The Hunter S. Thompson Phase

The Rum Diary (film) didn't get great reviews when it was released last year, but I thought it was really good. It works well as a companion piece to Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, but also (the director) Bruce Robinson's earlier film, Withnail & I, both of which I love. It's not about much more than Paul Kent (a re-named Hunter S. Thompson) mooching around and drinking a lot, but it has that easy-going Thompson charm that makes his writing so much fun. Also, I thought Johnny Depp was very good in it: a lot of his performances since Fear and Loathing have been really over the top, but in this he seems to have recognised that this was pre-wildman days for Thompson, and so plays the character with a greater restraint, with just a glint in his eye of the excitement and madness to come. There are some great hardcore drinking scenes that recall Withnail kneeling on the floor begging for antifreeze, and also some brilliantly choreographed cock-fights (fowl) in which the cockerels were taught for weeks to give the appearance of sparring and to strike their blows as close as possible to their opponents without actually fighting.

I've loved Hunter S. Thompson for years, his articles and books are always written with an amazing energy and have so much to say about America's seedy underbelly. Sometimes though, the fact that he has such a brilliant, unique style can make him appear a bit of a cliche, since every writer in the world who likes that kind of thing seems to go through a Hunter S Thompson phase, and reading anything written by somebody under the influence of this hex is one of the most excrutiating things imaginable. The curse is often found in music or film journalism, hip young gunslingers who think they sound cool. You can see it a mile off: an article that begins something like "I'm buring down the motorway at 90mph on no sleep on my way to meet Pee Wee Herman, brushing my teeth and spitting out of the window when I notice globs of toothpaste swirling in the wind and landing smack on a police car, who promptly pulls me over..." or some such trash. It's not big or clever, and whenever writing like this appears in print it blemishes the Thompson name just a little bit. And it makes you feel as if saying that you think he's a great writer makes you look like a bit of an idiot, when it really shouldn't.

Most writers grow out of it pretty quickly, but when the ghost of Thompson lingers in the pen it's visible a mile off, and it never works. Plus, once he's in your blood, he can be very difficult to get out. Luckily, I first got into Thompson when I was mostly just talking about being a writer rather than actually writing, but for ages the little narrative voice in my head was banging on about "Capitalist pigs" and "foul years of our Lord". I think the only way you can write after reading Thompson is to completely forget about letting even a hint of him into your writing - if you emulate him in the slightest you're going to end up looking like a terrible plagiarist. I guess this is what makes Thompson one of the best writers of the twentieth century: his style is so indelibly stamped as his own that it's impossible to get away with writing anything that can be compared to it, and so he stands alone.