Neither mescaline nor LSD were available at the concession stand
of the theater where I saw Alex Gibney’s new documentary,
Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S.
Thompson, so I had to make do with a couple of cold
Coronas.
This dearth of hallucinogenic enhancement may explain why the
film seemed to suffer from an excess of politics and a shortage of
laughter. Or maybe not.
Gibney, who won an Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side, his
anti-war film about the death of a Guantanamo Bay detainee, seems
determined to force the square peg of Thompson idiosyncrasies into
the round hole of contemporary liberal passions. It’s an awkward
fit. At times, Gonzo seems more like a celebration of
George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign than of Thompson’s
journalism career.
Granted, Thompson was a man of the Left who hated Richard Nixon
and deeply identified with the anti-war '60s counterculture that
McGovern’s campaign represented. And Thompson’s hilariously
insightful account of the McGovern debacle, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail
‘72, is one of my favorite political books of all time.
Yet it is hard to justify Gibney’s decision to allow that one
episode to gobble up nearly 40 minutes of a two-hour film about
Thompson’s four-decade career. The campaign segment repeatedly
loses its focus on Thompson and his methods as a journalist,
instead focusing on a hagiographic treatment of McGovern.
GIBNEY MAKES OTHER overtly political choices as a director —
including a non sequitur insertion of Martin Luther King
Jr.’s “mountaintop” speech and a split-screen sequence of war
footage from Vietnam and Iraq — that add nothing useful to the
portrait of Thompson as a writer.
These political choices might be more easily forgiven if they
did not result in Gonzo giving short shrift to other
aspects of Thompson’s career. The film offers no explanation of how
Thompson, who originally dreamed of being a novelist, drifted into
journalism as a sportswriter for the Eglin Air Force Base
newspaper. There is only passing reference to his formative years
as a freelance Latin American correspondent for the National
Observer.
Instead, Gibney’s Thompson seems to transform almost instantly
from his adolescence in Louisville, Kentucky, into the author of
Hell’s Angels, the 1967 bestseller that began as a 1965
feature article for the Nation. The filmgoer who knows
nothing of Thompson’s earlier work (Nation editor Carey
McWilliams was a fan of Thompson’s reporting in the
Observer), is left to wonder why a leading liberal
magazine would have picked him for the Hell’s Angels
assignment.
The Hell’s Angels segment, however, highlights several crucial
elements of the gonzo persona, including Thompson’s daredevil
attraction to danger. While covering the bike gang, he began riding
motorcycles himself, totaling his BSA 650 in a wreck that sent him
and a passenger to the hospital. Immersing himself into the outlaw
culture, Thompson also managed to get himself badly stomped by a
group of Angels at a weekend party.
HIS HABIT OF MAKING himself the protagonist of his own journalistic
endeavors is what set Thompson apart from the rest of the “New
Journalism” crowd of the 1960s and '70s. Truman Capote’s In
Cold Blood had pioneered the use of the novelist’s method in
non-fiction, and Tom Wolfe (who makes several appearances in
Gonzo) employed impressionistic literary techniques to
capture the '60s scene.
Neither Capote nor Wolfe, however, made themselves the central
character of their own stories as Thompson routinely did. Arguably
the best part of Gibney’s documentary is its portrayal of the most
distinctly subjective episode of Thompson’s career: His 1970
campaign for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado, on the “Freak
Power” ticket.
“We seem to be running an experiment that people are watching,”
Thompson says during one of the contemporaneous 1970 film clips
that capture the bizarre flavor of a campaign during which the
writer/candidate shaved his head so he could refer to the
conservative incumbent as “my long-haired opponent.”
Running on a platform that promised he and his deputies would
freely use mescaline if elected, Thompson lost, but came close
enough to demonstrate the strength of the hippie vote in Aspen,
presaging the counterculture’s emerging potential as a political
force.
From there, Gibney turns to the difficult task of limning the
origins of the purely subjective “gonzo” style that Thompson first
used in a 1970 article, “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and
Depraved,” then developed most famously in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, originally
published by Rolling Stone in two parts in 1971.
Much of Gibney’s version of what Thompson called “the Vegas
book” is told through clips from the 1998 movie version starring Johnny Depp, who
doubles as the documentary’s narrator, reading excerpts of
Thompson’s works.
Gibney seems to take these classic gonzo pieces at face value,
either missing the joke or purposefully ignoring the essential
shtick of both the Derby story and the Vegas book, namely,
the drug-addled hipster jeering at “square” America.
Ultimately, Thompson’s self-aggrandizement and his notorious
substance abuse were his undoing. Fame cost him the anonymity he’d
used to his advantage as a reporter. By the mid-1970s, as he
explains in one film clip, his fame was such that when he went to
cover Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign, he signed more
autographs than Carter did.
His boozing and drugging took an even greater toll, contributing
to a series of botched assignments that most notably included a
1974 trip to Zaire to cover the famous “Rumble in the Jungle”
heavyweight bout between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, during
which a drugged-out Thompson managed to miss the fight
entirely.
YET WHILE THOMPSON’S later work never matched the acclaim he’d won
for Hell’s Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
or his ‘72 campaign coverage, Gibney’s film almost completely
ignores the last two decades of the writer’s life.
Gonzo cuts directly from Thompson’s years in the late
'70s hanging out with Jimmy Buffet in Key West to his 2005 suicide
at his cabin near Aspen. In doing so, Gibney skips over Thompson’s
coverage of the 1982 Roxanne Pulitzer divorce trial, his years as a
columnist for the San Francisco Examiner, his final gig as
a columnist for ESPN.com, and his long legal crusade to free Lisa
Auman, who’d been sentenced to life in prison as an accessory to a
1997 murder.
Gibney’s shortchanging of Thompson’s later career reflects the
narrative of the biography (also entitled Gonzo) that Rolling Stone
publisher Jann S. Wenner and Corey Seymour published last fall.
Wenner’s portrayal of Thompson’s final years as a “humiliating”
afterthought angered his widow, Anita, who married him in
2003 after three years as his editorial assistant.
Despite its flaws, Gibney’s film still fascinates, if only
because Thompson’s larger-than-life personality was so inherently
fascinating. A boring documentary about Thompson would be
impossible, and as long as Gonzo remains focused on its
subject — rather than indulging in romanticized '60s nostalgia —
it compels attention, even without a brain full of mescaline.
