Going, Going, Gonzo

Hunter S. Thompson’s life was a breathless, head-spinning spectacle fueled by the abundance of swell drugs and non-stop “experience” that typified the height of 1970s self-actualization. He was cunning and attractive and brilliant -- the sort of guy who couldn't be expected to cover the American Dream “from a Volkswagen.” A limo, he told his editor, Jann Wenner, would be so much more appropriate.

It’s that out-sized bravura which makes the documentary, “Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson,” released earlier this month, so addictively compelling and so ultimately tragic.

The doc, drawing on a pastiche of interviews, home movies, past documentaries and scenes from the film “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” paints a picture of a precocious talent in possession of a rapier wit and a boundless appetite for pushing envelopes.

Thompson also emerges here as an early moralist, the consummate outsider raging against the oppression and evil in American life. He starts out a purist (or at least presents himself that way), a true believer in the notion that the right argument will prevail, that America can be saved from her demons, real or imagined. He takes on Hells Angels and Nixonian corruption and unjust wars, exposing sins -- right and left -- even if his Gonzo truth requires more than its share of fabrication, i.e., Ed Muskie is addicted to Ibogaine; Nixon is a vampire who roams the D.C. streets. Thompson finds liberation in drugs, and for a while, rides this freedom to the edge of mental exploration, producing crisp, cutting prose that has rightly earned its place in the literary pantheon.

But like other waves before it, his crests and breaks. The drugs scramble his mind into a plate of almost inedible lunacy. And he soon settles for the temporal rewards of rock star and circus attraction, effectively squandering whatever substantive impact he might have had.

Ultimately, Thompson is an excellent example of the old axiom that one should be careful in one’s hatreds. Thompson’s work is filled with bile toward the establishment, the ruling powers-that-be. And then, poof, everyone around him becomes the establishment, the monied set, the privileged few. And gee, look at that, nothing that was wrong with America has changed a bit. Funny how that happens.

That said it’s painful to watch the film’s final scenes. Our once beautiful prophet has exchanged his idealism for an all-you-can-eat buffet aimed at sating the darker angels – with its usual nihilistic array of guns and sex and drugs and money. The adulation is terrific. But it is the empty adulation of the whore. And I don’t think for a minute that Thompson, given his intellectual prowess, didn’t recognize this.

So there it is. America’s great original thinker-patriot-junkie finds himself reduced to a flabby geriatric, snarfing an orange straight from the peel, muttering his incoherent argot with the jittery popcorn beat of the chemically snapped mind. The first wife is long gone, having fled his insanity. His existence rambles along though, even if it is long past the stage of being a joke. By the time the camera gets around to his second wife -- the age of a daughter -- he’s become a parody of the dirty old man archetype, you know, the one who just can’t help screwing his secretary. By the way, the new Mrs. Thompson invokes the kind of pretty, empty-headed girl you might find working at a nursing home in a small town for minimum wage…just until she can find a way out or maybe a man who will pay the bills.

In the final reckoning, the gun goes off and the fireworks explode. The rest, as they say, is history. Thompson’s ashes burst into the night air lost forever to their cosmic destiny. Below, on terra firma, the “club,” the insular global society of fame and fortune, is all there to pay homage to their wild-eyed god. There’s the bizarre little actor Johnny Depp, who played the Thompson alter ego in “Fear and Loathing” and narrates him in this film. Oh, and over there…Sen. John Kerry, the presidential candidate Thompson campaigned for in 2004. A wooden Kerry stands in the midst of this “in crowd,” an uncomfortable and awkward reminder that Thompson has been fully co-opted.