Fear and Hate in Las Vegas: The Savage Trip to the Heart of the American Dream is a novel by Hunter S. Thompson, illustrated by Ralph Steadman. This book is a romance ÃÆ' clef, rooted in an autobiographical incident. The story follows his protagonist, Raoul Duke, and his lawyer, Dr. Gonzo, as they descend to Las Vegas to pursue the American Dream through drug-induced fog, while contemplating the failure of the 1960s counter-cultural movement. This work is Thompson's most famous book, and is best known for his grim description of early illegal drug use and early retrospective in the 1960s culture. Its population of the highly subjective mix of fact and Thompson fiction has been known as gonzo journalism. The novel first appeared as a two-part series in Rolling Stone magazine in 1971, and was published as a book in 1972. It was later adapted into a movie of the same name in 1998 by Terry Gilliam, starring Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro who plays Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo, respectively.
Video Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Origins
The Las Vegas, Las Vegas and Las Vegas Novel novel is based on two trips to Las Vegas, Nevada, which Hunter S. Thompson took with lawyers and Chicano Oscar Zeta Acosta activists in March and April 1971. The first journey resulted from a exposà ©  © Thompson writes for Rolling Stone magazine about Mexican-American television journalist, RubÃÆ'  © n Salazar, an officer from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department has shot and killed with a tear gas grenade fired at a distance was near during the March National Chicano Maratorium against the Vietnam War in 1970. Thompson used Acosta - a prominent Mexican-American political activist and lawyer - as the main source for the story, and both find it difficult to get white Mexicans to talk openly with white reporter in the tense atmosphere of Los Angeles, California. Both needed a more comfortable place to discuss the story and decided to take advantage of an offer from Sports Illustrated to write a photo text for the 400th annual Mint desert race held in Las Vegas from March 21-23, 1971.
Thompson writes that he ended their journey in March by spending 36 hours alone in a hotel room "writing hastily in my notebook" about his experience. These writings are the origin of the Las Vegas Freaks and Hate: Savage's Trip to the Heart of the American Dream.
What's originally a 250-word photo assignment for Sports Illustrated evolved into a novel-length feature story for Rolling Stone ; Thompson said publisher Jann Wenner had "liked the first 20 pages or so enough to take her seriously on her own terms and was temporarily scheduled for publication - which gave me the impetus I needed to keep working on it." He first handed over 2,500 words of manuscript to "Illustrated Sports Illustrated" which was "aggressively rejected."
A few weeks later, Thompson and Acosta returned to Las Vegas to report to Rolling Stone at the National District Attorney Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs held from 25-29 April 1971, and to add more material to < i> Fear and Hate narrative. In addition to attending lawyers' conferences, Thompson and Acosta looked for ways in Vegas to explore the theme of the American Dream, which became the basis for the second half of the novel, which Thompson called "Vegas II".
On April 29, 1971, Thompson began writing a complete script in a hotel room in Arcadia, California, in his spare time while completing "Weird Rumble in Aztlan," an article that records Salazar's death. Thompson joins the Vegas experience in what he calls "the fictitious basic framework" depicting a single-wheeled trip to Vegas peppered with creative licenses.
In November 1971, Rolling Stone published a joint text of the journey as Fantasy and Hate in Las Vegas: The Savage Trip to the American Dreams as a two-part article illustrated by Ralph Steadman, who, two years earlier, had worked with Thompson on the Scanlan's Monthly article entitled "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved". Random House published a hardcover edition in July 1972, with additional Steadman illustrations; The New York Times said it was "by far the best book of the decade of drugs," with Tom Wolfe describing it as "a stinging sensation."
Maps Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Plot
This novel does not have a clear narrative and often excavate surreal, never quite distinguish between what is real and what is only imagined by the characters. The basic synopsis revolves around journalist Raoul Duke (Hunter S. Thompson) and his lawyer, Dr. Gonzo (Oscar Zeta Acosta), when they arrived in Las Vegas in 1971 to report the Mint 400 motorcycle race for an anonymous magazine. However, this work is repeatedly hampered by the constant use of various recreational drugs, including LSD, ether, cocaine, alcohol, mescaline, and marijuana. This leads to a series of hallucinogenic experiences, where they destroy hotel rooms, car accidents, and have a vision of anthropomorphic desert animals, while contemplating the good decline of the "American Dream" and the 60's rival in the city of greed.
Main theme
The preface quotes Samuel Johnson: "He who made the beast out of him removes the pain as a human being." This quote alludes to the great drug use of the protagonists in escaping the harsh reality of American life; The detail parts of the failed counterpart, people who think drug use is the answer to community problems. The contradiction of "excessive solace" is thematically similar to The Great Gatsby .
Thompson argues that drug use alone (unlike Timothy Leary's thought-exploit drug attempts) is intended to make him fall apart; that he was a generation poster boy "paralyze and seek..."; their erratic behavior illustrates the anxious failure felt by his generation.
Throughout the Fear and Hate in Las Vegas, protagonists go out of their way to degrade, abuse, and destroy the symbols of American consumerism and prosperity, while Las Vegas epitomizes the crude vices of American mainstream culture.
The "wave speech"
"Speech Wave" is an important part at the end of the eighth chapter that catches the hippie zeitgeist and finally.
Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least the Main Era - the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the mid-sixties was a very special time and place to be part of. Maybe that means something . Probably not, in the long run... but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories that can touch the sense of knowing that you are there and living in a corner of time and the world. Whatever it means....
History is hard to know, because all the hoards are hired, but even without making sure the "history" seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of the whole generation comes to the head in a good long glow, for the reason that nothing is right to understand at that moment - and who never explained, in retrospect, what really happened.
My main memory of the time seemed to last one or five or maybe forty nights - or very early in the morning - when I left Fillmore half crazy and, instead of coming home, directed the great Lightning 650 across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour in shorts LL Bean and a butte sheepherder jacket... soared through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not sure what to do when I got to the other end (always stuck at the toll gate, too twisted to find neutral while I touched -profit for change)... but really sure that no matter where I go, I'll come to a place where people are as tall and wild as I am: There's no doubt at all about that...
There is madness in any direction, anytime. If not across the Gulf, then go up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda.... You can hit sparks anywhere. There is a fantastic universal sense that whatever we do is true , that we win....
And that, I think, is the grip - the inevitable sense of victory over the forces of Lama and Evil. Not in the mean or military sense; we do not need it. Our energy will only win . There is no point fighting - on our part or them. We have all the momentum; we are riding the tops of high and beautiful waves....
So now, less than five years later, you can ride on a steep hill in Las Vegas and see the West, and with your right eye you can almost see the watermark - that place where the waves finally broke and rolled back.
Thompson often cites this passage during the interview, choosing it when asked to read aloud from the novel.
Title
Fear and Hate in Las Vegas is Thompson's most famous job, and is known as "Fear and Hate" for short; However, he later uses the phrase "Fear and Hate" in book titles, essays, and other magazine articles.
In addition, "Fear and Hate", as a phrase, has been used by many authors, the first (probably) is Friedrich Nietzsche in The Antiichrist. In a Rolling Stone magazine interview, Thompson said: "It came out of my own fears, and is a perfect description of the situation for me, however, I have been accused of stealing it from Nietzsche or Kafka or the like. It feels like a natural thing. "
He first used the sentence in a letter to a friend written after the Kennedy assassination, describing how he felt about whoever shot President John F. Kennedy. In "The Kentucky Derby Decadent and Depraved", he uses the phrase to describe how people regard Ralph Steadman after seeing his caricature from them.
Jann Wenner claims that the title is from Thomas Wolfe The Web and the Rock .
Reaction to novel
When it was published in the autumn of 1971, many critics disliked the loose novel plot and the scene of drug use; However, some reviewers estimate that the "Fear and Hate in Las Vegas" will be an important part of American literature.
In The New York Times Christopher Lehmann-Haupt tells readers not to "bother" with the novel, and that "what happens in these pages makes Lenny Bruce look like angelsâ €; However, he acknowledges that the significance of the novel is in Thompson's literary method: "The whole book boils down to a kind of corrosive and ferocious prose poem that takes place where Norman Mailer The American dream stops and explores what Tom left behind Wolfe ".
When a novel becomes popular, reviews become positive; Crawford Woods, also at The New York Times, writes positive reviews that contradict Lehmann-Haupt's negative comment: the novel is "a specially crafted paranoia study, a cult from the 1960s and - entirely hysteria, irreverence, humiliation and decay - a desperate and important book, a wired nightmare, the funniest part of American prose "; and "this book is a storm of thought so we may need a little time to know that it is also literature... it unfolds the parable of the nineteen sixties to those who live in it in a mood - perhaps more melodramatic than the social, political, surrealist and chemical party. "About Thompson, Woods said he" believed in the authority of his senses, and the clarity of the brain was between brilliance and boredom ".
In any case, Fear and Hate in Las Vegas became the benchmark in US literature on US society in the early 1970s. In Billboard magazine Chris Morris says, "Through the duke of Duke and Gonzo filled with drugs in the midst of desert joyful desert greed, perfectly capturing the post-60s era zeitgeist". In Rolling Stone magazine, Mika Gilmore writes that the novel "peeks into the best and worst mystery of American heart" and that Thompson "sought to understand how the American dream has turned weapons on itself". Gilmore believes that "the fear and hatred caused by Thompson - the fear of both the inland devils and the psychic landscape of the nation around him - is not only his own, he also voices the mind of a generation who has held high ideals and is now crashing into the wall of American reality".
Cormac McCarthy calls the book "the classic of our times" and one of the few great modern novels.
As a work of gonzo journalism
In the book The Great Shark Hunt, Thompson refers to Las Vegas's Fear and Hate as a "failed experiment in gonzo journalism" he practices, based on William Faulkner's idea that " the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism - and the best journalists always know this. " The Thompson style combines techniques of telling fictitious tales and journalism.
He called it a failed experiment because he originally intended to record every detail of the Las Vegas journey as it did, and then publish the raw notes, unedited; However, he revised it during the spring and summer of 1971. For example, the novel describes Duke attending motorcycling races and drug conventions within days; The actual event happened a month apart. Later, he wrote, "I find myself forcing a basically fictitious framework about what started off as a piece of direct/crazy journalism". Nevertheless, critics call Thompson's crowning fears and ugliness in gonzo journalism. For example, journalist and author Mikal Gilmore says the novel "feels free swinging when you read it [but] does not seem unintentional.The writing is there, in the yard - surprising, unprecedented and made so well". Critics believe that Fear and Hate in Las Vegas should be regarded as a work of gonzo journalism because of the characteristics of gonzo journalism are all the characteristics seen in the novel.
Illustration
British cartoonist Ralph Steadman added a unique and strange illustration to the problem of Rolling Stone and his novel. Steadman first met Thompson when Scanlan's Monthly hired Steadman to do the illustration for Thompson's first attempt into gonzo journalism called "Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved."
Many critics praised Steadman's illustrations as another major character of the novel and companion for Thompson's disconnected narration. The New York Times notes that "Steadman's image is so loud and insane and captures Thompson's sensitivity, his opinion that beneath the plastic surface of America lurks something chaotic and rough, the image is torn plastic and people see it as monsters. "
Steadman has expressed his regret in selling his illustrations, on the advice of his agent to Jann Wenner's Rolling Stone Founder for $ 75. As a result of the deal Steadman has refused to sell any of his original works and has been quoted as saying " If anyone has the original Steadman, it's stolen. " Although there are original pieces stored outside their archives, they are very rare. The artist continues to have most of his artwork.
Audio adjustment
The audiobook version was released by Margaritaville Records and Island Records in 1996, on the 25th anniversary of the original publication of the book. It features the talents of Harry Dean Stanton as the older narrator/Hunter S. Thompson, Jim Jarmusch as Raoul Duke, and Maury Chaykin as Dr. Gonzo, with Jimmy Buffett, Joan Cusack, Buck Henry and Harry Shearer in small roles. Unlike most audiobooks, sound effects, music that fits a certain period and mixing sounds like albums are widely used, to provide a surreal feeling of book characteristics. Excerpts from Thompson itself became part of the album.
This album may no longer be printed, due to its relative scarcity, but is sought by fans due to its high production and loyalty to the tone of the book. The excerpt is included in the Criteria Collection movie release.
Movie adaptation
The popularity of novels led to cinematic adaptation efforts; Directed Martin Scorsese and Oliver Stone each did not successfully try to film the novel version. In the course of these efforts, Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando are considered for the role of Duke and Dr. Gonzo but production stalled and the actors were out of character. After that, Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi were considered, but Belushi's death ended the plan. The film Art Linson 1980 Where Buffalo Roam starring Bill Murray and Peter Boyle is based on a number of Thompson stories, including <<> Fear and Hate in Las Vegas .
In 1989, Fear and Hate in Las Vegas was almost made by director Terry Gilliam when he was given a script by illustrator Ralph Steadman. Gilliam, however, feels that the script "does not catch the story correctly". In 1995, Gilliam received a different manuscript that he felt was worth conscientizing; The 1998 film featured Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro as "Raoul Duke" and "Dr Gonzo", respectively; However, critics mixed and the film was a box office failure. Since then it has developed the following sects since mostly for the release on DVD, including the Special Edition released by The Criterion Collection.
Graphical novel adaptation
In July 2013, IDW Publishing announced plans to publish Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas adaptations in graphic novel format. The network of IDW's Top Shelf Productions subsequently announced more details about the graphic novel, adapted by Canadian artist Troy Little, released in late October 2015. In the interview, Little said "We decided right off the bat not to go the Steadman route, or become overly influenced by movies, and drawing Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro So we want to make it a unique thing... For me, capturing the energy of mania and the spirit of the book, and staying true to the nuances of
References
External links
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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