Dracula Untold: Vampires and the Rise of the Prince of Darkness

by Christopher Barr

“The Life of All Flesh Is the Blood.”

(Leviticus, 17:14)

“Within, stood a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of colour about him anywhere.”

– Bram Stoker, Dracula

“Your body’s dying.  Pay no attention, it happens to us all.”

– Lestat, Interview with a Vampire

Dracula Untold is not a good movie, it is a movie that drenches itself in mythology and is subsequently sucked down to the lower murky depths of cliché and imitation.  The movie failed to respect the endless well of source material it could easily have drawn from.  Its concern, as in the case of most all Hollywood studio productions, was to reach the broadest somnambulistic audience possible and thus necessitate the obligatory watering down of some of its source material.

The story surrounds a Prince that is on the brink of war with an invading massive Turkish army from the Ottoman Empire during the 15^th century.  The Sultan of Turkey is seeking a thousand young boys from the kingdom that Prince Vlad rules over, a kingdom with little army to defend against the Sultan’s demands.  The thousand boys would be trained to fight in the Sultan’s army to further the growth of the Ottoman Empire.

Vlad and two of his soldiers happen upon a cave in the mountains while searching for a Turkish scouting party that have entered Transylvania territory.  Instead of encountering the scouting party of Turks, Vlad and his men are met with the vicious force of an ancient sorcerer and master vampire, who quickly dispatches of Vlad’s men and drives him out of the lair.  Vlad’s escape from the creature was a result of the sun’s beaming rays, deadly to the creature, blanketing the mouth of the cave and preventing him from devouring Vlad along with his ill-fated men.

The movie mildly goes into the real Vlad the Impaler’s dark past, along with his war crimes against the many people he was responsible for murdering.  Living a life of war, historical Vlad realized early on, in order to defeat the enemy you cannot do it with mere swords, you must make yourself more than a man, you must make yourself a monster.  Vlad did just that by slaughtering a village of people close to the Turkish border and ordering his men to impale their bodies on long vertical stakes, covering a field with hundreds them. 

Superstition and sorcery were common views that weakened the resolve of most men in those parts, at that time in its history.  Vlad knew that this was the only way to ward off attack on his kingdom of Walachia.  The problem is the movie didn’t quite portray him as the monstrosity he truly was in actual history.  The unspeakable tortures he was responsible for have no equal, even among the most bloodthirsty tyrants of history, such as Herod, Nero, and Diocletian.

Vlad Dracul Tepes was a monster on his own without all the vampire mythos attached to him four centuries later by author Bram Stoker.  In Dracula Untold he was more relatable, his actions were more understandable given the plight he was forced to deal with.  Sure it was just a movie, so liberties are a reality in order to maintain a cohesive narrative for a modern audience to absorb, but the argument could be made that the aficionados of historical Eastern Europe, in all likelihood, wish they would just tell a story about Vlad the Impaler without all the vampire baggage.  Regardless, the vampire is part of it and will always be.

In the movie, in order to defend his land, Vlad made a Faustian deal with the devil of sorts.  He went back to the cave in the mountains and confronted the gangrenous master vampire who, instead of ripping him to pieces and drinking six pints of his ‘life force’, the creature provided Vlad with the gift of strength, speed and ferocious power …with a catch.  Vlad has three days to last without feeding off another human before the spell/curse is lifted, returning him to his human mortal form. 

He drinks the blood of the devilish creature from a broken cranium of a long since murdered skeletal victim and then ‘turns’ into one of them.  He awakens in the forest with no soul and with sensory perception overload.  He is able to look up and glance at the quivering starry blanket that is the fabric of space with telescopic sight.  He can hear a spider swathe a hapless insect with webbing that sounds like an axe splitting a tree trunk open.  He hears the howls and movements of the forests various animals and creatures, seeing them with a set of eyes that transcends solid objects at will, allowing him to see veins and heat signatures from all living creatures, man or beast.

With a voracious hunger for blood, Vlad attacks the Turks with magic and an established will to destroy his enemy with the power of the undead, drawing from the black lakes of evil, while avoiding the looming sunrise soon to follow.  He is able to transform himself into vast legions of ravenous bats and with the celerity of a madman with no bounds, swoops menacingly down and obliterates hundreds of invading Turks all at once, like the smashing force of a monstrous battle hammer.

“’The strength of the vampire is that no one will believe in him.’…It was true.  The book was a hodgepodge of superstitions and soap-opera clichés, but that line was true; no one had believed in them, and how could they fight something they couldn’t even believe in?”

– Richard Matheson, I Am Legend

The vampire, a preternatural being, has a long murderous bloodline dating all the way back to biblical times and throughout Christian mythology.  It all started with the sacrificial lust for blood to keep evil spirits at bay.  Within the folklore of Christianity; Lilith, first wife of Adam was said to be reputedly impatient with the first man’s sexual ineptitude.  Lilith went on to become queen of the demons and evil phantoms.  She would suck the blood of babies in their cradles and young men, robbing them of their vigor and potency as they slept.  Lilith was guilty of dismissing Hebraic belief and breaking Mosaic Law that forbids draining and drinking the warm blood of living things.

“Therefore I said unto the children of Israel, Ye shall eat the blood of no manner of flesh; for the life of all flesh is the blood thereof: whosoever eateth it shall be cut off.”

(Leviticus, 17:14)

In the New Testament the parable goes that Christ saved humankind by spilling his blood, before his ultimate sacrifice on the cross.  Christ saw the redemptive significance in his blood under the symbolic guise of wine shared with his disciples during the Last Supper.  The Gospel of John emphasized the regenerative properties of blood.  During the early years of Christianity the fathers had to redefine their interpretation of the virtues of blood, fearing a return to human sacrifice and cannibalism.

The link between the belief of vampires and Christianity can also be found in the Neoplatonic idea of a life after death.  This suggests that the body is a mere shell, a material covering that rots away while the soul lives on in another world, awaiting resurrection at the Last Judgement.  Vampires in Christian phenomenology are “souls in pain,” beings that belong to neither the world of the living nor that of the dead.  They are plagued to wander between worlds searching for vitality and in some cases, peace from their suffering.  These were nomadic rejecters of religious faith and have thus been made to suffer an eternity of pain.

The spread of the vampire legend from an anecdotal character to entering a European widespread collective consciousness was a result of the Bubonic plague in the 14^th century.  To avoid infection the panicky people rushed to bury the victims of the plague, and in some cases so quick to bury them that they did not even verify that they were clinically dead.  Days later when a family vault was opened the corpses were often in perfectly preserved shape but spotted with blood.  It didn’t take the locals too long to think that the corpses had become vampires, while in actual reality free from extraneous belief systems, the corpses were in fact hapless victims still alive and suffering a long and agonizing death in their coffins, and likely wounded themselves in their bleak attempt at escaping their crypts.        

The 15^th century lunatic Gilles de Rais, once a guard for Joan of Arc, spent his remaining days in southwest France torturing, slaughtering and drinking the blood of two to three hundred children, with a deranged alchemist attempt at finding the secret to the “philosophers’ stone” in blood.  Vlad Tepes was born the year of Joan of Arc’s death in 1431.  He is the primary source of Bram Stoker’s supernatural monster but not without the help of the 17^th century Countess Erzsebt Bathory.  A woman nearly as equally sick as both Vlad the Impaler and Gilles de Rais, kidnapped and tortured up to three hundred young girls with the belief that their blood could cure her from aging.  She would drink their blood and bathe in it on occasion to preserve her youth as long as possible.  When she wasn’t bathing in the blood of a thousand virgins, she would further her studies into Black Magic while viewing the torture and unremittent beating of young girls.  These girls would have spikes and needles punctured into their bodies and necks, and then were bound in skin-tearing ropes as they roll around in the snow naked, freezing to death.

Stoker took Vlad’s gothic surname, which translates into devil or dragon, along with his archetypical shadowed legend and Bathory’s use of blood to maintain everlasting youth, and created one of the most recognizable fictional characters known to the world, parallel to that of Batman and Superman.  This story became a true turning point in the history of vampirism in literature.  John William Polidori, also an influence of Stoker’s, is credited for the first vampire to appear in his novel The Vampyre.  This all came about in Geneva in 1816, while held up with a couple traveling companions; a competition was challenged by the English Romantic poet Lord Byron, fueled by copious amounts of laudanum by candlelight along with his companions, to see who among them can create their own tales of suspense.  Byron came up with a story about a vampire that he never finished but confided the plot to Polidori who went on to write his tale of the un-dead vampire.  Another one of the traveling companions, Mary Shelly went on to write one of the all-time best novels on terror ever written, Frankenstein. 

“I know nothing of God, or the Devil.  I have never seen a vision nor learned a secret that will damn or save my soul.  And as far as I know, after four hundred years, I am the oldest living vampire in the world.”

– Armand, Interview with the Vampire

The vampire has appeared in hundreds of films, books and comic books.  The vampire has been described in every incarnation from a sexual predator to a rock star, also ranging from a grotesque bottom-feeder to a romantic leading man.  Some renditions in film have been pretty good like in the case of Interview with the Vampire, 30 Days of Night, Byzantium, Daybreakers, the first Underworld movie, Night Watch and Day Watch, and even From Dusk Till Dawn and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  Then there have been many of these vampire movies that were not so good and ultimately forgettable like Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, John Carpenter’s Vampires, The Twilight Saga, Van Helsing, Vampire in Brooklyn, The Lost Boys sequels, Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows, Dracula 2000, Kiss of the Vampire, Vamp, and Once Bitten.

Among the best is Let the Right One In and the American remake Let Me In, Nosferatu and it’s 1979 remake Nosferatu the Vampire, Dracula (1931), Near Dark, Only Lovers Left Alive, Salem’s Lot, Horror of Dracula, Shadow of the Vampire, Fright Night and it’s Colin Farrell remake, The Lost Boys, Blade and Blade 2.  Television has had the always enjoyable and incredibly layered Buffy the Vampire Slayer and spin-off series Angel as well as a pretty good run with True Blood and the recently aired The Strain.

As for books Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the quintessential book on the mythological creature.  Anne Rice has The Vampire Chronicles which has been received well among the great seductive lore in the canon, but I Am Legend is one of the great celebrated vampire stories in book form ever written. The Historian was quite fascinating as well as Let the Right One In along with Salem’s Lot.

“The cross.  He held one in his hand, gold and shiny in the morning sun.  This, too, drove the vampires away.  Why?  Was there a logical answer, something he could accept without slipping on banana skins of mysticism?”

– Richard Matheson, I Am Legend

What makes the great stories so resonating and long lasting is they are about us, not vampires at all.  Richard Matheson’s I am Legend novel is about the last man on earth that is forced to barricade himself up in his house of desolation from bloodthirsty vampires.  But it’s actually about loneliness, loss and addiction; it is a philosophical journey inward while everything outward has gone to hell.  The films Let Me In and Only Lovers Left Alive are about living and adapting oneself to a seemingly alien world, with the former focusing on developing the strength to survive in an often unforgivable world.

Dracula Untold chose the spectacle route and inundated its canvas with CGI effects to such an extent that the performances became smothered and plastic.  The basic premise of good vs. evil vs. evil again could have been interesting with more detail put on character development and less on spectacle.  The sad state here is the market for a big movie like this is designed around an international audience.  As a result the concept and the dialogue must be able to translate into many languages.  Audiences from all over the world must be able to follow the basic story and have a rudimentary understanding of what the characters are saying to each other.  The Lord of the Rings Trilogy was able to avoid this trap where movies like Van Helsing have not.

“The vampires have always been metaphors for me.  They’ve always been vehicles through which I can express things I have felt very, very deeply.”

– Anne Rice

A little movie like Only Lovers Left Alive can build their characters within the mythology of vampires and still maintain quality and great story.  The problem with a lot of the bad ones is they want all mythology and as a consequence they fail critically time and time again.

Dracula Untold ends tragic for the character but creepily victorious for the audience because he becomes what they want him to become, Dracula the vampire.  He loses everything, his wife and son, he loses the respect and allegiance of his people and army, and certainly worse than all those combined; he loses his soul to wander the earth as a creature that drinks the blood of his unsuspecting victims for eternity.  We cheer for him in a similar way that we did when Tony Stark became Iron Man and Bruce Wayne became Batman.  The only glaring difference is Iron Man and Batman fight for what’s good; avoiding unnecessary killing at all costs, Dracula survives because of killing.

Dracula is a tragic character; there is no doubt about that, certainly a treacherous creature but never the less tragic as a result.  His curse has condemned him to a life of solitude, a life without love and a life shaded in a nocturnal existence.  His humanity is peeled away from him only to be filled by a murderous fiend.  Dracula Untold turned him into a superhero of sorts and stripped away all the heartbreak that Bram Stoker stitched so tightly to the core of his fable.  Nosferatu’s Count Orlok is a ghoulish figure, a hairless rat of sorts that hides just behind the slice of a shadow.  Like Dracula, he too has condemned himself to the stone walls of his castle, only coming out of the shadows when absolutely necessary.  These stories are in-depth allegories that investigate the human condition using the metaphor of the vampire. 

Like so many contemporary stories, Dracula Untold has no interest in the human condition or imparting a cautionary tale on what could happen if one disconnects oneself from the tribe.  Unlike its predecessors, this film’s tragic narrative doesn’t lie within the story rather it comes from the uninspired society that it’s disseminating itself to.  The tragedy is us, the audience desiring Dracula to be a hero and be cool doing it.  It’s likely when people saw a screening of Nosferatu back in the early twenties; they all didn’t leave the theatre wanting to be a vampire.  I’d hope they left the theatre feeling a sense of gratitude for who they have in their lives coupled with being absolutely freaked out by what they just watched.  Which is a good thing because that’s what vampires of the night hopefully do for us; they make us want to connect with living, breathing people and hang on.

“Do not wake yet, I beg you.  Why will you not believe me?  Sleep …sleep forever.  May your breast heave while pursuing the chimerical hope of happiness – that I allow you; but do not open your eyes. Ah!  Do not open your eyes.”

– Comte de Lautréamont, Maldoror

The Dark Knight: Batman, The Joker and the Fight for Gotham at the Toss of a Coin

by Christopher Barr

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter.”

 – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The Dark Knight is an outstanding film that expands upon the possibilities of what a super-hero movie can become.  Using an obvious influence from Michael Mann’s 1995 masterpiece Heat and the gritty realism from comic book artist Frank Miller’s take on the character, director Christopher Nolan created a mature superhero film by shedding all the silliness and fantasy usually present in these types of movies.  He created a super-hero movie for adults by dressing his interpretation of the character and surrounding world in realism.

The Dark Knight is about personal and social identity; How do I see me, how does the world see me and how do I want the world to see me?  It’s also about the capricious nature of evil and good, and the fact it is not actually black and white.  The film is a meditation on how evil gets on you and you cannot get it off, how under the right circumstances the law abiding citizen can become horrific.  It explores the concepts of how right and wrong can be far more difficult to navigate than how one would expect.   

In the film, Batman is still growing into his role of the cape crusader but he is also beginning to realize the consequences of being Batman.  We see this in the beginning of the film when Batman interrupts a crime going down in a parking lot.  When he crashes through a wall and over two cars with his Tumbler, he soon sees the criminals but also a group of copycats sporting, basement bargain Batman suits.  These wannabes only want to help out but they are doing more harm than good.  Here we see that desire to help isn’t the same as actually helping to solve a problem in the world.  Desire is a great starting point but then must be grounded and thought through.

Bruce Wayne is dealing with the late night jumping from the roof tops of buildings by sleeping his days away.  He’s bruised and cut all over his body but is determined to forge on because it’s the right thing to do.  This project is a way he is able to prove himself, the Batman is a manifestation that was birthed out of his inaction when his parents were both murdered, an inaction that was clearly not his felt because he was a child but never the less, the guilt of not doing anything lingers through his veins.  This is a dark chapter of his young life that holds sway in his adult decision making.   Mental trauma remains and wallpapers itself over all future action or inaction, depending on how one confronts or retreats from stress.

“I believe whatever doesn’t kill you, simply makes you stranger.”

-  The Joker

When the Joker arrives in Gotham, Batman soon sees that he’s dealing with a whole new type of villainy.  The Joker is a tornado, he is a deadly virus, he is everlasting, unchangeable and more troubling, he is unpredictable.  We see this when he talks about how he got the scars on his face, giving him a somewhat grotesque permanent smile.   He tells different stories as to how he got the scars which is a clever way the filmmakers want to avoid the audience pinning down his motives.  The Joker is also a form of symbolic evil that permeates society, that non-negotiable element that sharks possess, a malice that is not interested in the status of a person, that is not interested in who society deems deserving.  The Joker is a malevolent force that Alfred describes to Bruce while discussing the lack of definable motivation normally identifiable in autocratic people; “Some men aren’t looking for anything logical like money.  They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with.  Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

Terrorism and what must be done to combat it underlines this film.  There is a force in this world that wants to change people into their image, in order for their victims to believe in what they believe in.  Ideologies are weapons as well as curses; they motivate people to perform horrific acts to justify what it is they believe in.  They force their fantasy onto the world and kill anyone or anything that doesn’t claim it to be true and real.  This sickness is part of the darkness, hidden in the shadows and colored on the Joker’s face in The Dark Knight.  Anarchy is the enemy of structure which is why the Joker’s primary goal in The Dark Knight is to introduce chaos to the order of society.  ‘The League of Shadows’ in Batman Begins had a more definable reason behind their motives in destroying Gotham.  They felt that balance was needed to be restored in the wake of bureaucratic corruption running unchecked for the most part in Gotham.  The Joker it seems just wants to watch it all burn to the ground, which makes him ever more mysterious and volatile.

The Joker is present so Batman can exist and vice-versa.  He is responsible for Batman’s elevated strength during times of weakness.  The Joker is aware of their symbiotic relationship even when he declares that they will be pitted together forever.  The conflict with Batman is he does not quite see that relationship (or denies its existence), he sees himself as nothing like the Joker.  Batman sees himself as a symbol for good defending against all the evil in the world.  The Joker, albeit a madman, is smart and self-aware.  This makes him psychopathic as oppose to crazy, he knows what he is doing but he does it anyway.  He trashes ‘norms’ and steps on symbolic rituals followed by the majority of the populace. 

How does one combat madness, how does society not only combat it outside its borders but how does it combat it within?  Swimming with sharks is never advisable but those that are good at doing it have a rare understanding of the creature.  They appreciate it by trying to understand its chaos and the Joker is such an animal.  Batman needs to understand his own chaos in order to understand the Joker’s, and that’s the point of their on-going, ever-lasting, relationship, or as the Joker says in the interrogation scene; “You complete..meeee.”

The Joker and Batman have a ying and yang relationship.  Mainly this focus is on Batman, a man struggling with his morality as he edges into the gray dividing the black and white idealism of what’s right and what’s wrong.  An armageddonist, the Joker pleads with Batman that if he wants to beat him, he’ll have to break his one rule.  That rule being murder, Batman will have to kill in order to do what’s right.  Batman, thankfully, resists this advice and beats the Joker with his mind and his technology rather than giving in to lunacy like the frustrated Harvey Dent later does.

I BELIEVE IN HARVEY DENT

Harvey Dent’s coin toss and his gamble with fate, takes him down a darker path of vengeance.  He buys into the Joker’s madness in order to justify his murderous actions in the aftermath of his girlfriend, Rachel Dawes’ murder by the Joker.  Harvey’s face is brutally mutilated from fire as Batman saves him from blowing up in a warehouse.  After being hospitalized, Harvey swears revenge against those within the corrupt police department and district attorney’s office that provided the stepping stones that resulted in Rachel’s death.  Harvey’s face was badly burned on its left side giving him a sinister evil feature.  Like the coin he tosses to help him decide a particular outcome, Harvey “Two-Face” Dent has become that very coin.  But the coin was a lie, a rationalization or blame-shifter so Harvey can do as he pleases without psychological consequences.   

The films climax resulted from Harvey Dent going on a killing spree to avenge Rachel’s death.  After an attempt at keeping everything fair by flipping his coin to decide the fate of Commissioner Gordon’s family, himself and Batman, Harvey falls to his death.  Batman virtuously decides to take the blame for Harvey’s misdeeds in order to keep Harvey’s “White Knight” legacy in good standing with the people of Gotham.  

“You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” – Harvey Dent

The problem with this course of action is Gordon and Batman lied about what happened to Harvey.  They did this for the benefit of the people of Gotham but is this a noble lie?  Why not tell the truth about what happened to Harvey?  People in society are being so pampered from reality that they have become sheltered from the storm like infants.  People understandably keep certain realities from their children subsequently allowing them to develop the basics of language and the fundamentals of processing their thoughts, before they are burdened with the complexities of wars and politics.  But adults do not deserve this leeway, they need reality to function healthy in the world, not lies to keep them quiet and shopping until they die.

Telling the truth is far more beneficial to society and the person trying to navigate through it.  At the end of The Dark Knight they made it out to be a righteous thing that Batman takes the fall and is therefore hunted down like the bad guy, if that allows people to sleep at night.  Maybe Gotham needs a revolution, maybe it needs to wake-up and see the criminality for what it is, maybe Gotham wouldn't need Batman to do their dirty work if they all just woke the hell up, maybe then he wouldn’t have to be a silent guardian, a watchful protector, a dark knight.

“I’m whatever Gotham needs me to be.”

- Batman

WHY SO SERIOUS?

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: Hunter S. Thompson and the Disintegrated American Dream

by Chris Barr

“We were somewhere around Barstow, when the drugs began to take hold.”

“We can’t stop here!  This is bat country!!

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a Terry Gilliam film about the failure of the American Dream.  It features an eccentric journalist, Raoul Duke and his psychopathic attorney, Dr. Gonzo who travel to Las Vegas for a series of trippy psychedelic exploits.  Duke is assigned to cover a dirt bike race in the desert for a sports magazine but doesn’t really do anything with it, largely because the Vietnam War was blazing in Southeast Asia and the Civil Rights movement was still very much fighting to forge a path of equality, also he was stoned and drugged out of his mind to really pay attention to anything like dirt bikes racing in circles in a dust-filled desert.  Reporting on a sports event at that time in America likely just seemed inappropriate.  The film takes place in 1971 where politics and the American people were still very much out of alignment.  The roaring sixties was still winding down after its crash in 1968 and the achievement of the moon landing in 1969, splashing promise over the many fires of despair.

“We had two bags of grass, 75 pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a saltshaker half-full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers… Also, a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls.  Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.”

Duke and Dr. Gonzo drive in their rented red convertible shark along the sandy, scalding desert black top, speeding to Las Vegas to find the American Dream.  While there, they check into a hotel at The Mint and proceed to stiff, suck, inhale and drink every mind-altering, consciousness traversing drug known to civilized man.  They were essentially flagrant pulse-pounding drifters in time and space, floating along the Milky Way of the great cosmos, heading nowhere.  Meaning in this place had eluded them, drugs softened reality and in the mind, its weight pushed and pulled at them, creating a topsy-turvy of cellophane enlightenment coupled with existential meandering.  

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is based on a book, quite accurately and faithfully, by real life gonzo Journalist, the late Hunter S. Thompson.  He was a man that pushed outward toward the edge of existence, the edge that most of the living wouldn’t dare go, out of fear or spite; they see no use for it, the uninspired bastards.  Hunter saw the edge as something to push and poke at, something to die for if only to actually live because of.

Hunter S. Thompson was a rock n’ roll journalist and political impostor, but remained a creditable journalist where one should remain - on the outside.  That place out there where honesty and balance exists, that place that most journalist don’t dare travel.  Today his type of journalism is as dead as those sonar-guided flying rats are in Bat Country, sizzling off the side of the highway in the scorching California desert. 

Nowadays mostly all journalism is a complete sell-out, it’s a contact funnel for politicians and warmongering corporations to ‘connect’ with their servants.  These contemporary journalists are spin doctors for the oligarchy, they ultimately are a disgrace.  Woodward and Bernstein were actual journalists with integrity, as was Hunter S. Thompson, albeit an unconventional one, a man that wrote largely for Rolling Stone magazine but never sold-out to them.

The riots of the sixties were when the American Dream was truly clubbing itself to death, while ‘free love’ wasn’t stopping the bombs from dropping.  This uprising against oppression, against the Vietnam War and centrally, against the totalitarian control the government was enforcing over the people, was what defined that era in American history.  Hunter S. Thompson was in the tornado, waltzing with suicide; he was on the unpleasant edge that society was sleepwalking itself toward, an approaching cliff with no bottom in sight.  The malice of the Chicago Police department during the 1968 riots against the war protests, were a devastating blow for any hope that America might survive as a nation of equals, where race and gender would be words to describe groups instead of targets to discriminate.  Robert Kennedy had been murdered just a couple months prior and along with him, he took hope, which died with him on that kitchen floor, along with any promise for a unifying future for America.

“San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of.  Maybe it meant something, maybe not, in the long run.  But no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time in the world, whatever it meant.  There was madness in any direction, at any hour.  You could strike sparks anywhere.  There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.  And that, I think, was the handle – that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil.  Not in any mean or military sense: we didn’t need that.  Our energy would simply prevail.  There was no point in fighting – on our side or theirs.  We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of high and beautiful wave.  So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

The way out at this point, the only way to escape the menacing angst of the aftermath, of a failed revolution - was drugs.  The hippies smoked themselves toward a simulacrum of happiness, dropping acid and aimlessly dancing naked at outdoor concerts.  Nothing made sense, the body count in Vietnam was rising and actual reasons for American military involvement were lost on most.  What was happening to the world, why was everybody always fighting each other, carving their own names in the foreheads of their meaningless enemies?  Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. saw the ‘promise land’, he envisioned an America that discarded its inconsequential differences for a more equal prosperous future, he was greeted with horror by the power structure, who believed they were the privileged and in the end they killed him for that.

“I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality… I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.” 

- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

What they didn’t quite know then but we know now was, it was all about business.  The people wanted peace, but the swine corporations and the government bastards know no peace, their prime directive does not lie in the well-being of the American people, their bottom line is grounded deeply in their power and control apparatuses.

Hunter S. Thompson was a patriot, he was a man that wanted his country to succeed but not by the barrel of a gun in the face of an unnecessary enemy.  He saw the potential in America being bloodied with petty differences and profiteering.  He was a man that believed in the American dream at one point in his early life; however later saw the tragedy of why a journalist like him even had to exist.  Was his early hopes of prosperity all lies, were they ‘lame fuck-arounds’ so business in America could prosper, above the very population of the country?  That is sheer madness, a result of losing every value and tenet that the country was founded on.

The slithering snake with skinny human legs and the nose and ears of a raging gorilla, overflowed the dam in Vietnam into Cambodia and Laos, both countries that were simply guilty due to proximity.  Richard Nixon saw the demonic under-skin of America, he saw what George W. Bush would later see, that America is scared to death of change and is insecure about identity, so killing thousands of people in foreign countries gave the citizens of America something disgusting to be proud of.  The sick reality is; it gave them something, and still does to this day, to call their own.  They are the superpower; genocide and destabilization be-damned.

“All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit.  But their loss and failure is ours, too.  What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create… a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody-or at least some force-is tending the Light at the end of the tunnel.”

Las Vegas, Nevada is the nucleus of the death and commodification of the American dream.  It is Marshall McLuhan’s ‘The Medium is the Message’, It’s Jean Baudrillard’s ‘Simulacrum’, it’s Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ and it is Karl Marx’s ‘Superstructure’ with a million glittering lights.  This grossly atavistic city is decadent and in some cases inhumane because money is above all else.  It’s hyper-reality is compounded in one pulsating vein that is Las Vegas boulevard, a strip of billion dollar real estate that steals hopes and dreams by simulating hopes and dreams.  It is that fun version of hell on earth, that place you can truly lose yourself and the contents of your wallet along with it.  Prostitution, drugs, alcohol, gambling and no clocks in sight, it’s a dream away from the reality of the machine, that function that most must participate in, in order to buy into the possibility of escaping an expanding debt that is in tandem with the swelling universe itself, never ending.

The illusion that somehow one knows something that someone else doesn’t know is amplified in Las Vegas, people go there to gamble, hoping they will win above all others, they’re special and they are able to beat the almost algorithmic system of gambling.  That’s the true power of Las Vegas, and like Harry Houdini, it shows everything but tells you nothing, it makes you think that you’re winning, when all the while it’s breaking your bank.

The discombobulated savage and depraved reality is Las Vegas is a nightmare disguised as a dream; it’s a place where hearts go to die alone side fast-food wedding chapels.  In that regard, Las Vegas, through its simulacrum, can become real to those that hit the wall of desolation, those that see through the looking glass at its borders, but most fail at such an insight, most buy into its plastic walls that cover the doors and its sprawling pageants that hypnotize the mind, and the atmospheric aromas that tranquilize the soul.  Las Vegas speaks to the werewolf in us when the full moon comes too close, the savage man in a Hawaiian shirt and the 12 hour stink of alcohol on his breathe, peels the cheap paint away while he plays symbolic Russian Roulette with reality.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas entered the vampiric center of the fundamental problem in America and that was/is paralysis, the country froze as a result of disbelief, it never recovered from the reality of its own inferiority.  Like the Freudian narcissistic, egomaniac patient sprawled out on the Indian-rugged couch wondering why he’s the problem, when everyone around him keeps holding him back; America was never able to get over itself.  It’s a self-professed Empire with ringing bells and glitter from coast to coast, attempting to deify itself and angered at any nation that fails to see the illusion they worked so hard to build for themselves.  They are the psychopath that means to force their superiority complex onto the world.  Nations of the world will lay waste to the military power of the American Corporation Complex; they will be battered, beaten and left beyond all recognition.   

The film along with the book that inspired it, clamped down on the beating pulse of the on-going problem in America.  The film showed these two misguided men as representations of dissention against the new world order of McDonaldization, endless consumerism and globalization as we see it today.  The hippie flower movement failed before it even started with the Timothy Leary’s and the sit-in and sing-alongs.  That generation and this one have very little understanding of the enemy of freedom and opportunity.  The sad state today is that enemy knows us, in most cases, more than we know ourselves.  

They studied us like alien invaders, learning our customs, our strengths and weaknesses.  They’ve learnt about our emotional buttons, dreams and desires.  These alien invaders do not plan to assimilate us into their collective though, they plan to control us through pharmaceutical drugs, endless TV programming, color psychology, meaningless music and a slew of other forms of mind control.  These corporations and governments plan and have already succeeded in manufacturing a populace that embraces their enslavement, because they have been too dumbed-down, too distracted to see the chains anchoring them to the post.   There is this sadness within the oxygen permeating in the air and getting into people’s lungs, creating hallucinations that look dream-like but are in fact nightmares.

“Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.” 

- Robert Kennedy

Robert Kennedy was a speaker for the people and was shot to death in 1968, McGovern in 1972, won the Presidential Democratic Primary election, running on the platform that, if elected president, he had plans on pulling the plug on American military involvement in Vietnam and let the failed war spin down the drain.  Even Al Gore in 2000, represented hope for a new America, imagine if he had won the election; imagine how he would have handled the events of September 11, 2001.  One could certainly argue, had Gore not been cheated out of the election by Bush, 9/11 might not have even happened.  Political leeches like Nixon and Bush are necessary so the evil bankers and power mongers maintain the impaled claws they have dug in the backs of the world’s population.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, along with its drug use and iconoclastic bohemianism, is a profound statement against, maintaining, subservience, control and conformity.  But the real problem is; freedom has its cost, and most people who want, or think they want it, also need a structured society that is for the most part - safe, for them to run amok, or express their individuality.  Here we run into the problem of wanting our cake and eating it too.  

The failure of the sixties and levels of protests today have all parted ways in support for the very system they have fought so hard to crumble.  Maybe that’s realizing that the war between the working people and the aristocracy was already lost, or maybe, and certainly more prevalent today, maybe the people want their Big Mac’s and 500 channels.  Whether it was confabulation or most likely pluralistic ignorance, the people supported what they assumed everyone else supported and didn’t want to say anything otherwise for fear of ostracism.  This is one of the most important issues facing us today, we are afraid to speak out against a ‘norm’ in society because we don’t want to be left out of the group.  The resulting calamity is the treacherous fabricators of war can continue steamrolling over whomever they wish, for their own profit.  As a result of a disruption in their cognitive narrative, the general population of America retreat and seek the comfort of their predictable bubbles while the world destroys itself around them.  The unfortunate thing with this revolution is; truth does not cease to exist when we chose to ignore it.  Peace can never be if we begin by avoiding the reality of why we need it in the first place.  This was likely the forming dark cloud that often rained over the head of Hunter S. Thompson, a man that believed that anything that was worth doing, was worth doing right.

“Psychedelics are almost irrelevant in a town where you can wander in a casino any time in the day or night and witness the crucifixion of a gorilla.”