They were somewhere outside around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. By the end of this psychedelic adventure starring Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro, we do feel a bit light-headed, as if we have been on the same drugs for two hours. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a drug-induced thrill ride unlike any other. We’ve seen Cheech and Chong and a slew of other mind-bending duos take an audience on a wild ride into another realm. But there is something different about Terry Gilliam’s directorial interpretation of Hunter S. Thompson’s award-winning novel about a writer and his attorney on a quest to find the American Dream. But did they find it?
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The film takes place in the 70s era after the sexual and psychedelic liberation of the ’60s hippie movement. Americans engaged in a free for all and were trying just about anything. Music seemed to reflect this after The Beatles exploded into pop culture and shifted music in a more experimental direction. The film also takes place during the era of Gonzo Journalism. At the time of the novel’s inception, writers like Thompson were on a quest to be as authentic and as true to the truth as possible. Hunter S. Thompson was a proponent of this style of writing. Thompson uses the first person to tell the story of writer Raoul Duke and his attorney Dr. Gonzo… see a connection yet? In the film, however, Duke (Johnny Depp) uses voice-overs to guide us through this voyage into a reality far from real.

Tripping Out the Audience

Universal Pictures

Johnny Depp’s character Raoul is almost like a shaman guiding the audience through the trials and tribulations of his drug-filled time in Las Vegas. For those who have never done the laundry list of reality-bending substances the characters go through, it might be quite jarring to see for the first time. The images on the screen are altered and presented in a way that makes us feel like we are tripping with Raoul. The carpets move, faces and voices are altered, and some monstrous figures seem to take hold of those we once saw as familiar.

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However, this technique and execution might come off as too jarring and must be done in a way that is truest to the experience. After all, this is Gonzo we are talking about. The psychedelic images presented in the film are shown to us by a director who has actually done some of these substances, so he might know a thing or two about what the user could expect. According to IndieWire, Terry Gilliam used drugs at the time this film actually took place.

“I smoked marijuana once in college and didn’t like it,” Gilliam said. “LSD terrified me. When I moved to London and occasionally had to fly to Hollywood for work, I came back with a ferocious jet lag. At parties, someone was offering cocaine, because it was the ’80s and coke was everywhere, and a couple of times I said yes. I was tired, I couldn’t stand. But the hangovers were horrible and so I said to myself: never again.”

Universal Pictures

So, coming from the words of someone who has actually seen the effects of these mind-altering drugs, the film does hold a bit more credibility. The film is often referred to as one of the most accurate psychedelic films of all time. However, director Ari Aster utilized similar techniques of visually bending imagery 20 years later in his 2019 horror film Midsommar, which shows a group of young adults tripping in a Swedish village. Most of the foliage in the film moves as the characters become more and more intoxicated. Films like Enter the Void also imitate the out-of-body experiences of drugs like DMT, one of many films which have utilized a more experimental and care-free approach to the presentation of drug intoxication. But there is something special about Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which is accentuated by the incredible performances from Depp and del Toro.

Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing

Universal Pictures

Johnny Depp portrays the character of Hunter S. Thompson through Raoul Duke, the writer with a bag full of every drug one could possibly imagine. His movements are superbly gelatinous and eccentric from the very beginning and the audience can not help but feel the beats of sweat run down their faces as they watch this man melt under the pulsating pressure of the devil’s ether.

Depp told Fox News in 1998 of his experience meeting Hunter S. Thompson and his opinion of the actor’s performance:

“He was very generous with words after the film […] he applauded, you know he just said you’ve done a great job and he loved the film and didn’t want it to end. He’d said the greatest thing, he called the film an eerie trumpet call over a lost battlefield, which I thought was so beautiful and so profound. Yeah he supports the film and he was very supportive and nice about my performance so I was really pleased. It was a great relief, believe me, because I thought he may hate it, he may hate me.”

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What Depp and Thompson both seem to describe is this idea of the “lost battlefield,” specifically in cinema. Films have a formulaic and spoonfed approach to a topic such as drug liberation and seems to negate the perspective of those who lived around that time. While the film does not glorify drugs through Depp’s performance, it evokes a response from viewers. It is not a cookie-cutter film by any means. While Depp is the face, the technical applications and stimulating visuals are what drive the audience into madness.

Too Weird to Live, Too Rare to Die

Universal Pictures

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas represents the pinnacle of psychedelic cinema. It does for film what Magical Mystery Tour did for the world of music. There is something there to derive an emotional response from the audience, whether it is fear or hatred. The film is a glimpse into history and serves the purpose of just that.

Some seem to try and pull a theme and a purpose behind it, finding religious allegories or political meaning in Gilliam’s great film. However, there may not be a point to it at all. After all, most of the imagery in the film was all in the character’s minds anyway. So with a film like this, it is best to buckle up and just drive as deep into “bat country” as one could possibly imagine.