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Popular Culture Review
outdated. The socially isolated noir hero, suspended between lawful society and
the criminal underworld is replaced by a postmodern journalist whose psychological
identity is fragmented in an amorphous and ambiguous postmodern (under)world.
In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, noir, like a blinding, all-pervasive fog, has
seemingly permeated American culture in entirety.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is political in its implicit deconstruction
of individuals and society in early 1970’s America. It reflects a cynicism after a
cultural and ideological crash at the end of the 1960’s (typically symbolized by the
disaster of the Rolling Stones’ free concert at Altamont in 1969, where one fan was
killed and many others injured by the Hell’s Angels motorcycle group who were
hired as security). This cultural and ideological crash at the end of the 1960’s
mirrors the economic stock market crash at the end of the 1920’s, in the replacement
of economic or cultural optimism by a stark individualism based on pragmatic
cynicism . The arena changes from wide social prom ise to individual
aggrandizement. This is the perfect atmosphere for noir to thrive. The better known
noir protagonists, Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade and Walter Neff date from the 1930’s
novels (and subsequent films) of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and James
M. Cain. The Hard-Boiled Detective Hero, or noir hero, is the quintessential
American modernist, filled with anomie and isolation, witness to social depravity.
Although the categories of good and evil are complicated, there is still a moral
distinction between the hero and the corrupt villainous criminal underworld. Film
noir (especially later film noir) helps to shift focus to the criminal milieu and
abnormal psychology in films such as Gun Crazy, Kiss Me Deadly, Ace in the
Hole, and Sunset Boulevard, which portrays the deranged and the violent. The noir
protagonist becomes criminal and dangerous, but still heroic in his quick acerbic
wit and tough but romantic code of behavior. While the aim of noir is to create or
reflect a specific disorientation or alienation, the aim of Fear and Loathing in Las
Vegas is to create or reflect total, amorphous confusion and the breakdown of all
ideology and potentially all hope of redemption. Instead of merely depicting the
criminal milieu of a society, it questions the category of criminality as it applies to
the individual and American culture. Effectively, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
deconstructs and implodes the notion of personal and social morality. In the
postmodern tradition, it blurs and blends the categorization of culture, ideology,
and morality within a spliced, self-referential narrative.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, like its preceding noir influences, is
ultimately concerned with (dis)placing American constructs of male heroism and
ideology in their respective societies. The noir hero is a darker adaptation of the
heroic American frontiersman. The 1930’s noir hero works within urban space —
usually it is a relatively new and not fully urbanized American city (Los Angeles
or San Francisco) that still retains the elements of an untamed, lawless rural space