Home Video Hovel: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Scott Nye

I didn’t know Thompson’s work then, nor do I really now, aside from a few odd passages here and here. He had only been dead a few months, but I can’t remember if it was his death specifically that spurred me to check it out. Maybe it was a classmate wearing massive aviator sunglasses in tribute the day he died. Maybe it was just that I was gradually picking up the more approachable films in the Criterion Collection section of my local Hollywood Video. But Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas ripped my mind open and changed my life when I saw it in the spring of 2005.

On the eve of high school graduation, absorbing any persona I could to try to define myself, the fashions of the film suited me all too well, save, oddly, for the rampant drug use that I’ve still barely indulged in. I loved the language, the posture, the political certitude contrasted with the moral depravity. It was a grand and chaotic vision of the sort of lifestyle I was far too timid to enact and far too irresponsible not to obsess over. It’s funny in unexpected ways and strangely haunting and moving for how personal, political, cultural, and spiritual insight fills in the crevices of its stale-ketchup diorama. It seemed to understand that there was this vast space of abstract ecstasy and terror lurking a dimension outside of our tepid environs. And I loved the fashion. I bought a bucket hat and wore huge jackets with short shorts. These were not trendy items in the second Bush administration. But the film is all about ripping apart trend.

It was, itself, untrendy at the time, unsuccessful and unloved, part of a loose collection of late-90s works shot down on release and quickly reclaimed as cult classics in the early DVD era. I still have the Criterion DVD release, a wonky clear-plastic slipcase housing a double-wide DVD tray, teasing a film that seemed like its contents could never fulfill, only for it to strangely, hilariously, irresponsibly do so.

I feel differently about it now, or sometimes the same, or sometimes not at all. It feels now that it lacks center and purpose, or an understanding of its own issues, or any real character beneath the physically-pitch-perfect grotesqueries. It’s a cartoon sometimes prowling for a soul. It’s a gas to watch, and sometimes exhausting. I find it difficult to admire, and impossible not to love. The gradual public decay of Gilliam and star Johnny Depp contribute, of course, a factor that doesn’t often affect me but sometimes reveals a shallowness to the initial object. Watching it now, even ignoring anything of Depp’s personal life, it’s clearer that all the ticks that became so annoying about him as a star were well in place back then too, just put to use in bolder spaces and films that better fed on his inhuman energy. Clear too are all the reasons Gilliam’s work hasn’t found any lasting purchase following my adolescent rapture. Neither are solely to blame for the vapidity of the Raoul Duke character, Thompson’s odd alter ego; Depp’s unprobing, incurious, yet constantly inventive performance is like everything else in the film – captivating to watch, only ever a thing to watch. But still, what a thing.

Benicio Del Toro cuts deeper as Dr. Gonzo, largely because he’s given the film’s most dangerous moments, all the bits where it really might descend into a level of Hell no one could pull back from. Hard to think of anyone else who could have played this role. Harder still to think of many who would. Bits of dialogue ring through my head because the vocal affect is just so pure. The way he moves between different stages of sobriety and the effects of different drugs. You don’t even need Thompson’s famous line about him – “One of God’s own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.” By the time those words echo in the theater, Del Toro has already embodied them, twisted them inside out, torn their guts from their exposed spine and peels the muscle from the bone.

In some ways, its lack of self-reflection now feels refreshing, a 90s cultural posturing that was prevalent at the time and has now gone massively out of fashion in a culture of reflection. Fear and Loathing is all experience, all drive, all terror, all what’s visceral and tangible, even when it’s not real.

How could I stop loving this film, or indeed, after watching it repeatedly for weeks on end during a formative period, ever desire to revisit it? Criterion’s new 4K release provides the answer – give us greater clarity to the image, bolder colors, greater nuance, and carry over every last one of those abundant supplements from the days when DVDs just printed money on demand. While many Blu owners will rightfully be content with that transfer, the 4K offers a visible, tangible upgrade. The degree of depth and detail is absolutely astounding, the color palette richer, the whole experience fuller, more robust, more textured, more outlandish and vibrant. And for a film this ostentatious, you absolutely want the full-tilt batty experience. Yet even in the basics it excels – skin tones are much more stable and layered, and shadows have a lot more range. Running an A/B comparison on my home setup, the Blu-ray disc has a certain flatness that the 4K edition elaborates into a multidimensional extravaganza. Audio, as one might expect from anything past the Blu-ray era, is also crisp, clear, and well-balanced. The disc includes both 2.0 and 5.1 tracks.

Criterion’s original DVD edition was one of the great reclamations of a recent cult classic, pulling a film that only had a barebones studio disc and giving it an abundance befitting its subject. Going through each of the supplements with any sort of detail would be exhausting, so in essence – there are three commentary tracks, three deleted scenes, six storyboard sequences, a gallery of production design paintings, a gallery of stills from the shoot, a 14-minute program of Depp reading correspondence between he and Thompson, a 10-minute documentary following Thompson’s visit to the set, a 17-minute audio discussion of the screenwriting dispute, the film’s trailer and seven TV spots, three featurettes about Oscar Zeta Acosta (the basis for Dr. Gonzo), a gallery of novelist illustrator Ralph Steadman’s art, an excerpt from the spoken-word edition of Fear and Loathing featuring Jim Jarmusch as Raoul Duke, and a 1978 BBC documentary following Thompson and Steadman’s early adventures in Hollywood.

The commentaries – one featuring Gilliam; one with Depp, Del Toro, and producer Laila Nabulsi (all recorded separately, strung together); and one with Thompson and Nabulsi (as well as Thompson’s assistant) – are, unusual for there being so many, all really great and worth devoting the six hours to. The first two will give you the meat of the thing, tons of insight into the production, the choices made, the difficulties in rendering something this unwieldy as a series of day-to-day choices and the battles that must be fought trying to make and release it in the studio system. But boy do I love the Thompson track, precisely because it meanders and muses and lacks cohesion and is sometimes just him yelling the strangest sounds nature could force out of a man.

All of the other features are well worth spending time in, a great scrapbook of everything that’s sort of piled up within the film, filling out a portrait of the thing that gives it more context and humanity than the film itself is necessarily interested in. Thompson in particular, over the course of the supplements, emerges as a more fascinating person than even his writing reveals. He alternately indulges in and retreats from his own celebrity, slightly uneasy with the stature his success has granted him. He never comes across as guarded, but is constantly aware of some kind of audience. Depp, too, seems to be performing his own life, whereas Gilliam is as relentlessly unfiltered and pure as ever. The most insightful is definitely Nabulsi, who shepherded the film through many iterations and comes across as much responsible for its final form as anyone else. It was the first and last feature film she’d produce, unfortunately, perhaps due to its financial failure, who’s to say.

Finally there’s a booklet – a real, meaty, stapled, beautifully designed treasure – with a characteristically-astute essay by critic J. Hoberman and an introductory piece Thompson wrote for later publications of Fear and Loathing, because after all, the package would hardly be complete without some representation of the raw Thompson experience.

Criterion’s Fear and Loathing package remains one of their most definitive, from a time when the company took huge stands on contemporary films, and moreover when there was a contemporary film culture to be in conversation with. Criterion’s more recent releases of current films tend to be among the more acclaimed from our time; we live in a time when studios are even less invested in these types of films and cult classics are born and bred overnight. There’s almost no contemporary corollary, and this package does a great job of situating the viewer not just in the vast history of what came before it, but of what the film scene was in 1998, how adventurous the decade was underneath the sense of mass success, first-weekend gross, action extravaganzas that dominated the publicity cycles of the time and seemed too massive to truly best. Fear and Loathing was released against Godzilla. Well, they both have lizards anyway.

But I digress. For all my conflicted feelings about it, there’s nothing else like it. It’s a film for the young and those who think like them. That’s a great thing.