always interesting–there’s no doubt about that. The more of them I watch, though, the more I can’t help but question the honesty of his style, seeing his visuals as more “art for art’s sake” than simply eccentric, his hyper-reality as over conscious. I respect what it is he’s trying to do with Fear and Loathing, but there comes a time when you really have to take a step back and remind yourself that good film should be a constant balancing act between aesthetic as well as intellectual stimulus. Fear and Loathing, however, feels more like a give and take with long droughts in the middle of Del Toro’s incomprehensible mumbling and Depp’s paranoia, aesthetic as intellectual stimulus that only goes so far–paint speckled canvases that we’re supposed to gawk at. And they bore me.
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