Project A-Z: Scenes #8: Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas: The Crest Of A High And Beautiful Wave

The moment I picked Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas as part of Project A-Z I knew I had to do it as a "Scenes." There's no choice really, Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas is really nothing but a bunch of high powered vignettes thrown together. I could have pressed the fast forward button, closed my eyes, stopped it at random and would have in all probability a great scene to dissect.

This is exactly the thing that makes the film so maddening to its detractors. It just does not stop. Relentless doesn't cover it. Ebert famously quipped that "If you encountered these characters like this on an elevator, you'd push the button and get off at the next floor. Here the elevator is trapped between floors for 128 minutes." and in his recent review for The AV Club Scott Tobias seemed somewhat undone by the film (He also suggests that Enter The Void's relentless slog of human ugliness is somehow more appealing then Gilliam's KER-azy psychedelia. Suggesting he comes from Rand McNally. As an aside Mr. Tobias is actually responsible for the name of this blog. Though that is another story...)

But the thing that the detractor's miss is that just because it is unpleasant doesn't make it inaccurate. In the case of Fear And Loathing what is on the screen is what is on the page. You don't go see an adaptation of Moby Dick and then bitch that the whale is white.

And it's what on the page that made me finally decide to write up this particular scene in Fear And Loathing. But we'll get to that later...

We join the doctor as he lights up a bit of some unknown substance, at the end of a crazed chaotic binge. Now before you judge the doctor too harshly keep in mind that this...

Is what he was dealing with mere moments ago. I don't care who you are that'll make any man reach for the pipe.

Or er... Lightbulb... I've always thought that that is such a Gilliam touch. A little "Hey wait a minute." detail. The off kilter in the off kilter.

There are two things that are notoriously uncinematic, drugs and writing, and this scene fits in both.

And yet for all the tricks and stuff that have been used in the past nothing quite captures the powerful dislocative feeling of drugs as well as this simple shot. It's not just the couch moving. The foreground, background are all on different planes and as soon as Duke hit's whatever the hell that is they all become unattached from one another.

How Gilliam is that?

Contempt for worship of the sixties seems to have hit an all time high as boomer idealism continues to curdle at an exponential rate. Even I, who has a markedly higher tolerance for hippies then most of my generation could barely make it through a few of the solemner passages documenting the flower children, in Doctrow's Homer And Langley without laughing my ass off.

And yet, the feeling In Fear And Loathing seems earned. Maybe it's simply because Gilliam himself is a full fledged Hippie and this sequence set at "The Matrix" is as much his nostalgia trip as Thompson's.

Ah and there's the ghost of Christmas future himself. It's hard to look at Thompson now in the wake of his suicide. Hard for me to read him after he himself decided he had no answers. Thompson gave up, and though I know it isn't fair it's hard to not feel especially all these years later, that he didn't have the right. The carnival is running, still as crazy as ever and we need our barker. We need him and he is not here. It is just that simple and just that sad.

The fish eye lens and Terry Gilliam were made for each other.

The jump cuts that Gilliam uses to document Thompson's first encounter with LSD are a bit more standard then what he was using in the hotel room. This little vignette inside a vignette is just further proof of what a delightfully digressive (for me) movie Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas is.

... And that is one hell of a punchline.

Like I said, writing is almost as hard to film as drug use. And yet the words on the Voice over now are perhaps the most important in Thompson's career. Certainly the most important to himself. If there is any doubt just watch him rip Alex Cox a new asshole in Gonzo for having the temerity to suggest animating it.

These clips aren't presented in the usual congratulatory montage way the sixties are usually summed up in. But edited with the ferocity of the drug trips.

Slowing down only for a sly nod at both the beginnings of Thompson's career and the end of sixties.

The fact that we can look at that image without immediately laughing are a testament to Thompson's work.

In the closing moments with Thompson's words echoing through our ears it dawns on us. This isn't really about the sixties this is Thompson's version of the sixties. The reason it resonates isn't because of what happened it's because what it did to Thompson. He's telling his own version of the Garden Of Eden and it ends with him cast out and left alone with a head full of acid and a two hundred and fifty pound Samoan with a hunting knife. Worst of all he can still see the Eden, though it's forever out of his reach.

It's all there in that moment as much for Thompson as for us. That high cresting beautiful wave that crests and breaks just outside our grasp and then recedes, leaving us to chase it for the rest of our lives.

The 25: Part 23: Brazil

For, in order that men should resist injustice, something more is necessary then that they should think injustice unpleasant. They must think injustice absurd; above all they must think it startling. They must retain the violence of a virgin astonishment.

-GK Chesterton-

Information Transit got the wrong man. I got the right man. The Wrong Man was presented to me as The Right Man. I accepted him on good faith as The Right Man. Was I wrong?

-Jack-


There are films that are nightmarish and then there are films that unfold in with the relentless persistence of a nightmare.

The trouble with Brazil is the nightmare had bled over. Gilliam’s world of terrorism, torture, arrest without warrant, media manipulation, and eternal eavesdropping was looking mighty familiar by the time I first saw the film. We were all living in the world of Information Retrieval. But what I didn’t realize is that we are now all living in Sam Lowry’s world as well.

We all to one extent or another create a little world from the pieces of the big one, which we find bearable (Mine is called Things That Don’t Suck, welcome). I embraced Gilliam’s idea of freedom through solipsism. Faced with a frightening world on the horizon and a friendless existence at school, the idea of escaping inside my own head. A place were no one could touch me had a certain appeal.

Yet it is this very thing that disturbs me the most when I watch the film today. Like most truths it doubles back on itself. The inside of your own head is an escape yes, but it is also an imprisonment.

But let’s back up for a moment. As Ebert reminds us it less important what a film is about then how it is about it. And I can think of few films that get along with the “How it is about it” segment of the equation better then Brazil. It’s a masterwork of design, a sprawling parallel universe built from the ducts up with perverse nightmare logic. A film, perhaps the only one in Gilliam’s oeuvre, which has the distinctive energy of a vision fully realized.



Brazil to a certain extent functions as the most epic Monty Python sketch ever concocted. While Python exaggerated the little invisible absurdities of day to day life in order to make them unignorable Brazil presents a world in which there is nothing but absurdity no longer invisible. If there is a message that creeps up in all of Gilliam’s films it is that though chaos can be destructive, than chaos in a controlled system is unthinkably worse. The bureaucracy of Brazil has devolved into a perpetual motion machine dedicated to making everyone trapped within it as miserable as possible.

It only takes one moment of unpredictably, wonderfully envisioned by Gilliam as a literal bug in the system, for the life of our everyman, Sam Lowry, and the lives of countless others to be destroyed. Insanity becomes compound, there is one mistake, and then the gears of the system work ceaselessly to enforce it. And no one can ever say “This was a mistake.” Because if you do say that then you’re saying the system doesn’t work, and it’s much easier to get rid of you then the system.



Jonathon Pryce is one of the most capable cinematic everymen in recent memory. He’s so perfect for the role because he seems so entirely the sort of person this should not be happening to. Ian Holm, Bob Hoskins and Jim Broadbent make great work from small roles, inhabiting them so well that one could be forgiven for thinking Gilliam grew them out of Petrie Dishes for the express purpose. Robert DeNiro turns in great work as Harry Tuttle the one person ever on screen who seems capable, or interested, in subverting the system and makes one wistful for the day when De Niro was such a capable pinch hitter it was scarcely worth mentioning. Perhaps most impressive is Michael Palin one of the most striking examples of the banality of evil caught on film.

The lone weak spot in the film is Kim Greist who just doesn’t have the charisma for Sam’s dream girl (and I say that as someone who has an avowed thing for tomboys). She alone doesn’t seem to inhabit the same world as her characters. The only one who doesn’t understand the reality of her situation. When she storms heedlessly into the ministry of information demanding Buttle’s release it doesn’t seem as if she is heedless and passionate in her quest for justice, it just seems as if she hasn’t read the script very carefully.

But the real star of the film is Gilliam. Whose twisted vision has never been better realized. In all honesty if ask to choose a favorite of his films, I’d probably prefer the dark puzzle box that is Twelve Monkeys and yes perhaps he need not have drowned Bob Hoskins in shit. But these end up being minor quibbles in the face of what Gilliam accomplishes. Any idiot can make images that look wild and trippy, what Gilliam does here is something much rarer. His world does not give off the feel of something exaggerated, but rather one seen clearly. It’s our world with more acute perception then our own. The important thing isn’t that Gilliam can see that horrid statue in the center of the Ministry Of Information, or the rotting baby faces who patrol its hall. Rather the troubling thing is we cannot. Brazil is not a satire; it’s damn near a Lovecraftian artifact.



We talk so much about a director’s vision, but rarely has that term seemed more appropriate then with Brazil.

The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus

There are few directors I love more then Terry Gilliam. And note I didn’t say director’s films, though I certainly love those too. I just like Terry Gilliam, I like the way he talks about film, the way he thinks about film, the films he makes, his honesty, his artistry, his anarachy. I used to read Gilliam on Gilliam in my classes at high school because I knew what he had to say had to be more interesting then the boring fucker up at the head of the class. Brazil is just one of those rare perfect movies for me, something without a note wrong. 12 Monkey’s is perhaps the most underrated of the nineties. So it’s tough when you do like an artist on a personal level to just watch life kick him in the balls again and again and again.

Its not been an easy decade to be a Terry Gilliam fan. Point of fact there’s never been an easy decade to be a Terry Gilliam fan, but its hard not to imagine that for the past ten years Ole Terry has been wishing for films on The Monkey’s Paw. First came The Man Who Killed Don Quioxite, which of course famously imploded in a most spectacular fashion barely a week into production, with Gilliam lucky enough to have a camera crew standing by to document his humiliation in excruciating detail. Then came The Brothers Grimm, with The Weinsteins Interfering Gilliam into a half assed film, the typical touches of Gilliam genius that somehow survived (The Gingerbread Man) somehow make it even tougher to watch. This was followed immediately by Tideland, which plays less like a film then a psychological purge. Even I the hardest of the hard core Gilliam fan can find nothing to recommend in that grotesque walking travesty of a film. And then of course there was the death of Ledger, which hangs over this film, passing out poignancy and discomfort in equal measure at unexpected intervals. The sad fact is not only have we not had a great Terry Gilliam film in over a decade. We haven’t even had a good one.

Well at least that’s one thing that has changed in the new decade. The Imaginarium Of Dr. Parnassus isn’t a perfect film. It’s messy, unsatisfying, and not at all what I expected from Gilliam. It’s a film I have major issues with.

But damn it it’s a complete film, and a rewarding one. One that I think will just get richer with repeated viewings.

The film follows the thousands year old titular mystic, as he peddles his ramshackle but wonderous show to the piss drunk and the ignorant. Locked in eternal combat with Tom Wait’s Satan who seems to have emerged living and breathing from a 1930’s Black and White Cartoon and who is now possibly my favorite on screen version of Old Scratch, it seems at though Parnassus might be about to lose his daughter and perhaps all of existence on a bad bet, until a new mysterious stranger brings the possibility of salvation.

It’s easy to read a lot of autobiography into the story, as drunken assholes pass the Imaginarium by. Gilliam too has spent his life peddling his odd visions to a world that more or less couldn’t give a fuck. The odd thing is the surprising darkness in tone. Parnassus is just an almost oppressively pessimistic film. Less a paegn to the glories of “the stories that sustain the world” but an exhausted middle finger to them. The only film I’ve ever seen that’s remotely like it is Miyaziki’s Howl’s Moving Castle, where Miyaziki cheerily firebombed the Europe of the mind he had spent his entire career building.

You can’t say Gilliam hasn’t earned this sentiment…


But still…

The problem extends to the style of the film. Parnassus, like Tideland is shot HD, and while am not a complete luddite when it comes to Digital Film, I just don’t think Gilliam is the director for it. Here as in Tideland, Digital lends a harsh almost abrasive quality to the film that wasn’t there in his work before. Film softened Gilliam, made everything go down easy.

The unforgiving nature extends to his story as well. Though I won’t give too much away I’ll just mention that the majority of Gilliam’s characters don’t make out well. I’m not one to demand a happy ending. But I think the Gilliam on the other side of a decade of cruel experience might of. Watching the man who let Sam escape, snatched Baron Munchaussen from the clutches of death and let the holy grail be found in The Fisher King might allow his characters a smidge of mercy. Its harsh stuff he ends with and as someone whose followed Gilliam for so long I couldn’t help but feel a bit like the little girl at the end of The Fall, wondering why the storyteller I was listening too had started breaking his characters out of spite. The fact that at this point Gilliam starts mixing his metaphors, and its tough to decipher just what's happening doesn't help any.

But God there’s so much in The Imaginarium that works so well. Not least of all Heath Ledger’s final performance. It’s an odd one, defined obviously as much by what he does not do as what he does. But he invests Tony with grace and style.

The rest of the cast is a little uneven, Verne Troyer manages to beat his stunt casting. Which isn't easy for him to do.

(And you Brits say we're barbarians...)

While Plummer feeble and muddled makes a surprisingly poor representative for the wonders of storytelling. Lily Cole on the other hand… well Terry Gilliam has always had an eye for beautiful young women, being the first to notice Uma Thurman and the first to figure out that Christina Ricci had grown up. I have no idea what she’ll be like in another film, but she fits the role of Valentina to at.

The scenes inside The Imaginarium are filled with life and that old Gilliam spark. The scenes particularly one featuring a bunch of Russian Mobsters chasing Jude Law through what looks like a nightmarish combination of a mutual fund commercial and an old Monty Python sketch, capture the anarchy and dadist joy of Gilliam’s animation.

Because for all my issues of style, tone, and story, this film is a true Gilliam film. And as such it’s a rewarding fable even if its not a perfect one. It might end up being his Alfredo Garcia, one last gasp of bitter integrity before he’s swallowed up by a sea of idiocy, but damn it he got that gasp and he made his movie.

Like someone says near the end, “Happy Endings are not part of the guarentee.” You’ve just got to keep telling your story’s and hope you eventually get one.