Hunter S. Thompson is dead. I'm not sure how I feel about that. More than anything, I'm unnerved, which probably isn't a proper way to feel about someone who died. If it hadn't been for Hunter S. Thompson, I probably wouldn't be writing this column -- I'd still be alive, just doing something else -- and it's an eerie feeling, like looking down a long tunnel and seeing myself at the other end, looking back.
Thompson died on February 20th at his compound in Woody Creek, Colo., of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. As he was a very private person in life, little information has been released concerning the details. He was 67.
During his heyday in the late '60s and early '70s, Thompson was a pioneer of a new style of journalism that threw down the barriers between the writer, the subject and the reader. His peculiar brand of drug-fueled, anger-laden reporting he called "gonzo journalism," and at the time, it threw a wrench into the ideas of what a journalist was and wasn't. It was, and is, unusual to see a mainstream writer of any kind letting the pure insanity of the situation take front and center, blurring the line between reality and fiction.
Probably the most famous and influential piece of writing from Thompson's career -- unless we take all of his Rolling Stone columns together -- is the book "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," a semi-fictitious account of a drug-fueled romp around Las Vegas during the conservative backlash of the early '70s. The book was popular enough to inspire Terry Gilliam (of Monty Python fame) to turn it into an equally madness-driven movie in the late '90s. Thompson also inspired Garry Trudeau's Doonsbury character, Uncle Duke. At the time, Thompson was so angry about being satirized that he promised to set Trudeau on fire if the two of them ever met.
Thompson also took it upon himself to document the Hell's Angels from within by spending time around (and getting stomped by) their members as they rampaged across the country. He documented the 1972 presidential campaign in "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72", and helped cement the picture of Nixon as a cold-blooded and calculating monster. Beyond that, he's written numerous columns for Rolling Stone magazine, all of them doing to politics what Harlan Ellison did to science fiction, both the good and the bad.
The peculiar and unique mindset of the self-described "outlaw journalist," the hard-drinking, profanity-laden, drug-induced, take-no-prisoners mentality still shows up today in underground writers and reporters. The graphic novel "Transmetropolitan" remade Thompson's personality as part of futuristic gonzo journalist Spider Jerusalem. And if it hadn't been for "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and "Transmetropolitan," I wouldn't be writing this opinion column.
Write to Jonathan at tenement_cellar@msn.com
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