Learning From Las Vegas
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More importantly, Thompson’s passage reminds the reader that Duke’s
reminiscence is part of an ongoing collective project in the present known as
“history.” In the film version, any sense of Duke’s reminiscence as part of a
collective project disappears. For Thompson, the fact that “history is hard to
know” is part of what makes history, understood as a collective and open-ended
project, necessary. For Gilliam, the fact that history is “hard to know,” just
makes it unknowable, except to individuals who happened to experience it.
However, even they can only reference the past through simulacra, a feeling
conveyed by the “classic rock” soundtrack and television footage that Gilliam
uses for the scene. In fact, the introduction to Duke’s flashback—^with Duke
sitting on the couch staring at a TV screen filled with static, followed by a
reverse angle shot showing Duke himself in a blizzard of static—suggests the
medium has thoroughly absorbed the individual and his or her memories.
The soliloquy at the end of the film, absent from the novel’s ending,
recalls the skties to pronounce them, once again, dead. “We’re all wired into a
survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled the sixties,” Duke proclaims
from his typewriter in his hotel room as a stack of TV sets in the background
flicker with images. However, more than dead, the film’s ending goes on to say
the sixties were fraudulent. The “great San Francisco acid wave” and the
alternative community it formed turns out to be, in the movie’s conclusion,
nothing but “pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy peace
and understanding at three bucks a hit.” This is a baffling contradiction of the
film’s earlier, albeit nostalgic, attempt to valorize the sixties. It seems as though
Gilliam is caught between Gv