The neighbors' Christmas tree is gone. We dragged it two blocks along the street and then past Kitsilano Pool -- frozen, with a flock of confused and vaguely embarrassed-looking seagulls standing around on the ice, as though they knew something was wrong, but couldn't figure out exactly what. Then past the closed concession stand and the Wind Swimmer statue on top of its pole overlooking the pool, across the expanse of field where there are usually knots of people either playing soccer, throwing a football around, hurling Frisbees or, of course, that inexplicable Hacky-Sack thing, which always makes them look like a bunch of sadists trying to tease a bean-bag to death . . . or maybe bore it into submission. Hacky-Sacking ("hackying?") must be great if you're stoned; it looks astoundingly boring otherwise.
A big yellow chipper in the parking lot next to the beach gulped denuded Christmas trees and spewed their chewed remains into a bin on the back of a truck. The folks running it were right in the middle of a pulping round when we approached. Henry and Spencer both stared as the trees were fed into the blades at the back and almost instantly came firing out of the mouth of the spout on the top of the thing in a gout of dark green peppered with blond wood chunks. I kept thinking about Steve Buscemi's character in "Fargo," with Marge Gunderson saying, "and that must've been your accomplice in the wood-chipper . . . and those three people in Brainerd . . . and all for a little bit of money . . ."
There was lull in the tree-shredding: they powered the chipper down and waited for more cars to come creeping into the snowy parking lot and leave another object of pagan worship on the pile. It wasn't clear how big the pile had to be before there were enough accumulated saplings to fire the chipper up again. But the drop in traffic and the few trees in the existing pile seemed to indicate they wouldn't be firing it up again any time soon. So we stomped through the snow to Starbucks for a hot chocolate (for those five and under), coffee (for those over five).
After that we went back to the chipper just in time to watch them zap through a pile of Christmas trees that was about the size of a minivan and a half. Then it was back home, with a lot of snowball-throwing and marveling at the people running a sailing race in the snow on English Bay and considering how exotic this kind of thing seems here. Snow down here next to the water seldom happens. And this kind of winter -- the kind with snow -- lasts about a week or ten days here . . . at least, that's what it did last year. Compare that with the Toronto winters we're used to, the ones that start in late November and conclude sometime in early May, and which are memorable for a couple of perennial features: the endless weeks of gray, slushy drear, the cold snaps whose temperatures make your face hurt when you step outside and are usually accompanied by brilliant sunshine, and the false dawn of a thaw in January or February that melts everything just enough to encase everything in an impenetrable carapace of ice several inches thick.
Here, it's gray and rainy with this bout of "winter" in the middle -- usually just long enough to make you glad it'll be gone in a week instead of hanging around until the end of April . . .
After the tree was done with and we'd had a bunch of snowball fights and were sufficiently wet and cold, we returned here. I finished reading a rotten novel called "L9.99" (you'll have to view that capital L as a British "pound" symbol) by Frederic Beigbeder (originally titled "99 francs," and listed in some places as "L6.99," which seems to have been somebody's idea of a joke, as though it had been reduced in price). When you're reading a good novel, it gains heft; the characters come into sharper focus and the world in which it occurs gets realer because of the accretion of detail and description. "L9.99" does the opposite. The more of it I read, the less real and believable and plausible the characters got, until, by the end of the story, they were inane caricatures who'd become so annoying you couldn't wait for them to completely disappear.
The book is an achievement. It's not often you find the adolescent dingbat politics and superficial lack of understanding of Naomi Klein or Adbusters fused to the clumsy, affectless McDonald's-menu prose style of Bret Easton Ellis in service of the blindingly obvious apercus of Baudrillard, complete with the French habit of overthinking and over-analyzing some aspect of pop-culture ephemera and coming to conclusions that are so bizarrely and deeply wrong they're laughable . . . and all of it leading to the astounding revelation that some aspects of advertising business are not terribly deep or sufficiently selfless and/or noble. Wow. This is all marketed, of course, with the breathless excitement of encountering someone with the fearless ability to speak truth to power. And the fact that M. Beigbeder (or, as I've come to think of him fondly, "Monsieur Bagbiter") used to work for Young & Rubicam and got fired when his boss read the book is held up as proof of its worth and his bona fides. It's implied that the firing was occasioned by Beigbeder's "telling it like it is," but it seems more likely that his boss just fired him because the book was bad. "Sorry, Fred, we can't have anybody who'd write anything this bad working here. What will our clients think? What will other agencies think?" Or, even more likely, Bagbiter was an annoying wiener, and his dumb-ass "book" provided the perfect pretext for getting rid of him.
The British publisher decided it'd be a good idea to translate not just the language -- from French to English -- but the references and "signifiers" from French to English as well. Why stop there? Why couldn't translator Adriana Hunter couldn't have come up with a better plot, chopped out the embarrassing passage wherein every famous person who's died since World War II is posited to have faked their demise in order to live in some post-lapsarian state of cosseted indulgence on an island in the Caymans, cut about 75 pages and fixed things like the misspelling of Paula Porizkova's name and the misattributed and misquoted song lyrics? (And that's a much worse sin in something striving for some kind of hipster doofus cachet, like this book, than it might be elsewhere.)
In addition to those problems, the book seems almost quaintly dated. Published in 2000, it's got that whiff of pretty minor, inane concerns being inflated to the level of real problems: "oh, dear . . . advertising is everywhere . . . and, um, well, it's probably bad, because, um, it isn't good, right?"
But that was only the start. After 9/11, an event one might have hoped would make people who write books like this stop writing books like this, Beigbeder wrote "Windows On The World," in which he imagined the attacks from inside the towers. He said the media's presentation of the attacks was too clinical and sanitized, and that the only way to know what truly happened was to invent it. Wrong, wrong and wrong. I can only guess he was talking about the French media's reporting, since that was not the case here in North America . . . and one of the most detailed and heartbreaking aspects of the reporting on that cataclysm was a French documentary ("9/11"), which I guess he wasn't aware of, either. Or maybe they didn't show it on TV in France.
The excerpts of "Windows on The World" I read offered more of the same tired, adolescent tedium that's Beigbeder's standard product, and for which there must be an inexhaustible appetite somewhere: "clueless French intellectual pontificating about 'American cultural imperialism' and the hollow pointlessness of modern existence while decrying some cartoon version of capitalism that no actual capitalist would recognize." Apparently there's no human experience -- no matter how shattering, life-altering or terrible to contemplate -- that can't be grist for an "explanation" of its "real meaning" by some ideology-damaged European "intellectual." Maybe if we had smart, well-written, intelligently conceived and elegantly argued cultural commentary from people who bothered to try to be be informed or engaging instead of the kind of self-important, noisome, empty sloganeering scribbled by people like Frederic Beigbeder to consider, that wouldn't be such a big problem, now, would it?
Saturday, January 08, 2005
Thursday, January 06, 2005
Whither Whit?
Just concluded watching “Barcelona,” Whit Stillman’s 1994 (?) picture, the second in his trilogy. (The first was “Metropolitan,” the third was “The Last Days of Disco”) again. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen the picture now. At least six, but probably more.
Back when “Metropolitan” came out, somebody (probably Vincent Canby -- that would make sense, although it may not be accurate) compared him to Woody Allen, and that’s kind of accurate, or at least there are rough but appreciable analogies between them: there are moral considerations bedeviling their characters, there’s a lot of dialogue; it’s beautifully crafted, eminently quotable and more often than not, both writer/directors’ characters say things we would like to have the presence of mind to say in similar situations. But there are differences. Where Allen tended -- at least through the middle of his career -- to split his artistic aspirations between funny, sharply observed romantic comedies that also served as a kind of anthropology of a certain stratum of Manhattan society and heavier, dead-serious pictures such as "Interiors" or "Another Woman," Stillman showed himself as somebody who wanted to get those two things into the same picture: the sharply observed elements of the human comedy together with pretty serious emotional territory, although more often in situations where moral quandaries were determining romantic conduct and outcomes. And there was the wistful aspect to Stillman’s work that was absent in Allen’s movies. The young people in “Metropolitan” have convinced themselves that they’ve just arrived at the party moments too late . . . which is funnier because the whole movie is about what happens after they leave the parties they’re ostensibly getting together to attend; they frequently eulogize the fading world they inhabit, lamenting the fact there won’t be many -- or any -- more orgy weeks or debutante seasons soon, and about how the whole “UHB” -- “urban haute bourgeoisie” -- is doomed.
“Barcelona” moves that further, with the Boynton cousins, Ted (Taylor Nichols) and Fred (Chris Eigeman) in a kind of moral/familial conflict and tension, played out in the conflict of sexual politics, moral/romantic questions, and politically motivated violence. Again, a world or moral framework is collapsing or fading or giving way. In the case of Barcelona, it’s the Cold War, which is just about to end, and although it’s never explicitly stated, the picture is suffused with the knowledge that all the pegs and benchmarks and points of the moral and political compasses are disappearing. Every scene in the picture is telling, the performances are brilliant and the writing is tremendous.
Another few years went by, and along came the equally brilliant “The Last Days of Disco,” the story of which occurs between those of “Metropolitan” and “Barcelona.” Once again, a terrific story, a brilliant balance between the internal, moral conflicts and the larger, social and legal ones. And since then, what? Stillman bought some time with the novel of “The Last Days of Disco,” which was entertaining and well-crafted enough. But for Stillman, it almost seemed like a step backwards -- and that’s not something I say lightly. I’d think that in a lot of ways it’s tougher to write a novel than make movies -- although it’s probably easier if we mean “making movies” here the way Stillman makes them, writing, producing and directing. The novel did offer more insight into some of the characters -- most notably, obviously, Jimmy Steinway, the dancing ad man. But the movie offered insight into the character of the social scene, the milieu (for want of a better term) and the differences between the changes people thought were happening in social mores and the unchanging, universal elements that are remarkably resistant to change. There’s another point of conflict. And once again, we’re dealing with a subculture or a world that’s disappearing: it’s the last days of disco, remember. And the opening title card sets the time as “the very early eighties.”
The appreciation for Stillman’s work is sincere, but edged with selfishness. Why hasn’t he kept going? There was talk of his writing and directing a picture called, I think, “The Red Azalea” about the Cultural Revolution in China. But for whatever reason, that never seems to have happened. And there were directing stints on “Homicide: Life on the Street.” But what else? An d why not? It doesn’t seem unreasonable to think that there could have been other, more practical parallels with Woody Allen. The budgets for Stillman’s pictures must be pretty modest and reasonable. They can’t have been expensive to make, at least compared with some of the bloated swords and sandals historical epics that seem to have rolled by . . . okay, I can only think of two: “Troy” and “Alexander the Great.” What I can’t think of is why anybody would want to sit through either one. In the first instance, you’ve got Brad Pitt woefully miscast as an ancient Texan warrior fighting bravely to affect a British accent so the proceedings will seem more “historical,” and the other is directed by Oliver Stone, whose last not-entirely-unwatchable movie was . . . well, “JFK” was execrable revisionist/paranoid twaddle, and has there been anything since then that anybody would have bothered renting?
So how come Woody Allen comes out with a picture every fall almost as reliably as Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and Whit Stillman seems to be on a once-every-five years schedule? Stillman has said he writes slowly, that it takes him a lot longer to get a screenplay he’s satisfied with than it seems to take anybody else. And his directing and producing the pictures probably adds to the amount of time it takes to get them made. But still, from a purely selfish perspective, it’s way too long since there’s been a Whit Stillman movie, even allowing for the established five-year interval between pictures . . . unless, of course, one is imminent and I’m just not aware of it.
I always thought that if ever anybody were going to adapt any of Salinger’s work for the movies, Stillman would probably be the best choice. Hey, now I’m really reaching. And why not? If Stillman isn’t going to make any movies of his own screenplays or stories, then why shouldn’t we look for material he can work on? Not that anybody’s going to let any movies get made of anything J.D. Salinger has written, at least not while Jerome is alive. And I’m sure there’s some fearsome codicil made out of pig-iron and welded onto his will specifically prohibiting any literary executors from selling the movie rights to his work until . . . well, probably ever.
But, what the hell, Whit, why not drive up to New Hampshire and lean on Jerome? There might be enough similarities between your esthetics and the characters you’ve created that you could make it happen.
Then again, the night before watching “Barcelona,” we watched “Withnail and I,” and what else has writer/director Bruce Robinson done since making that in 1986? What else has he needed to do? And maybe that’s the way it is with Stillman. Having made “Metropolitan,” “Barcelona,” and “The Last Days of Disco,” what else does he have to do?
Back when “Metropolitan” came out, somebody (probably Vincent Canby -- that would make sense, although it may not be accurate) compared him to Woody Allen, and that’s kind of accurate, or at least there are rough but appreciable analogies between them: there are moral considerations bedeviling their characters, there’s a lot of dialogue; it’s beautifully crafted, eminently quotable and more often than not, both writer/directors’ characters say things we would like to have the presence of mind to say in similar situations. But there are differences. Where Allen tended -- at least through the middle of his career -- to split his artistic aspirations between funny, sharply observed romantic comedies that also served as a kind of anthropology of a certain stratum of Manhattan society and heavier, dead-serious pictures such as "Interiors" or "Another Woman," Stillman showed himself as somebody who wanted to get those two things into the same picture: the sharply observed elements of the human comedy together with pretty serious emotional territory, although more often in situations where moral quandaries were determining romantic conduct and outcomes. And there was the wistful aspect to Stillman’s work that was absent in Allen’s movies. The young people in “Metropolitan” have convinced themselves that they’ve just arrived at the party moments too late . . . which is funnier because the whole movie is about what happens after they leave the parties they’re ostensibly getting together to attend; they frequently eulogize the fading world they inhabit, lamenting the fact there won’t be many -- or any -- more orgy weeks or debutante seasons soon, and about how the whole “UHB” -- “urban haute bourgeoisie” -- is doomed.
“Barcelona” moves that further, with the Boynton cousins, Ted (Taylor Nichols) and Fred (Chris Eigeman) in a kind of moral/familial conflict and tension, played out in the conflict of sexual politics, moral/romantic questions, and politically motivated violence. Again, a world or moral framework is collapsing or fading or giving way. In the case of Barcelona, it’s the Cold War, which is just about to end, and although it’s never explicitly stated, the picture is suffused with the knowledge that all the pegs and benchmarks and points of the moral and political compasses are disappearing. Every scene in the picture is telling, the performances are brilliant and the writing is tremendous.
Another few years went by, and along came the equally brilliant “The Last Days of Disco,” the story of which occurs between those of “Metropolitan” and “Barcelona.” Once again, a terrific story, a brilliant balance between the internal, moral conflicts and the larger, social and legal ones. And since then, what? Stillman bought some time with the novel of “The Last Days of Disco,” which was entertaining and well-crafted enough. But for Stillman, it almost seemed like a step backwards -- and that’s not something I say lightly. I’d think that in a lot of ways it’s tougher to write a novel than make movies -- although it’s probably easier if we mean “making movies” here the way Stillman makes them, writing, producing and directing. The novel did offer more insight into some of the characters -- most notably, obviously, Jimmy Steinway, the dancing ad man. But the movie offered insight into the character of the social scene, the milieu (for want of a better term) and the differences between the changes people thought were happening in social mores and the unchanging, universal elements that are remarkably resistant to change. There’s another point of conflict. And once again, we’re dealing with a subculture or a world that’s disappearing: it’s the last days of disco, remember. And the opening title card sets the time as “the very early eighties.”
The appreciation for Stillman’s work is sincere, but edged with selfishness. Why hasn’t he kept going? There was talk of his writing and directing a picture called, I think, “The Red Azalea” about the Cultural Revolution in China. But for whatever reason, that never seems to have happened. And there were directing stints on “Homicide: Life on the Street.” But what else? An d why not? It doesn’t seem unreasonable to think that there could have been other, more practical parallels with Woody Allen. The budgets for Stillman’s pictures must be pretty modest and reasonable. They can’t have been expensive to make, at least compared with some of the bloated swords and sandals historical epics that seem to have rolled by . . . okay, I can only think of two: “Troy” and “Alexander the Great.” What I can’t think of is why anybody would want to sit through either one. In the first instance, you’ve got Brad Pitt woefully miscast as an ancient Texan warrior fighting bravely to affect a British accent so the proceedings will seem more “historical,” and the other is directed by Oliver Stone, whose last not-entirely-unwatchable movie was . . . well, “JFK” was execrable revisionist/paranoid twaddle, and has there been anything since then that anybody would have bothered renting?
So how come Woody Allen comes out with a picture every fall almost as reliably as Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and Whit Stillman seems to be on a once-every-five years schedule? Stillman has said he writes slowly, that it takes him a lot longer to get a screenplay he’s satisfied with than it seems to take anybody else. And his directing and producing the pictures probably adds to the amount of time it takes to get them made. But still, from a purely selfish perspective, it’s way too long since there’s been a Whit Stillman movie, even allowing for the established five-year interval between pictures . . . unless, of course, one is imminent and I’m just not aware of it.
I always thought that if ever anybody were going to adapt any of Salinger’s work for the movies, Stillman would probably be the best choice. Hey, now I’m really reaching. And why not? If Stillman isn’t going to make any movies of his own screenplays or stories, then why shouldn’t we look for material he can work on? Not that anybody’s going to let any movies get made of anything J.D. Salinger has written, at least not while Jerome is alive. And I’m sure there’s some fearsome codicil made out of pig-iron and welded onto his will specifically prohibiting any literary executors from selling the movie rights to his work until . . . well, probably ever.
But, what the hell, Whit, why not drive up to New Hampshire and lean on Jerome? There might be enough similarities between your esthetics and the characters you’ve created that you could make it happen.
Then again, the night before watching “Barcelona,” we watched “Withnail and I,” and what else has writer/director Bruce Robinson done since making that in 1986? What else has he needed to do? And maybe that’s the way it is with Stillman. Having made “Metropolitan,” “Barcelona,” and “The Last Days of Disco,” what else does he have to do?
Tuesday, January 04, 2005
Breakfast With Hunter
Wayne Ewing’s 2003 documentary Breakfast With Hunter is a portrait of a baffling cultural and literary presence that's truthful and respectful at the same time. In most instances, you might expect those two things to be mutually exclusive. But not always, and not in this case.
Shot over the course of 1996 through 1998, it covers the publication of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in the Modern Library edition, the 25th anniversary of the publication of Fear and Loathing: On The Campaign Trail ’72, the making of the movie version of Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, some kind of Hunter Thompson Appreciation Day in Louisville and a DUI case with questionable evidentiary and procedural issues in Aspen.
I’ve been a fan of Doctor Thompson’s work for about 30 years. I was 14 when I first read Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, which knocked me out, and not because of the drug intake or the any of the reasons people usually seem to glom onto Thompson’s work — many of them the same reasons you’d expect a 14-year-old boy to get a kick out of it. It was the writing: the vivid, visceral impact and poetry of the words. But it made its point without any kind of tenderness or sentimentality. By the time Raoul Duke staggers into some kind of redemption, it’s filthy and tattered; ragged and compromised, and it only counts as redemption because it’s mere survival . . . which doesn’t seem like much. But when destruction is the only other alternative, survival looks like victory. The impact of that book was visceral and cerebral all at once. Who didn’t want to drive to Las Vegas after reading that book, with or without the alcohol, drugs, disruptive intention and burning outrage?
And I guess a lot of people didn’t need more than that book. Not me. I had to read everything, of course, starting with Hell’s Angels and right on through everything else — the Rolling Stone work, all the collected stuff in The Great Shark Hunt and as much as I could find outside of the hardcover offerings, including things that hadn’t been collected at that point — the 1967 piece for the New York Times Magazine about Haight-Ashbury, for example, along with everything else listed in the bibliography of works in the back of Shark Hunt. There was also the Craig Vetter Playboy interview . . . from 1974, I think, while Thompson was still riding high following Campaign Trail ’72.
One of the things that all that reading confirmed was what a tremendous reporter Thompson was, and, I guess, what an excellent reporter he still is, although there seems to be a lot less reporting now than there used to be; it’s not something he does as much now. And even when he was reporting, there was always a clearly defined point of view. But the stuff for the National Observer from all over South America offers one example after another of deep insight and the kind of understanding that can only be gained from going to a place and talking to the people there, as well as really working hard to analyze everything you see and hear, as well as working to synthesize it with a lot of other knowledge and wisdom. As he’s said, he became a journalist because it was a way for somebody who wanted to be a writer to earn a living. And Thompson was a writer from a very early age. As he says in Ewing’s film, it was the only thing he knew he could do that wasn’t against the law. And now that The Rum Diary has been published some forty years after it was written, maybe somebody will publish Prince Jellyfish, since the excerpt of it that was in Songs of the Doomed shows it to be polished, evocative and finely wrought. And if they could published The Neon Bible, which John Kennedy Toole wrote when he was sixteen . . . and then make a movie out of it, well why not Prince Jellyfish? Unlike a lot of other fiction I stagger through these days, once I got to the end of the excerpt, I wanted to read more. I don’t know if that’s the novel he was working on in that cabin in Cuddebackville in upstate New York, after being fried from the Middletown Daily Record or not. But given the quality of work in the two volumes of letters, The Rum Diary and just about everything else (with the exception of Better Than Sex, which is a low point and may be nothing more than a day-late-dollar-short effort to keep lawyers and contracts from crushing him — I don’t know) that’s come out of his typewriter and/or pen, I’d be happy to see everything he’s ever written collected and/or published properly. He’s written at a very high level from the get-go: his membership in Louisville’s literary society, for one thing, in addition to the well-documented practice of writing out pages of Hemingway and Fitzgerald prose as part of an effort to understand their techniques and “rhythms.”
The writing’s all been vivid, and because of that it’s easy to see why there’s been a drive to bring it to the screen. But that’s been as fraught as his Thompson’s publishing history (especially as detailed in Fear and Loathing In America, the second volume of letters.) Part of the problem with the movie work, though, seems to have been — as in a lot of other places and times, and with a lot of other people — confusing the author with the work; Thompson has probably had more trouble and more well-meaning stupidity perpetrated on his behalf by people who thought they were doing him a favor than just about any other writer I can think of. Well, Hemingway, maybe. But even that’s a stretch.
First, there Where The Buffalo Roam, in which Bill Murray does a reasonably good Thompson imitation, but which is more of a caricature that serves the demands — such as they are — of the picture’s lousy screenplay. Murray only has to be a caricature because that’s all the Thompson character is in Buffalo. The picture’s rotten script made no sense and must have pissed off anybody who’d read any of the books or any of Thompson’s work. Whichever coke-addled blowdog wrote the screenplay had taken the least salient aspects of a dozen passages from Thompson’s writing, mashed them together with adulterated, clumsily fictionalized anecdotes from Thompson’s life, and then torqued everything even further for reasons that can’t even be guessed at. Did it seem as though Thompson’s life and work lacked drama, or as though the material required hyping or punching up? The point in Buffalo where Thompson encounters Richard Nixon in a hotel bathroom is a confluence of two incidents: one in Campaign Trail ’72 where Thompson is in Manchester, New Hampshire for that state’s Democratic primary and happens to look up from a urinal in a men’s room (maybe at the Exeter Inn, but I’m not going to look it up right now) and finds senator George McGovern at the next urinal, and the second is a story about Richard Nixon from 1968 (also in New Hampshire, which is the only thing the two stories have in common) in which Thompson is pressed into service to take a car trip with Nixon because “the boss” wants to relax and talk football and Thompson is the only person who knows anything about the subject. The passage occurs in a magazine story about Nixon’s recasting himself yet again in order to serve his monumental — some would say monstrous — political ambition. It’s in Shark Hunt. And both cases are in their respective original places for very specific narrative reasons. In the first instance, Thompson is trying to demonstrate the lack of artifice and expectation around McGovern and his campaign at the beginning of the 1972 primary season (everybody was certain Ed Muskie was going to prevail and that McGovern would be a footnote, at best). The Nixon story comes at a point where Thompson has become convinced that there is nothing to Nixon except ambition. There are no ideals or philosophy or beliefs or goals, except to get elected. Talking about football with him humanizes him unexpectedly, and one of the things the sequence does is to (a) demonstrate that Nixon is not evil, and (b) what politics and lust for power can do to people. To mash those two things together in that preposterous sequence in Buffalo is just idiotic, which is just one of the reasons the movie didn’t — and doesn’t — work: the entire picture is a string of those kinds of false, hollow skits, crude cartoons that would satisfy only people who’d read Las Vegas and missed its point . . . and probably not even them.
It’s easy to see why nobody went near anything else with Thompson’s name on it for 20 years. The stench of Buffalo would have been enough to keep even the most stouthearted, determined Thompson fanatics away from his work.
Not that other people weren’t still trying to make it happen. There’s a sequence in Breakfast where Alex Cox and a screenwriter visit Thompson to talk about their vision for the thing and we watch the project fall apart because they want to depict the metaphor of the wave of the 1960s San Francisco cultural foment breaking literally, and to conflate it with Thompson’s aborted escape midway through the story: They want to have him go to the airport after the Fabulous Mint 400, get on a plane and then get hit by an actual wave instead of trying to drive back to Los Angeles and getting stopped by the cop. Thompson accuses them — rightly — of turning something he considers poetry into a cartoon. As the argument escalates, it becomes clearer that Cox and his cohort are really a lot more interested in making an animated version of Ralph Steadman’s drawings for the book than the book itself. Thompson kicks them out of his house, calls the producer trying to put the movie together and barks threats at her.
It’s good he prevailed, because Terry Gilliam did a terrific job making the movie. The only part that didn’t make any sense was the Gary Busey come-on in the mid-story cop sequence. But everything else was so faithful to the work and did such a good job of translating it that it’s possible to forgive that lapse, tiny as it is. And all the sequences in the documentary illustrate perfectly the weird oxymoron that working with Thompson must be: he's passionate in defending his work, passionate in a way we would hope anybody committed to their work would be. But there are also quirks that make you think about what it must mean to be Thompson's collaborator or editor or co-conspirator and think how tough that job must be.
One of the excellent supplements on the Breakfast With Hunter DVD is a two-part conversation between Thompson and P.J. O’Rourke. At one point in the first half of the conversation, O’Rourke asks Thompson about how he feels about his influence — specifically the negative aspects of it, about the thousands of godawful pages of derivative garbage scribbled by the countless scores of Thompson fans who have tried to write like him. Thompson — rightly — won’t take the blame for other people’s bad writing, although he’s clearly aware of it. Hell, a lot of that bad writing has probably been forced on him, mailed to him, faxed or pushed at him at book signings. The second part of the interview is O’Rourke’s reading the end of Fear and Loathing, with Raoul Duke reeling through the airport, yelling at Marines and ending with his description of himself as “a Man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident.”
You come away from Ewing’s movie with a much better idea of who Thompson is and what he’s like to deal with. The three biographies didn’t really get that across as well: one didn’t bother trying; one was just an agglomeration of interview transcripts. Peter Whitmer’s book came closest. But in this movie, you can see that Hunter Thompson is who he is, was who he was long before he was made to join the Air Force to avoid jail, was who he was through all the later adulation and the early years of anonymity and struggle. Go back and read “Burial At Sea” and everything’s there: all the elements of his worldview, the distinguishing characteristics of his prose; his style, basically. Read through the letters — particularly those in the first volume, Proud Highway and it’s all there, too.
The nickel-a-throw cheap-and-easy psychological explanation probably has something to do with mistrust of the world, being angry at it and not wanting to get too close to it for a lot of reasons that make sense for the writing and the making of art, but which must always have made Dr. Thompson very tough to get along with for anybody who had to do that regularly — his friends, family, co-workers and others. But for every kind of cheap scolding a person could come up with, citing Thompson’s deviation from social norms and niceties, you have to ask yourself about what modifying his conduct would have meant for his work, because over the course of the picture, Ewing makes it clear that it’s all part of a single package, that you can’t get the poetry and the outrage and the insight without the outrageousness . . . or, if you prefer, the “special requirements.” It’s not as though the brilliance is an excuse for the behavior, but at least some of the people with whom Thompson has clashed or closed to struggled must have felt it was worth it, since they’ve continued to publish his work and to encourage him to do what he does . . . which means, of course, being who he is . . . for good or ill, as the doctor himself might say. And thank God for that. The movie is a fascinating portrait and a real through-provoking piece of work for anybody who’s ever enjoyed Thompson’s work for any reason, right or wrong.
Shot over the course of 1996 through 1998, it covers the publication of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in the Modern Library edition, the 25th anniversary of the publication of Fear and Loathing: On The Campaign Trail ’72, the making of the movie version of Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, some kind of Hunter Thompson Appreciation Day in Louisville and a DUI case with questionable evidentiary and procedural issues in Aspen.
I’ve been a fan of Doctor Thompson’s work for about 30 years. I was 14 when I first read Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, which knocked me out, and not because of the drug intake or the any of the reasons people usually seem to glom onto Thompson’s work — many of them the same reasons you’d expect a 14-year-old boy to get a kick out of it. It was the writing: the vivid, visceral impact and poetry of the words. But it made its point without any kind of tenderness or sentimentality. By the time Raoul Duke staggers into some kind of redemption, it’s filthy and tattered; ragged and compromised, and it only counts as redemption because it’s mere survival . . . which doesn’t seem like much. But when destruction is the only other alternative, survival looks like victory. The impact of that book was visceral and cerebral all at once. Who didn’t want to drive to Las Vegas after reading that book, with or without the alcohol, drugs, disruptive intention and burning outrage?
And I guess a lot of people didn’t need more than that book. Not me. I had to read everything, of course, starting with Hell’s Angels and right on through everything else — the Rolling Stone work, all the collected stuff in The Great Shark Hunt and as much as I could find outside of the hardcover offerings, including things that hadn’t been collected at that point — the 1967 piece for the New York Times Magazine about Haight-Ashbury, for example, along with everything else listed in the bibliography of works in the back of Shark Hunt. There was also the Craig Vetter Playboy interview . . . from 1974, I think, while Thompson was still riding high following Campaign Trail ’72.
One of the things that all that reading confirmed was what a tremendous reporter Thompson was, and, I guess, what an excellent reporter he still is, although there seems to be a lot less reporting now than there used to be; it’s not something he does as much now. And even when he was reporting, there was always a clearly defined point of view. But the stuff for the National Observer from all over South America offers one example after another of deep insight and the kind of understanding that can only be gained from going to a place and talking to the people there, as well as really working hard to analyze everything you see and hear, as well as working to synthesize it with a lot of other knowledge and wisdom. As he’s said, he became a journalist because it was a way for somebody who wanted to be a writer to earn a living. And Thompson was a writer from a very early age. As he says in Ewing’s film, it was the only thing he knew he could do that wasn’t against the law. And now that The Rum Diary has been published some forty years after it was written, maybe somebody will publish Prince Jellyfish, since the excerpt of it that was in Songs of the Doomed shows it to be polished, evocative and finely wrought. And if they could published The Neon Bible, which John Kennedy Toole wrote when he was sixteen . . . and then make a movie out of it, well why not Prince Jellyfish? Unlike a lot of other fiction I stagger through these days, once I got to the end of the excerpt, I wanted to read more. I don’t know if that’s the novel he was working on in that cabin in Cuddebackville in upstate New York, after being fried from the Middletown Daily Record or not. But given the quality of work in the two volumes of letters, The Rum Diary and just about everything else (with the exception of Better Than Sex, which is a low point and may be nothing more than a day-late-dollar-short effort to keep lawyers and contracts from crushing him — I don’t know) that’s come out of his typewriter and/or pen, I’d be happy to see everything he’s ever written collected and/or published properly. He’s written at a very high level from the get-go: his membership in Louisville’s literary society, for one thing, in addition to the well-documented practice of writing out pages of Hemingway and Fitzgerald prose as part of an effort to understand their techniques and “rhythms.”
The writing’s all been vivid, and because of that it’s easy to see why there’s been a drive to bring it to the screen. But that’s been as fraught as his Thompson’s publishing history (especially as detailed in Fear and Loathing In America, the second volume of letters.) Part of the problem with the movie work, though, seems to have been — as in a lot of other places and times, and with a lot of other people — confusing the author with the work; Thompson has probably had more trouble and more well-meaning stupidity perpetrated on his behalf by people who thought they were doing him a favor than just about any other writer I can think of. Well, Hemingway, maybe. But even that’s a stretch.
First, there Where The Buffalo Roam, in which Bill Murray does a reasonably good Thompson imitation, but which is more of a caricature that serves the demands — such as they are — of the picture’s lousy screenplay. Murray only has to be a caricature because that’s all the Thompson character is in Buffalo. The picture’s rotten script made no sense and must have pissed off anybody who’d read any of the books or any of Thompson’s work. Whichever coke-addled blowdog wrote the screenplay had taken the least salient aspects of a dozen passages from Thompson’s writing, mashed them together with adulterated, clumsily fictionalized anecdotes from Thompson’s life, and then torqued everything even further for reasons that can’t even be guessed at. Did it seem as though Thompson’s life and work lacked drama, or as though the material required hyping or punching up? The point in Buffalo where Thompson encounters Richard Nixon in a hotel bathroom is a confluence of two incidents: one in Campaign Trail ’72 where Thompson is in Manchester, New Hampshire for that state’s Democratic primary and happens to look up from a urinal in a men’s room (maybe at the Exeter Inn, but I’m not going to look it up right now) and finds senator George McGovern at the next urinal, and the second is a story about Richard Nixon from 1968 (also in New Hampshire, which is the only thing the two stories have in common) in which Thompson is pressed into service to take a car trip with Nixon because “the boss” wants to relax and talk football and Thompson is the only person who knows anything about the subject. The passage occurs in a magazine story about Nixon’s recasting himself yet again in order to serve his monumental — some would say monstrous — political ambition. It’s in Shark Hunt. And both cases are in their respective original places for very specific narrative reasons. In the first instance, Thompson is trying to demonstrate the lack of artifice and expectation around McGovern and his campaign at the beginning of the 1972 primary season (everybody was certain Ed Muskie was going to prevail and that McGovern would be a footnote, at best). The Nixon story comes at a point where Thompson has become convinced that there is nothing to Nixon except ambition. There are no ideals or philosophy or beliefs or goals, except to get elected. Talking about football with him humanizes him unexpectedly, and one of the things the sequence does is to (a) demonstrate that Nixon is not evil, and (b) what politics and lust for power can do to people. To mash those two things together in that preposterous sequence in Buffalo is just idiotic, which is just one of the reasons the movie didn’t — and doesn’t — work: the entire picture is a string of those kinds of false, hollow skits, crude cartoons that would satisfy only people who’d read Las Vegas and missed its point . . . and probably not even them.
It’s easy to see why nobody went near anything else with Thompson’s name on it for 20 years. The stench of Buffalo would have been enough to keep even the most stouthearted, determined Thompson fanatics away from his work.
Not that other people weren’t still trying to make it happen. There’s a sequence in Breakfast where Alex Cox and a screenwriter visit Thompson to talk about their vision for the thing and we watch the project fall apart because they want to depict the metaphor of the wave of the 1960s San Francisco cultural foment breaking literally, and to conflate it with Thompson’s aborted escape midway through the story: They want to have him go to the airport after the Fabulous Mint 400, get on a plane and then get hit by an actual wave instead of trying to drive back to Los Angeles and getting stopped by the cop. Thompson accuses them — rightly — of turning something he considers poetry into a cartoon. As the argument escalates, it becomes clearer that Cox and his cohort are really a lot more interested in making an animated version of Ralph Steadman’s drawings for the book than the book itself. Thompson kicks them out of his house, calls the producer trying to put the movie together and barks threats at her.
It’s good he prevailed, because Terry Gilliam did a terrific job making the movie. The only part that didn’t make any sense was the Gary Busey come-on in the mid-story cop sequence. But everything else was so faithful to the work and did such a good job of translating it that it’s possible to forgive that lapse, tiny as it is. And all the sequences in the documentary illustrate perfectly the weird oxymoron that working with Thompson must be: he's passionate in defending his work, passionate in a way we would hope anybody committed to their work would be. But there are also quirks that make you think about what it must mean to be Thompson's collaborator or editor or co-conspirator and think how tough that job must be.
One of the excellent supplements on the Breakfast With Hunter DVD is a two-part conversation between Thompson and P.J. O’Rourke. At one point in the first half of the conversation, O’Rourke asks Thompson about how he feels about his influence — specifically the negative aspects of it, about the thousands of godawful pages of derivative garbage scribbled by the countless scores of Thompson fans who have tried to write like him. Thompson — rightly — won’t take the blame for other people’s bad writing, although he’s clearly aware of it. Hell, a lot of that bad writing has probably been forced on him, mailed to him, faxed or pushed at him at book signings. The second part of the interview is O’Rourke’s reading the end of Fear and Loathing, with Raoul Duke reeling through the airport, yelling at Marines and ending with his description of himself as “a Man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident.”
You come away from Ewing’s movie with a much better idea of who Thompson is and what he’s like to deal with. The three biographies didn’t really get that across as well: one didn’t bother trying; one was just an agglomeration of interview transcripts. Peter Whitmer’s book came closest. But in this movie, you can see that Hunter Thompson is who he is, was who he was long before he was made to join the Air Force to avoid jail, was who he was through all the later adulation and the early years of anonymity and struggle. Go back and read “Burial At Sea” and everything’s there: all the elements of his worldview, the distinguishing characteristics of his prose; his style, basically. Read through the letters — particularly those in the first volume, Proud Highway and it’s all there, too.
The nickel-a-throw cheap-and-easy psychological explanation probably has something to do with mistrust of the world, being angry at it and not wanting to get too close to it for a lot of reasons that make sense for the writing and the making of art, but which must always have made Dr. Thompson very tough to get along with for anybody who had to do that regularly — his friends, family, co-workers and others. But for every kind of cheap scolding a person could come up with, citing Thompson’s deviation from social norms and niceties, you have to ask yourself about what modifying his conduct would have meant for his work, because over the course of the picture, Ewing makes it clear that it’s all part of a single package, that you can’t get the poetry and the outrage and the insight without the outrageousness . . . or, if you prefer, the “special requirements.” It’s not as though the brilliance is an excuse for the behavior, but at least some of the people with whom Thompson has clashed or closed to struggled must have felt it was worth it, since they’ve continued to publish his work and to encourage him to do what he does . . . which means, of course, being who he is . . . for good or ill, as the doctor himself might say. And thank God for that. The movie is a fascinating portrait and a real through-provoking piece of work for anybody who’s ever enjoyed Thompson’s work for any reason, right or wrong.
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