What is Born in the Wake of Death

I also watched Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas again recently. I was thinking it could work as a good companion piece to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. It helps that they're both buddy films. It's also fitting given that Terry Gilliam, Fear and Loathing's director, was a mentor to Quentin Tarantino, Once Upon a Time's director. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood portrays an America at the point of a loss of innocence and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is set in the aftermath. You can throw The Wicker Man in between and maybe preface the group with Terry Southern movies like Candy, The Magic Christian and Easy Rider. Maybe Vanishing Point would fit in. I should programme a film festival.

Another theme could also be Las Vegas. You could show Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with Showgirls and Twin Peaks: The Return. Too bad Kyle MacLachlan's not in Fear and Loathing or it could be a Kyle MacLachlan in Las Vegas festival. I've always thought it would be fun to pair Honeymoon in Vegas and Leaving Las Vegas for a Nick Cage/Las Vegas double feature.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas would work as the epilogue. It has Hunter S. Thompson's narration delivered by Johnny Depp ruminating on the fundamental change in American culture at the end of the '60s, represented by the Manson killings in Tarantino's movie and by the culture of Las Vegas in Gilliam's. When the spirit of transgression is deprived of the spirit of love and benevolence. You could add in Winstanley to show how similar the phenomenon was to England in the 1640s and 1650s. But perhaps no other culture was so burdened by postmodernism as America was. But maybe postmodernism is just another way of saying self awareness. The rage of Caliban seeing himself in the glass, to borrow a phrase from Oscar Wilde. Though in Fear and Loathing's case it's horror. Or, well, fear and loathing.