106
Popular Culture Review
primal aggressive and narcissistic impulses.
Las Vegas is presented as a city that encourages depravity and excess.
Duke and his attorney’s outrageous behavior while drugged is hardly noticed, or
passed over as drunkenness. “In this town, they love a drunk,” (46) Duke says of
Las Vegas, as inevitably drunks make both poor gamblers and good entertainment
to the equally depraved clientele. Most importantly, Duke and his attorney seem to
blend in with the crowds in Las Vegas. No one singles them out for outrageous
behavior, even when they are under the influence of mescaline and fall and trip
over themselves and other people while trying to enter the turnstiles to the Circus
Circus. Rather, they are put through the turnstiles and let loose on the gambli ng
floor by the Circus-Circus staff, who presumably hope that they will be in bad
enough shape to lose a good deal of money. Ironically, in a city which seems as lax
on law enforcement as Las Vegas, there is a huge penalty for the possession of
marijuana: 20 years to life. Presumably, there would be at least an equal penalty
for the more dangerous substances that Duke and his attorney take. Duke is aware
of the potential penalty he could face if he is caught. However, he relies on the
benevolent, but ultimately corrupt attitude of Las Vegas towards people with money
or who seem important.
In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Thompson challenges our sense of
reality in a postmodern society. It is not manifest whether there is a “true” or clearer
reality lurking somewhere beyond the hyper-reality of Las Vegas and a steadily
depraved, noir American society. However, the shift of space from Los Angeles to
Las Vegas is important in the sense that Las Vegas is positioned as hyper-real
postmodern space, which has become the heart of noir. Las Vegas has come to
represent noir America, or the potential future of postmodern noir America. Los
Angeles, the noir capital of old, is Just the starting place for the descent into the
postmodern American inferno of Las Vegas. Duke calls Las Vegas a “society of
armed masturbators/ gambling is the kicker here/ sex is extra/ weird trip for high
rollers” (41). It is a perverted society, but it is also Thompson’s vision of America:
an aggressive male dominated dream and nightmare. He compares Las Vegas to
the anny, where “the shark ethic prevails — eat the wounded” (72). This postmodern
form of Social Darwinism is based more on arbitrary luck than on class, ethnicity,
or inherent talent. The wounded are the unlucky gamblers and the culturally and
criminally deviant, such as Duke and his attorney. Duke mentions that there is “no
mercy for a criminal freak in Las Vegas” (72). Yet there is no better place for a
criminal freak or deviant in America than Las Vegas, which attracts people in its
glitter, pomp and lure of quick wealth. Indeed, Duke later says that “Vegas is so
full of natural freaks — people who are genuinely twisted” (190).
Thom pson’s criminal freak must be intelligent: at least somewhat
cognizant of the city’s amorphous postmodern power structure, and able to lie and