TheodoreRoosevelt said:
Any movie that tries to simulate a drug trip is horrible, and just a product of inept writers.
It is?
TheodoreRoosevolt said:
It's the same as doing a dream sequence in a movie - writers do it because they have no clue how to end the movie or make it meaningful, so they turn it into a dream/trip sequence.
That's a major generalisation.
Fear and Loathing is a drug movie, representation of drug trips happen throughout. I doubt that they are used because the writers didn't know how to end the movie, or because they didn't know how to make it meaningful, or even because they were "inept".
I'd like to know why a movie can't be about drugs? Does there have to be something more? Drugs seem like a plenty expansive enough topic to cover.
As I see it, the meaning of Fear and Loathing is chaos. The meaning is that there is no meaning. But Raoul is on a constant search to find it. A couple of lines stood out in regards to this:
Raoul Duke:
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.
Raoul Duke:
We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled that 60's. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "consciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously... 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 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.
Notice how the movie gets more and more incoherent, and makes less and less sense as it progresses. Finally peaking right near the end of the movie when Raoul is in the hotel room, having flashbacks, which are presented in a way that conveys nonsense and a building sense of impending chaos (eg. it starts with a conversation in a bar about purchasing an ape, and after a few more progressively more intense flash backs, suddenly he is running into the same bar while it seems to be collapsing screaming "where's the ape?".)
To say that 'drug trips were just used because the writers didn't know how to put meaning into the story', is kinda either missing the point of the movie, or getting it in an odd sort of way.