Directed by Alex Gibney
Review by Laura Hawbaker
“Nah man, it’s this style of journalism. It’s crazy!” Midnight in Chicago, and on the Clark bus is a twenty-something in a hole-ridden ironic t-shirt. His grizzly beard and pungent odor calls to mind the hippies of yesteryear; his words flick fast like a lizard tongue. “The writer, he’s like inundated in the story, he’s a part of the story. It’s called Gonzo.”
This is not the first child of the 80’s to coo praise for Gonzo journalism and the man behind it, Hunter S. Thompson. Hipsters, too cool for school, have long professed their undying love for this man who fought the Man with his flippant pen. Worker bees, normally lackluster after a hard day’s nine to five, debate the merits of Thompson’s mantra. A casual phone conversation with a colleague turns gushy at the mere mention of him. “Hunter Thompson? I worship his stuff!”
A portion of all this Gonzo-love is left over from “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” the 1998 ode to drug-dom starring Johnny Depp as Thompson’s alias, and co-starring Benicio del Toro as his partner in hallucinogen hell. But the itch of this latest Thompson-rash is spurred by a new documentary, “Gonzo: The Life and Works of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.”
Directed by Alex Gibney of “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” and “Taxi to the Dark Side”, the film chronicles the fast times of Thomson’s career, a career that entrenched the wayward, manic journalist into some of the 60s and 70s most earth-shattering counterculture moments.
The rise of the Hells Angels, Thompson was there. The San Francisco free love scene, Thompson was there too. He was also on the streets of Chicago’s 1968 Democratic Convention and along for the ride on the McGovern campaign, when—just months before the Watergate scandal broke—the liberal governor crossed swords with Nixon for a doomed presidency.
As Thompson would say, he witnessed the death of the American dream.
With his self-destructive, maniacal embracing of liberal ideals, Thompson is the kind of cartoonish character that makes Hollywood drool and the average American Joe wonder, “Is this guy for real?” Bald, thick glasses, smoking a long-stemmed cigarette while driving a convertible with a trunk-full of drugs. The man railed against authority and laced his locution with quotable fire. “I can’t cover the God-damn American journey in a Volkswagen!” “I’m an idiot; I’m a fool… but I’m a good read.” Never once did Thompson meet a deadline.
Gibney, with an Oscar under his belt, wrangled a cadre of Thompson’s friends, family, and colleagues on to the screen: Sandy, his long-suffering first wife; Anita, his bleached blonde second; Ralph Steadman, who’s traditional illustrations morphed after Thompson gave the choir boy mescaline and he “went nuts”; Johnny Depp, who takes the place of Thompson’s voice by reading aloud from his published works: Jimmy Carter; George McGovern…
The list of interviewees is, to say the least, impressive proof of Thompson’s far-ranging impact on modern American culture.
Though Gibney’s thorough walk-through of Thompson’s career is a thing of beauty, one can’t help but think that Gibney’s Thompson amalgamates the man with the myth. There is an element of glamorization here, which, given the subject matter, is difficult to avoid.
Gibney lingers on Thompson’s golden years but skims over his later decline, when drugs and the weight of his iconic status crushed the journalistic icon into depression, ultimately stifling his reserve of caustic words.
Thompson committed suicide in 2005. The notorious gun enthusiast (he possessed over two hundred guns, all loaded, in his house) shot himself in the head, an act he’d planned for years. Unsurprisingly, the combustible character went out with a pre-planned bang, the final nail in Thompson’s legendary image. “It was self-indulgent,” says one friend. “He could’ve wielded a pretty effective sword against what’s going on right now.”
“Gonzo: the Life and Works of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson” begs the question: what is it about Thompson that draws such passion from today’s twenty-somethings? Why do we, a generation marionetted by the corporate moguls at Mac and Google, latch ourselves to the mythos of Gonzo? Perhaps we are a generation tired of spin control, image machines, and being sold stuff. Perhaps we thirst for our own Gonzo torchbearer, a writer who will say in words corrosive as blood and metal what he wants, when he wants, how he wants… and damn the Man and the consequences.
Perhaps, if he hadn’t been devoured by his own legacy, that writer might have been Thompson himself.
