The Half-Baked Cultural Detective
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cloak himself within the city’s darkness and depravity. Indeed, it is through Duke’s
ingenuity that he and his attorney are able to run up an amazing hotel bill and
continue their drug-induced escapades. Despite their perpetual derangement, Duke
and his attorney are clever and relatively ingenious. When a cleaning woman,
Alice, comes into their trashed, drug-filled hotel room, they quickly invent a story
about being special detectives investigating a dope ring in the hotel. To guarantee
Alice’s silence, they promise her a thousand dollars a month for her surveillance of
the hotel. It works magnificently well, with Alice apologizing and smiling as she
leaves their room. In greed-dominated Las Vegas, money is the only real law. As
Duke cynically suggests, “If Charlie Manson checked into the Sahara tomorrow
morning, nobody would hassle him as long as he tipped big” (106). In his vision of
Las Vegas, Duke summarizes a postmodern credo that implodes morality: “In a
closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a
world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity” (72). Duke suggests that Las Vegas
is grossly atavistic but representative of American culture or what is at the core of
American ideology. Ironically, it is through massive drug taking that he and his
attorney become atavistic, monstrous, and are thereby able to understand and blend
into Las Vegas culture.
The Postmodern Male Homosocial Nightmare
Previously, the noir hero has been positioned as tough, but there is a subtle
hint of emotional scarring in his social isolation and emotional self-abnegation.
This noir hero in Fear am! Loathing in Las Vegas adheres to a contradictory hyperreal combination of self-abnegation and self-liberation (or self-amplification). This
identity contradiction is illuminated by the epigraph at the beginning of Fear and
Loathing in Las Vegas, which is a quote from Dr. Johnson: “He who makes a beast
of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man” (1). Duke may take an excessive
amount of drugs in order to stave off the “natural” emotional pain of being a
(hu)man. In other words, he may be self-abnegating. On the other hand, Duke may
also consider man to be more naturally a beast, and therefore the emotional pain of
being a man is an artificial pain at the repression of natural or primal instincts and
impulses in “civilized” society. If this is the case, then Duke and his attorney take
an excessive amount of drugs to help liberate or amplify their repressed natural or
primal human traits of aggression and fear.
The earlier noir heroes tend to be caught in a state of emotional dormancy,
but underneath their hard shells, there is a guarded or latent romanticism. In fact,
this is what made them privy to emotional redemption or destruction by fatal or
redeeming women. In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Duke has effectively
nullified his “better” emotions of compassion, altruism, and love. He is left with
only the emotions of aggression and fright, fear and loathing. In Duke’s world and