Fear and loathing in las vegas movies123
the newspaper racks made a bad joke of that notion. Even Duke admits that he is looking for "news of the outside world, but. Thompson often uses the news as a way to remind both the reader and his characters about what is happening in the world beyond Duke's drug-addled escapist narrative. The press is a gang of cruel f**gots" (200). He also uses Agnew to illustrate his conflicting feelings about being a member of the press at the end of the novel, saying, "Agnew was right. The lobby fairly reeked of high-grade formica and plastic palm trees - it was clearly a high-class refuge for Big Spenders" (44). He describes the Mint Hotel as "Bob Hope's turf. In Fear and Loathing, Duke often invokes Agnew in an ironic manner, aligning Nixon's VP with images of superficiality, greed, and antagonistic authority figures. He also publicly denounced the American press for overanalyzing president Nixon's words, calling journalists "the unelected elite" and accusing broadcasters of being "hostile critics." Two years after Fear and Loathing was published, Spiro Agnew became the first American VP to resign in disgrace under charges of corruption and tax evasion Nixon followed suit less than a year after that.
During his tenure, Agnew took a vocal stance against liberals and opponents of the Vietnam War. Spiro Agnew was the Greek-American Vice President who served under Richard Nixon from 1969-1973. Ultimately, this motif underlines Duke's countless observations about how diseased American society has become. a Man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident" (204). Duke's references to Alger are pointedly sarcastic at the end of the novel, he describes himself as "a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger. Horatio Alger gone mad on drugs in Las Vegas" (12). So we would have to drum it up on our own. However, he later indicates how the pathway to the American Dream has become convoluted as of late, wondering, "but what was the story? Nobody had bothered to say. When he receives the call for the assignment in Las Vegas, Duke exclaims to his attorney, "This is the American Dream in action! We'd be fools not to ride this strange torpedo all the way out to the end" (11). With this in mind, Duke's references to Alger and the American Dream are heavily ironic. In his study, Weiss referred extensively to Alger’s work, claiming that the novelist is “identified with the golden age of American plutocracy” (48). Only two years before Thompson wrote Fear and Loathing, the scholar Richard Weiss published The American Myth of Success, a scathing critique of the notion that hard work is all that is necessary to succeed in America. Critics also accused him of equating personal fulfillment with material wealth (Weiss). In the 20th century, many scholars argued that Alger’s stories glossed over the dramatic economic inequalities of Gilded-Age America. His work is often associated with the concept of the 'American Dream' because his heroes are rewarded for their hard work with happy nuclear families and a solid place in the middle class.
Alger was a 19th century American novelist who is best known for his stories about young boys working hard to lift themselves out of poverty. Horatio Alger and the American Dream form an ongoing motif throughout Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Buy Study Guide The American Dream/Horatio Alger (Motif)