Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 2, Summer 2000 | Page 103

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