The Half-Baked Cultural Detective
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sheer delusion or hallucination. Distortion of the psyche to see a more real '‘reality”
is in the tradition of nineteenth century French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud
who wrote that, "A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and
systematized disorganization of all the senses.” (Rimbaud, 276). However, Duke
certainly does not appear to be a visionary. Although he does hint towards possible
hidden meaning in American culture, Duke’s aim in excessive drug taking is more
like self-indulgent diversion. He does not (at least not initially) seriously intend to
explore the nether regions of his society or psyche and his obsession with finding
the American Dream seems to be a deluded, half-baked goal.
Postmodern Las Vegas, Hyper-reality and Criminality
The setting of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in the city of Las Vegas is
crucial, as Las Vegas is widely regarded to be the first truly American postmodern
city. Robert Venturi’s seminal postmodern architecture book. Learning From Las
Vegas (1972), presents Las Vegas as a postmodern conglomeration of "allusion
and comment, on the past or present or at our great commonplaces or old cliches,
and inclusion of the everyday in the environment, secret and profane” (53). Venturi
presents Las Vegas as the postmodern city of the future, a pastiche medley of
American architectural forms. He calls it an "archetype” (17), but it is more like a
hyper-real archetype.
In the postmodern tradition. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas repeatedly
blurs the distinction between fiction and reality. In Las Vegas, the surreal is
indistinguishable from the real. Effectively, Las Vegas represents America for Duke
- a surreal paranoid nightmare. Under the influence of various drugs, Duke and his
attorney straddle a thin line between the drug-induced fiction of their own minds,
the artificially constructed fiction of Las Vegas and the nightmarish quality of
American postmodern culture. In the Circus-Circus gambling casino, Duke points
out that you can stand in front of a machine and for $1.98, your likeness will
appear, 200 feet tall, on a screen above downtown Las Vegas. This unsettling thought
leads Duke to the conclusion that "any freak with $1.98 can walk into the CircusCircus and suddenly appear in the sky over downtown Las Vegas twelve times the
size of God, howling anything that comes into his head” (46). Not only is CircusCircus blatantly materialistic, the ongoing entertainment there is shockingly violent,
a surreal postmodern inferno, where "you’re down on the main floor playing
blackjack, and the stakes are getting high when suddenly you chance to look up,
and there, right smack above your head is a half-naked fourteen-year-old girl being
chased through the air by a snarling wolverine, which is suddenly locked in a
death battle with two-painted polacks” (46). Disgusted, Duke concludes that "this
[Las Vegas] is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted”
(47). Las Vegas is hyper-real in all senses — it exaggerates or liberates all dark