The thesis of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (carried over directly from the Hunter S. Thompson novel) is made poetically explicit near the end by Raoul Duke (Thompson's alias):

"We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled the '60s. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling 'consciousness expansion' without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously... All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody... or at least some force - is tending the light at the end of the tunnel."

Duke laments the 1960s at great length, saying that it's difficult to understand if you weren't there and mentions how "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 - the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back." Whatever it was that was powering the '60s, it's gone now. The charge of the decade was deeply rooted in naivety and foolish optimism, things that, after all, never last for long.

The film begins with a quote by "Dr. Johnson": "The man who makes an animal of himself takes away the pain of being a man." This puts Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas into its proper context. Duke and Gonzo do not wish to assault Las Vegas with their excesses; rather they wish to assimilate into it. Duke is very upfront with the fact that he and his attorney Dr. Gonzo are not products of the sixties but rather products of the seventies. That is "products," mind you; these are not heroes and these are not rebels, with or without a cause. When they buy and eat a tab of acid, they have no delusions about finding Peace and Understanding through the experience.

The idea of becoming an animal to take away the pain of being a man reminds of Gilliam's most famous film, the 1985 Brazil, where the protagonist Sam Lowry escapes from his totalitarian government into fantasy and "forbidden" bread-and-circus entertainments while others around him initiate actual revolutionary change. Although I have in fact read the original Hunter S. Thompson novel as well his collection "The Great Shark Hunt," I am not terribly well-versed in the life of Oscar Zeta Acosta, the real-life attorney who served as the inspiration for Dr. Gonzo. Some modest research reveals that Acosta was in fact a vocal Chicano activist from 1968 to 1973. He gained both great notoriety and great support in defending various Chicano protest groups. Acosta disappeared in the summer of 1974, the victim, Thompson believes, of either political opponents or drug dealers. None, repeat none of this is present in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Dr. Gonzo is utterly without any socio-political consciousness.

Del Toro, who plays him, claims that he was blacklisted after Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. People in the business thought that his acting had become far too indulgent. Del Toro's defense for the performance was that he was simply doing an interpretation of the character, and the character was "an animal." Indeed. Del Toro's Dr. Gonzo is so bestial that at times it seems that he may have been created to make Duke sympathetic in comparison. When Dr. Gonzo hooks up with "Lucy," an underage teenage runaway who paints portraits of Barbara Streisand, Duke plays on Gonzo's drug-addled paranoia to convince him to abandon her. We're meant to believe that Duke is paranoid as well, I guess. But as the two men walk out into the hall to discuss the matter at hand, Lucy flashes Duke a peace sign or its rough equivalent (didn't he say it was "the one world" symbol in the novel?). We can read embarrassment on his face; Lucy is a throwback to a more innocent age, the sixties, and that seems to mean little else to these two men but liability and perhaps a kinky turn-on.

Later, they go in a diner where Dr. Gonzo hands the waitress a napkin with the words "Back Door Beauty?" written on it. The waitress is outraged; she says she's had to take a lot of shit from people but she sure doesn't need to take it from some spic pimp. Dr. Gonzo takes out a knife and coolly cuts the phone line so she cannot call the police, then moves behind the counter and asks her how much her lemon meringue pie is. She can't speak, and so he guesses that it is about four or five dollars. He peels off some bills, takes the pie and leaves. She looks like she is about to cry. Duke just tries to read his paper and pretend he doesn't care. We're reminded of a similar scene in the 1996 Trainspotting where the Ewan McGregor character Renton decides that he'll rip off his friends when he finds himself sitting by while the demonic Begbie assaults some poor sod for having the audacity to spill his drink on him.

For all of his hipster posturing, these two moments imply to us that there is still something human left in Duke. He isn't as much an animal as he is simply ineffectual at retaining those lingering traces of humanity. Raoul Duke is not as much a hypocrite as a whiny self-loathing little shit: sitting back, documenting the fall of human civilization in purplish hyperbole as he waits in line to take a hit for himself.

Few fans of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas could legitimately claim that the text is countercultural at heart or that Thompson is a countercultural hero. To do so would of course represent a gross misreading of the material. Where I think that support of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is potentially naive is in the demonization of the 1970s themselves. This decade was not the low-point of American history. The '70s weren't even the low point of the twentieth century, not when we have the '00s, '10s and '30s in competition. That they seem to be the low point of American history is a testament to how bloated and spoiled Americans have become with affluence post-World War II. It's been so long that Americans were able to experience human misery firsthand that they can now only understand it in a pop context.

The Armageddon envisioned by Terry Gilliam and Hunter S. Thompson is made up of lime-green polyester pantsuits, Hare Krishnas, 29-cent hot dogs, Barbara Streisand portraits and an endless loop of Debbie Reynolds' "Tammy's in Love." Even things like Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War are not really real. Nixon is little more than a scowering Gargamel in this movie, quite literally a cartoon. At one point Raoul Duke hallucinates a flock of Nixon heads floating towards him jabbering some kind of banal political soundbite. This Nixon hallucination is not given any more weight than the hallucinations of bats or lizards. Similarly, it is clear while watching the film that television did not bring Vietnam back home; rather, it just coded Vietnam as television. Psychological distance to the war finally matched that of America's geographic distance. Vietnam became so overexposed that America grew numb to it. Horsemen Death, War, Pestilence and Famine never make an appearance proper. I think that we could experiment with expanding our consciousness in the 1960s because we were living in a stable society. We could overdose on ether and acid in 1970s, lose all hope for expanded consciousness and devolve into animals (complete with engorged pot bellies) because we continued to live in a stable society. In demonizing the 1970s, the film reveals that the 1970s have already metastasized deeply into its bones.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas feels sort of sanitary and "wrapped in plastic." What is being said is really just that the 1970s were a low point for American culture, that we were basically a nation of assholes. There are worse things than living in a nation of assholes, and in placing assholism as the worst of the worst, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas reveals itself to be spiritually and humanisticly atrophied. It doesn't seem to have the big picture, a problem stemming from an essentially milkfed mindset.

The antithesis of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is George Clooney's 2002 near-masterpiece Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, also an adaptation of a cult autobiography. It said basically the same things about the 1970s, but it said them in more straightforward narrative terms. One of the great innovations of Charlie Kaufman's screenplay (both he and his fans have disowned the film as not being genuine Kaufman) is in refusing to give protagonist Chuck Barris any substantial voice-over narration. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas has Raoul Duke narrating the whole thing and accordingly we are put into his head. As everything that we see is in Duke's perspective, it's much more difficult to associate him with the environment he inhabits.

As Hunter S. Thompson/Raoul Duke is a social critic by profession, there is yet another layer of artificial distance between Duke and Las Vegas/'70s America. Duke IS essentially a passive figure, a product of environment, but you do have to dig for this much harder than you do with Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is formatted in a way that makes Duke into an antagonistic figure and encourages misreading the film.

In adopting a considerably less subjective perspective, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind doesn't feel as high-reaching or preachy either; one doesn't feel as obligated to put it to the historic test. It's sadder too; the relative objectivity lends it a humanity that's missing in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a plus experientially but also a needed quality in keeping the film from making "grand statements" about America or the human condition. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a dreadfully superficial film, I suppose is what I'm getting at, and that superficiality lends it a directness that quickly exposes the naivety at the heart of the piece.

Made in 1998, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas has a decidedly modernist aesthetic. As I have explained again and again in my reviews of theatrical releases that I probably wouldn't have much to say about otherwise, modern films -- that is, films from the late nineties to the present -- have been packed to the gills with sheer cinematic electricity. Compared to Bad Boys II or Van Helsing, 1994's Speed looks positively minimalist. Summer blockbusters seem to be growing to black hole proportions; one day they'll grow so large they'll implode onto themselves. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas shares that same penchant for visceral excess. A title sequence that alternates footage of '60s protests with splatterings of red blood on a black screen, scored by a creepy rendition of "My Favorite Things," reminds of the modernly aesthetic remakes of anti-hippy classics The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Helter Skelter. Like Marcus Nispel and whatever film school joker helmed Helter Skelter (both filmmakers owe a great debt to David Fincher, in particular for Se7en, who owes a great debt to David Lynch, in particular for Eraserhead (or perhaps just to the vastly underrated 1993 killers-on-a-run-pic Kalifornia)), Terry Gilliam seems to be fascinated with the scary beauty of decay.

Keeping with the generally nihilistic attitude of the film, the '60s segments are sanctioned as a distant memory through the documentary footage (neutralizing any spiritual or humanistic lift they could potentially produce; Gilliam wants to remind us that the '60s are over) and literally seem to have been shoved into the sausage grinder to produce Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. (Are the title cards meant to represent a killing floor?) The '70s Apocalypse never fails to look hip and perversely attractive.

The parade of celebrity cameos may be some sort of joke, I guess, to satirize TV celebrity guest appearances, but one very quickly gets the feeling that you're watching the popular kids playing dress-up. Cameron Diaz is one of the many who pop up, and in a sense Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is basically the same movie as Charlie's Angels, The Sweetest Thing (thinking of that explicitly-noted-as-such dressing up montage), or let's face it, Shrek. Diaz and friends show how cool they are by pretending to be uncool. Yet another way Confessions of a Dangerous Mind proves superior is in how it serves to inhabit and comment upon '70s banality instead of opting to deify through demonization. A more palatable and entertaining decision, and accordingly a less emotionally complex one.

Made in 1998, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas suffers from being made before September 11th and before the Bush administration. It's not that America now lives in a truly Apocalyptic age of Death, War, Pestilence and Famine. But it did have a taste. The barrage of late '90s films borne out of upper middle class ennui (i.e. Eyes Wide Shut, Fight Club, Magnolia, Rushmore, Happiness, Toy Story 2, Being John Malkovich, that prize bitch American Beauty, Very Bad Things which in all likelihood which we'll be looking at in this upcoming month, oh, and Office Space) do seem a tad flippant, maybe even childish in retrospect. Smart-ass is a very good word to describe it. There is a melancholy to recent pseudo-late-nineties films like Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and The Incredibles that would be harder to find five or six years ago. That taste of death has sweetened our taste buds a bit, and we need that reflectively melancholy flavor.

By the time Terry Gilliam signed up to helm Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro had long since been attached and had done a good deal of research. Both actors are famous for always trying to act the fuck out of a movie, but it is Del Toro that proves to be the real thing. Peter Sellers once said that he has no personality of his own and thus depended on the characters he played to give him one. Depp seems to be the same way. His performances range from Edward Scissorhands to Ed Wood characters that are so diverse that you can't see any of him in them. No Johnny Depp means no humanity which means no depth. He wasn't able to put on any masks when he played the title character in What's Eating Gilbert Grape; he wasn't able to do any "hard acting." Accordingly in that film you see why he can't be himself in the movies; he's too introspective a personality, too difficult to get attached with. Studied stunt acting is the way that he could make a career of it.

You know, I don't really think that Depp is a bad actor, although he can of course give a bad performance. (I found his star-making turn in Pirates of the Caribbean as being obnoxious and arrogant.) Limited? Maybe, but not bad. Whatever it is that Johnny Depp does, he did after all perfect it in Ed Wood. In fact, Depp's Ed Wood may be one of the cinema's greatest "stunt" performances, helped in no small part I'm sure by inhabiting a cheekily superficial movie. The showy and superficial Depp treatment of Raoul Duke is surely keeping in tone with Gilliam's vision for the film. But compared to Benicio Del Toro, the standoffish quality of Depp's performance seems to be accentuated.

I know that I described those two moments where Duke reacts to Gonzo's depravity with Lucy and with the waitress as being glimpses of humanity, but I think that that word "humanity" could be potentially misleading. Duke is a caricature, an archetype, in every frame of the film, and these two moments don't make us think that he is anything deeper than that. There is a strong possibility, however, that Depp massaged these moments into the scene, that he wants us to sympathize to some extent with Duke. Del Toro doesn't care about any of that. His Dr. Gonzo is a creation similar to that of Dennis Hopper's Frank Booth, a drug-addled man-child. All teeth and all appetite. Del Toro isn't any deeper, but in a roundabout way he's more human: earthy, vulgar and exposed. A better film may have had a Raoul Duke that was more sober and more detached, three-dimensional. Instead of just giving us two moments exposing the character as inactive, that characterization should have inhabited the performance entire. Something in Depp's performance suggests definitively that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is all a lark. Those sympathetic moments show us that we're not exactly playing for keeps.

This review has been sounding much more negative that I thought that it would. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was released the same weekend as Godzilla, and many cineastes at the time presented it as a viable alternative. I actually saw and liked both films. I regarded Godzilla as a Godzilla movie; minimalist strings-and-rubber-costume camp transformed into big-budget summer blockbuster camp. The Dean Devlin/Roland Emmerich blockbusters are a very different animal than the Jerry Bruckiemer/Michael Bay ones. They're just cheesy, utterly harmless trash. The Patriot and Universal Soldier were sort of icky, but one could comfortably enjoy Independence Day or The Day After Tomorrow in the same condescending way that you enjoy one of the Godzilla pictures. Godzilla is a tad bit underrated and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a tad bit overrated. The reason that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas gets more respect is not because it is a measurably better movie; indeed under just a few shreds of analysis it seems to sort of fall apart, but rather it just speaks the right language. Some people would just rather see an adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, ANY adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, than see a Dean Devlin/Roland Emmerich film.

Even I initially overrated this film before I started this review, when I asked myself would I rather watch this again or Shakespeare in Love (which I still remember liking a lot). My gut reaction was, sure, I probably would rather see Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas again. I'm not so sure anymore. I think that the film is an interesting failure, but I must confess that the attraction is much more primitive than that. This film has a real sense of electricity and simulates anger and disenchantment with social convention. Being quite fond of using drug metaphors to describe experiential qualities of films, you get high as a fucking kite watching this movie. Like Godzilla, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is just brainless entertainment. The only difference between the two films is that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is designed for a niche audience. It simply pushes a different set of buttons.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is, in the most literal definition of the phrase, a major guilty pleasure. You want to bash in the skulls of those fuckwads that are canonizing the picture as being "an escape from Hollywood" or being a masterpiece. But then you sheepishly find yourself filing back in line, waiting to get your second hit.