For Good Or Ill...

I only seem to go to the GFT for documentaries these days, the last time was for Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten and I went back yesterday for another featuring a now dead, dissolute hero, Gonzo: The Life And Work Of Hunter S. Thompson. I've been immersed in the man's writing again lately, getting through two volumes of his copious and sprawling letters. I don't know if it's possible to have a balanced view of such an unhinged personality, this film, made up of the man's own words didn't attempt to question the myth, rather to put it in historical context and highlight the impact of Thompson's political journalism.
In front of me in the cinema was a big, bald bloke dressed in aloha shirt, hunting vest, shorts and very possibly white Chuck Taylor Converse... which reminded me of the Doonesbury which marked the Doktor's passing...
Tom Woolf has his white suit, and Thompson found himself becoming the Fear And Loathing character Raoul Duke and acting in the depraved way people expected him to, his notoriety destroying the possibility of continuing as a serious journalist.
It all proves that heroic failure (Thompson idolised F Scott Fitzgerald and wanted to write the Great American Novel, but never managed it. In failing, he created Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, a work that no one else could have written, and which he spent the remainder of his career trying to outrun) is far more interesting (at least to me) than a story of high achieving success. As usual, Philip French is more elliquent than I could possibly be on the subject.