Gonzo

Hunter S. Thompson was a supremely funny man but, alas, was a deeply unhappy one. Thompson's political positions could have hardly been more different from my own. Nevertheless, I admired his work because he was such an original and so entertaining. I did so mainly because I knew better than to ever take him seriously. Unfortunately, Thompson never learned to not take himself too seriously and that failing led to his self destructiveness and, ultimately to his suicide.

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson is a mostly loving look at Thompson through the eyes of many of his friends and the politicians he wrote about. It shows a man with a profoundly dichotomous nature: creativeness and wit on its positive side but dark, self destructive depression on the other. It created the richly entertaining Gonzo journalist who those of us who admired his work so enjoyed but also planted the seeds for his depression and death.

Near the end of the film, Thompson's first wife, Sondi, takes issue with those who characterize Thompson's suicide as "heroic." I think she has a point. Thompson had largely fallen from the public eye some years before he killed himself in 2005 at the age of 67. In a note delivered to his wife four days before his death, which was described by both his family and the police as a suicide note, Thompson wrote, under the title "Football Season is Over":

"No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt."

That about sums it up.

Before watching this film I knew a decent amount about the father of Gonzo journalism, and everything I had learned seemed to suggest a man whose many contradictions made his overall nature hard to grasp. For this reason I praise this film for doing a remarkable job of really digging into the essence of all that is Hunter S. Thompson, including his writing, his lifestyle, his acquaintances, and primarily his impact upon America.

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S.Thompson methodically covers the bulk of Hunter's life from his boyhood to his untimely suicide. With interviews from many of his close friends and relatives, as well as some substantial political figures, the movie does a great job of putting his life in perspective. Consequently, it brings with it the energy and intensity that was pervasive in those times and places, like San Francisco in the early 60s. But Hunter's life is far more than sheer counterculture excitement, and the film covers the many events of civil disarray that Thompson fell witness to, and that shaped his cynical view of modern-day America.

The film manages to draw many parallels to the afflictions of our nation today, such as the war in Iraq and Bush administration. It follows Hunter's life all the way to the end, and in spite of the last quarter of the movie being a bit too lengthy, closes decently. For its effectiveness and emotional force, this is a must-see for Gonzo fans.

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson: 6 out of 10: Is Hunter S Thompson any more relevant to modern journalism than Joe Namath is to modern football? After all, both were men of their times. In addition, both faded badly by the mid-seventies. Thompson's early work is excellent (a copy of "The Proud Highway" sits on my bookshelf) and reached its pinnacle with Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72.

A mere three years later Rolling Stone publisher Jenn Warner had become so fed up with Thompson he basically tried to have him killed.

As Gonzo.org puts it "Then, early one evening in March 1975, Hunter was watching a nightmarish film of the evacuation of Da Nang on the evening news. The phone rang, and Hunter picked it up. It was Wenner, saying, "How would you like to go to Vietnam?" Hunter could not resist. The collapse of the American empire was a happening tailor-made for his talents. Within days, he was heading out over the Pacific. He arrived in Saigon hours after Thieu's palace had been bombed and staffed by his own Air Force. For a man who lived with the conviction that the world was going to end next Monday, this was an especially ominous portent. Thompson had the sense of "walking into a death camp." This was it. He would never get out alive. As it turned out, the fate that was in store for him was even worse. Thompson discovered that, even as he was on his way to Vietnam, Wenner had taken him off retainer - in effect, fired him - and with the retainer went his staff benefits, including health and life insurance." Also leaving him no way out of Vietnam... a one-way ticket if you will.

Dude that is cold...

And that is the very nature of the problem with this documentary. Why is not this story mentioned? Who knows? It certainly was a turning point in Thompsons life (He apparently became more withdrawn and paranoid afterwards... understandably so) Gonzo is a pollyanna look at Thompson. The abuse of his first marriage gets a glancing look and all the interviewees (Including Jimmy Carter, Pat Buchanan and Jenn Werner) seem hesitant to speak ill of the dead.

The fact that in a few short years Thompson turned from a well-respected writer into a Muppet and Doonesbury cartoon is not covered well. The fact is mentioned but the reasons are glossed over. It is as if the film is worried that by mentioning his failures it will reduce his significance.

Yet, I would argue that Thompson's effect on Journalism is larger than he gets credit for. Reporters nowadays often ignore facts, concentrating instead on how events make them feel. Anderson Cooper crying during the Hurricane Katrina coverage threatened to become a bigger story than the storm itself. (He was not helped when fellow Mensa candidate Wolf Blitzer said "You simply get chills every time you see these poor individuals…many of these people, almost all of them that we see are so poor and they are so black") The documentary never really focuses on this aspect either. Gonzo seems to fear pulling back any of the masks its subject wears presumably scared of what it might find. Gonzo would have been better served concentrating on one period of time and focusing its energies.

That said, for those unfamiliar with Hunter S Thompson outside of his Muppet form this is a good start. Moreover, if it gets people to read his early work so much the better.

In the sphere of all the memoirs collected in this post-counter culture portrait of a counter culture icon, narrated by Johnny Depp who played him to some extent in Terry Gilliam's film version of Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, there was one issue I found noticeably absent: The reality of the unhappiness and suffering of this comic book character of a painfully vague crustacean. The film finds remarkable approach to the people involved in his life, but not even from his two wives do we get a picture of what he was like the inevitable physiological drawbacks caught up with him. He was plainly, intensely addicted to drugs and alcohol, and after a trance-like sleep not much different than passing out at the right time, he would have awakened in a mess of depression and alienation. What did he say on those mornings and afternoons? How did he act?

Of course, it is said during the film that he would drink all day or take drugs and there was no discernible effect. I don't think I buy that. What if it was a front? The main thing is, he wasn't killed by day-to-day simultaneous intakes of alcohol and pills, which can really tear up your head, which are said to cause a likelihood of seizures. He was killed by himself, which he himself scripted and all of his friends totally assumed would happen. He took every reckless risk there was to take, and he, not time or drugs or people, ended it all because his own agenda was dried out. As a journalist, for instance, he reported that at some point in a presidential primary Edward Muskie consumed Ibogaine, a psychoactive drug given out by a "mysterious Brazilian doctor," information which was entirely fictitious yet was actually learned and passed along as truth. Thompson's stunt may have been part of the cause of Muskie's furious irritability throughout the 1972 Florida primary. No other journalist could have carried such a fib, but Thompson was fortified by his myth that he could publish anything.

He was an unpredictable, nearly spellbinding writer, with a savage hilarity in his style. He was never aware of impartiality. In 1972 he backed George McGovern as the Democratic nominee, and no slander was too degraded for him to attach to McGovern's rivals in either party.

This documentary by Alex Gibney is notable, to begin with, for recapitulating to us through how many fires Thompson ran of his very own volition. He rode with the Hells' Angels for a year. Ran for sheriff and lost, but came in very close. Covered the 1972 and 1976 presidential primaries, and had an inexplicable personality, so that for instance McGovern, Tom Wolfe and his wives and son think of him lovingly, but also as enormously cruel and spiteful.

Nobody in the film was around while he was doing things that initially fortified him within the sphere of legend. He became celebrated for writing about that edge of speed going around a bend which you could never pass without killing yourself. He rode loads of edges on his motorcycle, and never got killed. He said persistently that the way he chose to go was by doing the job himself, with a gun, before his success declined. He died that way, using one of his 22 firearms, but he had most definitely declined by that time.

Without doubt he made an impact on his generation like not many other journalists ever have. This documentary is all you could wish for about the man's career and involvement with different people, but there is something at his core that we are inhibited from fully understanding for sure. And it results in you speculating on how so many people liked him when he didn't even seem to have liked himself?

Hunter S. Thompson was an often astute commentator of American life, and an always astute commentator of his own mental disintegration, a process driven by his own enthusiastic use of mind-altering drugs; a gun freak who opposed American involvement in Vietnam; and a critic of capitalism who became, pretty much, the living embodiment of his own brand. He also, years after his best work was done, died by shooting himself. This documentary provides insight into his strange journey, which does have a tragic dimension: the values of the life he lived, the adulation he received for living it and the damage it did to him appear in the end inseparable. By the end, he was still celebrated (by new generations of kids who love to get high) but no longer relevant, his final act a desperate (and arguably failed) plea for attention. This documentary tells us much of the story, mostly interestingly, though there are times when it fails to disentangle the process it describes, the overwhelming of man by self-created myth. Still, while it's the prerogative of every generation to feel jaded, I find it hard to imagine another figure like Hunter emerging today, if only because a large part of his quality was that no-one expected him. But the film reminds you of another part as well: he could certainly write.