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(this review was originally written May 22, 2021)
I was about halfway home in the middle of the highway when the COVID-19 vaccine began to take hold.
The first symptom was arm soreness. Unsurprising. Happened last time as well. Worse than before, but not too much worse.
The second symptom was tiredness. Again, unsurprising. I was able to keep myself awake and pretty much alert.
The third symptom, such as I could tell, was misery. Maybe I was just having a bad few days, but around 7PM I started to feel like human garbage. The scum of the Earth. I wanted to give my soul a shower.
At 7:30 PM I started watching Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, to distract myself. The movie ended two hours later. For those two hours, I forgot about the sore arm and the tiredness and the misery. Then, at 9:30, the movie was over, and they all came back.
About an hour later, I received a message from a college friend, asking me if I wanted to do something or other. I told him I was too tired because I just got my COVID shot. He told me to watch out for insane dreams - he, apparently, had one so realistic he still thought he was in the dream even after waking up. I told him I'd keep it in mind.
About an hour after that, I went to bed.
The one solace a fever dream has when compared to a bad drug trip is the lack of interaction with other real humans. In my head I may have been babbling to my Samoan attorney about bat country and lizard people for hours. In reality, all I was doing was tossing and turning in my bed. I can well imagine that, if some other person had approached me in my stupor, I would have grabbed them and frantically mumbled a plea for someone to help me find the American dream. I probably would've freaked them out just as much as Thompson seemed to.
Other than that, there are quite a few similarities. At its worst, light, color and sound divorce entirely from context and meaning. Snapshots of the world repeat themselves in my head, bits of phrase plucked from memory to run on loop. "...grossly atavistic..." "...he who makes a beast out of himself..." "...buy some heroin?" It all seems too strange to be real, yet too convincing to be fake. The constantly-shifting strobe lights of Vegas punctuate a series of fuzzy, disconnected anecdotes. It's hard to remember where exactly I am and what I'm doing at any given moment, only that the world is huge and too bright and full of people who are giving me funny looks. Occasionally I can grab hold of some higher understanding - oh yeah, I'm looking for the American dream - but it doesn't stick around for long.
The movie runs through a startling array of drugs, giving each its time in the limelight, and pays tribute to them with lavish special effects. First the walls and people shift on LSD. Then Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro flail around like morons with devil ether. Then comes mescaline, etc. Of these, the devil ether seemed to come back the strongest, maybe because I felt a strong kinship with the characters' total loss of motor control. I would feel myself tossing and turning, suddenly jolt back into consciousness for a moment if I accidentally put too much weight on my sore arm. Then, knowing full well what I was going to return to, I'd turn to rest on my other arm and fall back to sleep. Why didn't Thompson ever just take a moment to rest and sober up?
Dr. Gonzo almost never appeared in my dream. Despite getting second billing and playing the only other major character in the movie, he is totally eclipsed by Depp and his cigarette holder. The fucking cigarette holder just doesn't go away. Depp has to keep his teeth clenched for the entire movie to keep it in his mouth; del Toro's insanity is comparatively well-hidden, so it doesn't have as much impact on-screen. When I tried to speak, the words came out as a delirious mumble. I doubt he could've gotten rid of the damn thing if he tried, not that he could really do much of anything lucid between all the drugs he was taking. On one level, by all accounts Thompson was a public menace freaking out everyone he came across. But he seems fully aware of his own ludicrousness, and accepts it as part of the ride. I wish a fever dream offered that level of clarity.
I do not mean this as an insult, but it comes as a great relief when Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is over. The movie, the book, the dream. The purpose of Gonzo journalism is to immerse the consumer as directly as possible into the life of the journalist, whatever that journalist might happen to be doing. Thompson's life is exhausting. Too weird to live and too rare to die. If he has one undeniable talent, it is the ability to stay poetic as a writer and thinker even as he's completely ruining himself with drugs and paranoia. The paranoia is almost worse, although the two are probably connected. Everyone who enters his room is a secret cop planning his downfall. He's always one step away from being caught by the pigs. Something terrible must be happening, just out of the corner of his eye.
Watching a movie is easy. You can check how much time is left, pause to get some water, or just look around, safe in the knowledge that what you are watching is not real. Dreams offer no such luxuries. I would have much rather dreamed through many, many other movies before this one. Still, there is something very appropriate about it. Fear and Loathing has little plot and no character arcs. There is only one thing on offer: for two hours, you get to live as someone who is completely batshit insane. Then, you get to wake up. I don't know how to feel about the former, but I am infinitely grateful for the latter. Poor Hunter Thompson - he couldn't wake up from his own life, whether or not he wanted to. I wonder what his dreams were like.
8/10