Deeper and detached meanings

I've been picking up a lot of Blu-rays (and occasional DVDs) these days after I realized that things "bought" on streaming services like Amazon can be lost, not by disconnecting from the service (obvsly), but if they happen to lose the license. The only way to rewatch Gandhi a couple years ago was to buy it for your Amazon library for $8 or whatever. I wanted to see it again, so I paid my $8. A few months ago, I noticed it was missing and upon further investigation, discovered that they had lost the license for it. So, despite me "owning" the digital copy of said film, I no longer did because they no longer had access.

The other thing is that I'm not interested in being tied to someone else's service fee and, if we do end up relocating to somewhere cheaper to live for retirement, I want to be able to watch what I want to whenever I damn well feel like it and regardless of whether we have access to this or that service. My friend, Roger, who retired to Panama with his wife last summer approached things the same way. He brought along a few hundred DVDs and Blu-Rays that he'd been acquiring over the years. I'd always been a movie acquirer, too, as I once had a huge collection of VHS tapes and now have a substantial collection of discs. At the very least, said discs are more durable than the tapes, which I eventually abandoned because it was more and more difficult to find a VHS player that could connect with modern TVs. Anyway, last night I decided to rewatch my newly-acquired copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It's not a great film, but I think it's one of Johnny Depp's (and Benicio Del Toro's) better performances and I really liked the book. (It was also on sale, having been sitting on one of my Amazon lists for some time.) When it was done, Tricia looked over and said: "What's so entertaining about a couple of drugged-out idiots?", which is a valid question in most contexts and could be leveled at the current man actually running the White House.

I told her that the point of the book wasn't just to relay all of the weird visions that Hunter Thompson had while ostensibly on assignment for Sports Illustrated (and also while finding a place away from the LAPD to talk about the latter's murder of journalist, Rubén Salazar.) It was more to make a statement about just what drugs could do to the way you perceive things and if you were able to use that perception to talk about things from a broader angle; in this case the end of an era, being the 60s and hippie culture and the idea that expressions of peace were the only answer to institutional violence, whether at home or abroad. I compared it to Jack Kerouac's On the Road in the same way that it took a snapshot of the period in time and talked about life, the culture, the zeitgeist, and how people interacted with and were affected by all of those. She'd never read either of them, so I said that the best approximation I could make was of the difference between what I post about our trips to different places in the world and what she'd expect (and has suggested, pointedly) a normal "travel report/blog" would say. 

The obvious rejoinder is that I'm not writing a "normal" travel blog any more than Fear and Loathing is a "normal" novel. The fact that it wasn't normal is why it originally garnered so much attention and has lasted down through the decades as a significant piece of American literature. In the same fashion, I don't spend much time talking about where we went and what we saw and did, but more about the people we encountered and the differences in culture and the general "feel" of the place. You can bring up 1000 different reactions on Yelp or Tripadvisor about where to go and what to see. I'm not interested in replicating that. Instead, I'm going to tell you what I was thinking about while we were there, which is more of what interests me and which is kinda what Thompson and Kerouac were doing and what ended up delivering the greater impact of both their works.

The film is a decent approximation of that story and its theme. After all, it does give some prominence to "the wave speech", which is the central moment of the novel, really. But I think director Terry Gilliam's focus on the visuals (as is logical in, y'know, a film) clouded a lot of what Thompson's words otherwise delivered in the book. It's the most common problem with translation from one medium to another (typically prose to film; "the book was better-!") and this film does not escape it. Given Gilliam's general tendencies, it's hard to imagine how he could have. But I wanted a preserved copy of it because I think it is saying a lot more with those images than I think many gave it credit for or still do. It is, of course, in part because I have an appreciation for the novel and for Thompson's approach to life, in general. Suggesting that I'm trying to do what he did is only the most facile of comparisons, as it has never really been my intent. It's just the way I do things which, in the end, is about as much respect as can be conveyed. Kinda like making sure you can hold the film in your hand when the world starts dissolving around us. And not because of the drugs.