Film review: Gonzo: The Life And Work Of Dr Hunter S Thompson

Published on Wednesday 3 December 2008 19:42

HUNTER S THOMPSON always had one beady, sun-bespectacled eye on posterity. At 21, living in poverty in a remote cabin in the Catskill Mountains and toiling away at an autobiographical first novel, Prince Jellyfish (still unpublished), he would compare his own progress to that of F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, two other writers who came late to public recognition. He kept files of self-portraits, which he took using the timer on his camera, and was even cataloguing photographs o

Nearly half a century later, late in the afternoon on 20 February 2005, Thompson put his freshly polished .45 pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger. He could have chosen few more effective finishing touches to his own legend. And he was, moreover, providential enough to leave behind him a mountain of unholy relics to keep the flame alive.

By the time Thompson's letters were beginning to be published, in 1997, there were 20,000 of them to choose from. Two volumes have appeared to date; a third is imminent. His over-stuffed bibliography has been further swelled by a wave of recent books. Last year's Gonzo by Jann Wenner, Thompson's editor at Rolling Stone, was swiftly followed by William McKeen's Outlaw Journalist. Yet another memoir, Hunter S. Thompson: The Glory Years, by Jay Cowan, will be published next year, as will a new anthology of Thompson's magazine work. The Gonzo Tapes, a five-CD set of his musings (or rantings), was released in October.

The filmography is rather ample too. Two cult actors have played him: Bill Murray (in Where The Buffalo Roam) and Johnny Depp (in Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas). There are numerous documentaries, the latest of which, Alex Gibney's Gonzo, opens on 19 December. Rumours indicate that a long-mooted film of The Rum Diary, the thinly fictionalised novel that Thompson wrote while working in Puerto Rico in 1960, is about to start shooting.

It will star Depp, Thompson's virtual alter ego (the actor lived in his basement while preparing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, narrated Gibney's film and wrote the preface to Wenner's book; he even picked up the bill for Thompson's flamboyant $2.5 million funeral).

All of which raises some questions. Could this market for Gonziana perhaps be getting over-saturated? And, come to that, does the dood doctor deserve it? Famously, Thompson urged his followers to "buy the ticket, take the ride". It might be time to leap off the bandwagon.

There have always been dissenting voices. William Buckley, in an obituary dismissed Thompson as a flashy, shallow exhibitionist: "Hunter Thompson elicited the same kind of admiration one would feel for a streaker at Queen Victoria's funeral." Reviewing Gibney's film in the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan cautioned scepticism towards our fascination with the kind of loose cannon, the self-indulgence and the recklessness, that Thompson personified.

Perhaps his most deadly legacy has been the inexorable rise of the opinionated – but not necessarily intelligent or well-informed – columnist. Or worse the rambling, free-form, unreadable and unread blogger, none of whom commands the unrivalled platform that Thompson, back in the 1960s, enjoyed at Rolling Stone.

"Too many people have tried to imitate him," says McKeen, "but I don't think he should be blamed for it. I don't know that he intended to create a league of imposters, although that has happened."

Both he and Gibney have been accused of adopting a fan's-eye-view of Thompson, a charge each man vehemently rejects. "There's a lot of things about Hunter that are negative," McKeen says. "For all his abilities, he was not always kind to his friends and he was abusive in a lot of his relationships with women. I see him as a genius writer but an amateur human being, full of flaws and contradictions. But that's what makes him interesting."

Gibney's film devotes some time to one of Thompson's most inglorious hours, when he was sent to Zaire in 1974 to cover the "Rumble in the Jungle" between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. The match was postponed and he spent six weeks getting wasted. On the night the bout finally happened, his seat was empty. He was wallowing, stoned, in the hotel swimming pool.

In the 1980s, plagued increasingly by ill health as his life style took its toll, Thompson retreated to what he called his "fortified compound", Owl Farm, in Colorado. "Hunter's heyday was when he was doing good hard reporting at the same time as finding an interesting way to insert himself into the story," Gibney says. "But he ended up wasting his rather considerable talents, instead of refining them. He became a bloviator – someone who would spout gaudy opinions and mindlessly prattle on. As time went on, he saw the world as a reflection of himself. He didn't look out as much as he looked in the mirror. And he committed suicide in a way that was not heroic but rather sad and narcissistic."

Like Gibney, McKeen sees Thompson as trapped in a myth of his own making. "He was often his own worst enemy, creating and then watering and manuring this vivid persona that threatened to suffocate his achievements," he argues.

McKeen quotes a damning assessment by Sandra, Thompson's first wife, for whom the writer's decline in later years was linked to a deep self-loathing. "He was a tortured, tragic figure," she said. "He was horrified by what he had become, and ashamed… He never became that great American writer he had wanted to be. Nowhere close. And he knew it."

Yet in McKeen's view, Thompson's handful of great successes – the 1966 book on the Hell's Angels motorcycle gangs, Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, his coverage of the 1972 Presidential campaign and, it is increasingly emerging, his letters – are enough to ensure his lasting literary reputation. Hunter's undoubted egotism was always tempered by a healthy self-deprecation. "He portrayed himself as this burned-out loser, and that was charming. He was always the butt of his own jokes," McKeen says.

"He will be remembered as the guy who recorded a personal narrative history, primarily of America, from 1950 to 2005. He was a great patriot and deeply passionate about politics and our society, although he's so funny that it masks his sometimes serious message. I believe his work will be looked back upon in the way we now look back on Mark Twain's work from the 19th century. He will not be a footnote or one of those flashes in the pan from 1960s psychedelia."

Gibney was working on Gonzo at the same time as Taxi To the Dark Side, his sombre, Oscar-winning documentary about Abu Ghraib, and he sees these two films, seemingly so different, as in fact odd companion pieces. "America is a country of great extremes: on the one hand, a tremendous idealism and hope for the future; and on the other hand this xenophobia and brooding vitriolic resentment – even though it's a nation of immigrants – and a refusal to engage in fair-minded discourse and instead to scream slogans and threats. It's everything that comes out of what Hunter called fear and loathing. He saw some fundamental truths about the American character and this strange country which has the power to annihilate the earth, and those observations remain as true today as they did then.

"I didn't want to go and interview a bunch of celebrities, 'Hey, what drugs did you do ? What party do you remember?'" Gibney concludes. "We knew about the wild and crazy guy; that was pretty evident. We saw him every day in Garry Trudeau's cartoon, Doonesbury (which features a thinly disguised Hunter character]. What had been forgotten was how good the work was. No-one would give a shit about his antics otherwise."

&#149 Gonzo: The Life And Work Of Dr Hunter S Thompson is in selected cinemas from 19 December

ON JOURNALISM: "If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people – including me – would be rotting in prison cells today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism."

ON MUSIC: "The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."

ON AMERICA: "Just a nation of 200 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable."

ON WRITING: "If you're crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you're going to be locked up."