16 years after hunter thompson
what does he mean during MeToo?
Lots of men have followed Hunter Thompson over a cliff. The most intimidating writer of all time has left an enormous trail of casualties, from bucket hats to anyone who tries cracking a joke while doing first-person journalism. He messed up a lot of people. I mean, look at what happened to Johnny Depp. Sean Penn is so cooked now he thinks he is Hunter Thompson. And many people say Taibbi has changed for the worse. I disagree. Y’all changed.
Reading Thompson gives you a lot of courage, but he’s not someone who should be imitated. Of course, he ended up so miserable that he blew his head off in a room next to his wife and son. He chose the same fate as his fellow Cancer, Ernest Hemingway. I haven’t read Thompson in a while. I kind of had to put him down. But lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what he means today in the MeToo era.
It’s gotten old to keep hearing about how Thompson was a hyped up man-child who was always ripped to the gills on whatever substances were within reach. It got to a point where he felt like he had to play that character for people. I prefer early Thompson these days. Hari Kunzru once called Thompson a writer who “makes himself ugly to expose the ugliness he sees around him.” But it got so ugly that it cost him his life.
Nevertheless the Thompson content farm keeps coming. Just over the past year there were two new Thompson films released, both about his subversive run for sheriff in Aspen, Colorado. One was a pretty good doc called Freak Power, the other a really terrible film that came out a couple weeks ago called Fear & Loathing in Aspen. I watched both, and now I’m begging you people: stop making films about Hunter Thompson. Stop writing books about him. Maybe we should just resign to the fact that he’s hard to talk about and stop doing it.
For one, every film since Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas has been bad. Remember Rum Diary? God that movie fucking sucked. Now, a licensing-turned-production company, Shout Factory!, has released Fear & Loathing in Aspen. Bobby Kennedy v9 directed it. Of course a Kennedy directed it. They’ve been trapped in the 60s their whole lives. This film is like if Lifetime got into the streaming game and tried to make a movie about drugs and politics using Tik Tok people. Not good. Thompson comes off more like the hick from Ernest Goes To Camp. Jan Wenner acts like Ben Shapiro, and one of the candidates for sheriff is Matt Gaetz.
By now you might have heard the story. In declaring his candidacy for county sheriff, Thompson spearheaded a hostile takeover of a sleepy Republican town, bailed the hippies out of jail to vote, and freaked out the locals so much that the FBI started surveilling him. He shaved his head so he could refer to the incumbent sheriff, who only had a crewcut, as his “long-haired opponent.” Thompson lost by just 173 votes.
But there was a lot the film left out. The tagline for the movie says Thompson ran for sheriff because Pitkin Mining Corp was polluting the local river. That’s not why Thompson ran for sheriff. He ran because his friend almost won a mayoral race there and it got the gears moving in Thompson’s mind about the possibilities for himself.
But what’s really interesting, and not mentioned in either the movie or the doc, is Thompson may have very well gotten the idea to run for sheriff from Oscar Zeta Acosta, the Chicano rights lawyer who Dr. Gonzo was based on in Thompson’s singular Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. The Latinx Acosta ran for sheriff in a much scarier place—Los Angeles during the turbulent late 60s—while Thompson ran for sheriff in the chill white utopia of Aspen, Colorado and tried to gentrify it with his bored friends. Acosta and Thompson eventually had a falling out over his portrayal in Fear & Loathing. He eventually disappeared into Mexico and ended up dead. I’ve been reading Acosta’s books, which are a cool blend of Latinx gonzo journalism about California, and they raise some questions about what artists owe their subjects. There is a great, short little PBS doc on Acosta here. (If you want to read some solid non-Gonzo Thompson journalism, his dispatch looking into the murder of LAT journalist Ruben Salazar by the LA County Sheriff’s Department is a great snapshot of East LA, police brutality, and the Chicano Rights movement at the end of the 60s. Thompson described East LA as being “a rifle shot away from the heart of Downtown Los Angeles.”)
The sad thing is all the things Thompson and the hippies were trying to stop, like retrograde drug laws, overdevelopment, pollution, didn’t really work. Today Aspen is where rich people in shiny Moncler puffer jackets come to ski the bunny hill after feeling good about donating once to the ACLU.
The world is **very** different since Thompson died in 2005. Masculinity has changed just in the last few years, and people today would definitely try to cancel Thompson in a heartbeat. He was a complicated person. As one of the embodiments of free thought and liberal acceptance, Thompson had a gay brother who died of AIDS, but he never talked about it. According to his brother, Thompson shunned him for most of his life. It’s sad, but I guess it was a different time.
Today all these writers and reporters are the same; you can’t tell who is who. No one has a sense of humor. They just want to go viral. Lots of reporters fall into the job because they believe in nothing. They’ll write whatever people tell them. Thompson remains necessary, but maybe we should forget about him for a while.
P.S. If you want to read some more early Thompson, I recommend the first story he ever got published in a magazine, in 1961, about Big Sur. It’s a hard find but a very pure, clear-eyed account of the area while it was still a bohemian hideout. Thompson lived there, working the grounds of the Esalen Institute, and writing The Rum Diary while facing the boom of the morning surf everyday. After about 8 months, he moved back home to Louisville, Kentucky. So for all you aspiring exhibitionists out there, it’s okay if you have to move back home to live with your mom for a bit. It happened to me!
Also also: if there is anything you want me to review out there, let me know.
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