(Audio) Reflection: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Part I

Pretty funny about Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  Now that I’ve seen the movie (did I watch it twice?), and read the book as well, the audiobook seems eerily sedate.  Or should I say, nothing in the book so far seems utterly unreasonable.  It’s amazing how much I have come to accept Thompson’s narrative of his trip to Las Vegas, even though much of the narrative is the narrative of what he was imagining and feeling in his own mind.

But does that mean that Thompson has succeeded, or failed?  The initial strangeness of the story comes from the weird things that Thompson and his lawyer are hallucinating during the trip.  And since the hallucinations not unexpectedly call forth paranoid and gut instincts, it would not be surprising that they react the way they do.  But do they?  Did they?

Because the other half of this equation is exactly what I mentioned to begin with:  The eerie sedateness with which I now react to the story.  Within the story, the characters act as if nothing is very surprising.  They’re a bit startled, of course, when hotel staff morph into lizards and so on.  But they handle it with surprising aplomb.  They never look at someone and say, “My God, you’ve turned into a giant lizard!”  They may talk to one another about what they’re experiencing; but they don’t talk to the others about it.

Or do they talk to one another?  Maybe—they could talk softly to one another, under their breath, about the weird goings on all around them.  And maybe they do.  But how would we know?  Can we trust much of anything that Thompson tells us in this narrative?

In Part I of the book, he’s gone to Las Vegas to cover a desert motorcycle (and dune-buggy) race.  My research says he’d nailed an assignment to write 2,500 words of captions for the photographs.  He did so, but his contribution was rejected by the magazine.

If we are to believe the book, the race began, and within 30 minutes the entire surrounding area was enveloped in a huge dust cloud.   That’s the last he saw of the race.  Part I of the book, far from 10 pages of captions, runs 100 pages, describing some possible facts but more often the anxieties of Thompson and his attorney.

Believable—if we believe that covering the race and subjecting oneself to Las Vegas in the wrong frame of mind could call forth one’s inner demons, especially under the influence of every conceivable illegal substance.

But would a journalist covering a two-day race really take along a trunk load of highly illegal substances, with the intention of becoming utterly bonkers even before arriving, and staying that way for the duration?

It’s an interesting proposition; possibly even true.  Thompson was certainly “unusual”—and an engaging writer.  Welcome to his potentially unnerving world.

The audiobook, by the way, features Ron McLarty and is available from Recorded Books, LLC.  Curiously, the copy I am listening to, from the local library, becomes generally unplayable about half-way through.  “Coincidence???”