How Hunter S. Thompson’s Perceived Persona Overshadowed His Real Self
Video essayist Pursuit of Wonder examined the life of legendary Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, noting how Thompson's perceived persona overshadowed his true self. The narrator talks about Thompson's difficult childhood, his brief criminal stints in high school, his first journalism job, and embedding with the Hell's Angels, a project that came to a violent yet prosperous end.
This all came to a head however when Thompson tried to stop one of the Hell's Angels from beating his wife and dog. Thompson told this individual Only a punk beats his wife and dog." This as one might imagine, didn't go over very well and resulted in a broken rib and badly beaten face for Thompson. When the novel came out however, titled Hell's Angels", it was also a huge hit.
From this experience, however, Thompson became completely disillusioned with US politics, counterculture, and the innate cruelty in most people, not unlike what he saw with the Hells Angels.
Thompson...was critical of the ineptitudes and hypocrisies on all sides... Perceptively he saw the incoming consequences of the failed subcultures and political disarray. ...Thompson said I think one of the most important things is to recognize that we do have this mounting violence in us and then to find the reasons. Once you find that it's like curing a boil."
By adding drugs into the mix, Thompson discovered his unique Gonzo" writing style, as was revealed in the novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
The piece seeks to recount real events with real people and real experiences for the purposes of real journalistic insights. But it places the weight of firsthand experience and imaginative sensibilities equally on the scale of truth. It puts Thompson's imaginative perspective in the story central to it. This literary style would come to be known as Gonzo journalism, which was coined and based on Thompson's work.
Thompson's incredible story came to an end in 2005 when he put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.
It is often said that there's a fine line between genius and crazy. And it can perhaps be said that Hunter S Thompson snorted that line. He livedwith both the chaos courage and depravity that he wrote about. He indulged in the excess. He was a product of the American dream and thus an embodiment of it. And if his story his American dream couldn't be any more poetically American it ended with a gun.
