Friday, July 4, 2008
GALUPO: One gonzo star is enough
On the campaign trail in 1972, Hunter S. Thompson, the pioneering narrative journalist, spent 1 1/2 hours in a limousine with his bete noire, President Nixon.
They talked football the entire time.
Decades later, Mr. Thompson met with John A. Walsh, a senior executive at ESPN, to discuss the possibility of Mr. Thompson contributing to a blog on the sports network's Web site.
They talked politics the entire time.
The late Mr. Thompson sized up his subjects by observing them inside and outside their comfort zones. He also, more simply, liked to shoot the breeze (literally, too, one hastens to add).
On a very basic level, "that's what made him a good reporter," says the Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney, whose "Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson" opens in select theaters today.
Nearly everything else about Mr. Thompson - his mash-up of reality and wild invention; his drug- and drink-fueled Kerouacian escapades; his use of himself as a narrative-framing device - constitutes a theory and practice of journalism so idiosyncratic as to defy imitation.
"His great talent was marrying this great reporting ability with a novelist's flair for writing," Mr. Gibney says.
Aspiring journalists: Don't try this at work.
William McKeen, who chairs the University of Florida's journalism department, says many students "are intoxicated by" Mr. Thompson; they worship him as journalism's equivalent of Bob Dylan.
Yet Mr. McKeen, whose biography "Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson" comes out Monday, is quick to caution that "there was only one guy who could get away with that."
That fact hasn't stopped many would-be gonzos from trying.
Indeed, it's the most dubious aspect of gonzo that has proved most alluring in our celebrity-sodden culture: the reporter who doubles as the star of his own reporting. The journalism that morphs into a kind of performance art.
The watch-me-dive world of the blogosphere and YouTube.com is tailor-made for such self-referentiality. Mr. Thompson looms large, too, over the work of pseudo-jovial attack dogs like Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock ("Super-Size Me"), who have, to varying degrees, turned what was for Mr. Thompson a literary device into an increasingly tiresome stunt.
To the extent that he insinuated himself into his work, Mr. Gibney says it was because "he had this sense that he was a great antenna; he was using himself as a kind of tuning fork to understand the music around him."
In an era before "Saturday Night Live" and Comedy Central made it safe to skewer the powers that be on a nightly basis, the gonzo method, Mr. Gibney says, was a highly effective way of piercing the veil of - and injecting some much-needed humor into - traditional political reporting.
Ironically, in their affection for Mr. Thompson's exhibitionism, the likes of Mr. Moore and Mr. Spurlock are replicating the very bacillus that halted the writer's 10-year run of greatness.
In his earliest work, Mr. Thompson did not so much star in his reportage as he was embedded in its subject matter. For example, he spent fully a year in the sordid company of - and was at one point physically beaten by - Bay Area bikers to produce his mid-'60s masterpiece "Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs."
Yet after the terrific success of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72," Mr. Thompson encountered the same problem as one of his contemporary comic legatees, "Borat" star Sacha Baron Cohen: He got too famous.
When you're treated like a rock star in the press gallery, "How can you expect to get any work done?" Mr. McKeen wonders. Once Mr. Thompson became a celebrity, "he could only react to things, rather than observe them."
"For a long time, he was able to turn his camera outward," Mr. Gibney says. "But over time, the camera focused more inward. If he was getting a sense of the world, it was because the world was coming to him. He got lost in his own persona and in his own fame."
By the mid-'70s, Mr. Thompson's productivity began to decline. In fairness, though, he never stopped writing before his death by suicide in 2005.
According to Mr. Gibney, he left behind a significant amount of unpublished work, including, most intriguingly, a book about the National Rifle Association.
Worst of all, the older he got, the less he ventured from his Woody Creek, Colo., cabin.
There's only so much reporting one can do from inside a self-described "compound" - even for someone with as febrile an imagination as Hunter S. Thompson.
Hence this bit of parting practical advice for the good doctor's 21st-century aficionados: You can't be gonzo and stare at your computer screen all day.