The Half-Baked Cultural Detective:
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
as Postmodern Noir
What is the function of a private detective? If we consider a logically
deductive detective in the tradition of Sherlock Holmes or Auguste Dupin, the
answer seems obvious: the detective typically pieces clues together in order to
solve a murder, locate a valuable object, or find an adulterous spouse. The search
is external to the detective, whose psychological character is essentially immaterial,
as the detection is more of an intellectual game of object/clue scrutiny which leads
to the apprehension and removal of the culprits. This ‘‘traditional” detective story
details aristocratic society and the private detective is often a wealthy man, a
discerning idler. A different kind of American detective emerges with the Hard
Boiled Detective Novel. This new, lower to middle class detective ultimately looks
for a broader social truth beyond his detection. The search may begin with a tangible
object in society, but it concludes with the revelation of the sociological ruin of
urban society and the subsequent emergence of a Modernistic American hero, who
is more of cultural or sociological detective. This is Raymond Chandler’s archetypal
hero who walks the mean streets of a city, “who is himself not mean, who is neither
tarnished nor afraid” (Chandler 992), but is ultimately secluded, cynical, and morally
questionable. American film noir grew out of the Hard Boiled Detective novel and
appropriated its heroic cultural detective into a noir hero. The further moral
ambiguity of the noir hero mirrored the further moral ambiguity in American society.
Film noir plunged deeper into the underworld of American ideology and heroism
by directly portraying and often romanticizing the criminal/subversive world. It
helped introduce the notion of the criminal as an alternative hero in the face of
mass cultural or governmental corruption.
The Hard Boiled Detective Novel is considered to be a modernistic form
of writing. Film noir is akin to a bridge between modernism and postmodernism,
in that it begins the work of decentering or deconstructing morality and subjectivity
of American male heroism and ideology. This trend towards deconstructing heroism
and ideology culminates in Hunter S. Thompson’s truly postmodern Fear and
Loathing in Las Vegas. In this essay, I will examine Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear
and Loathing in Las Vegas as postmodern noir that unmasks American ideology
and morality in the tradition of film noir and noir fiction and completely blurs
them in a disorienting, suiTeal postmodern noir landscape. By the time oiFear and
Loathing in Las Vegas' publication in 1971, the heroic private detective had become