Fear, Loathing and a Tangential Exploration of the Unknown
I may be off-base here, but I would surmise that the members of my generation (the ubiquitous 18-24 sect) will remember the dearly demised doctor through one of two mediums – comic strips and film. Not being well versed in Doonesbury, I’ll instead touch upon what Robert Mitchum on Pitchfork wrote: “the cultural distortion of his personality into a grinning Johnny Depp gripping a cigarette holder between his teeth and popping mescaline.” No doubt many of my contemporaries and peers will have that cinematic image imprinted into our collective minds. Anyone worth his weight in mescaline will gleefully recall the immortal words first uttered in the film (and printed in the book): We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.
Chemical dependencies aside, cultural distortion, when used above, certainly raises some interesting questions. Has Depp created a situation where art imitates life so successfully that it actually supersedes the source? When we think of the words “godfather” and “mafia”, is not the first image that materialises in our craniums a mumbling Marlon Brando?
But what about life imitating art? In Tennessee, two boys were arrested for re-enacting an admittedly violent video game – Grand Theft Auto. Out of sheer boredom, the boys aged 13 and 15, decided to shoot at real vehicles on a real highway, and ultimately, resulting in a real death. Or what about the hyperbolic vitriol spewed forth by groups in the US over Spongebob Squarepants and the promotion of accepting homosexuality (as far as I can discern, the original complaint stems from the fact that Sponge and his male starfish pal, Patrick, are seen holding hands). If these fools are to argue that a single instance of cartoon character can, and will, influence children, my only question would be: where were you all when really appalling behaviour is being broadcast? Where were the howls of outrage when grown men and women (read: people our children should be looking up to) are forced to consume animal testicles and jump off cliffs for cash?
Of course, the cultural phenomenon of voyeurism is so abrasively amped up several notches in the Far East. Thanks to the wonders of piracy and the Internet, I had the “pleasure” of viewing a particularly grotesque form of torture. Not the graphic humiliation of school girls in pornographic snuff films though; what I witnessed was a televised event broadcast in Japan. Given my rusty handle on the language, and the half-baked interpretation I received, the story unfolds like so:
Two years ago, at the start of the Nippon Professional Baseball Season, two television comedians made a wager on whose team would win the league. The loser of this particular bet would undergo the greatest public humiliation known to mankind – for 23 minutes, the winner will essentially “own” the loser. Whatever the winner says, the loser must do, without protesting or reacting.
His punishment arrives in the form of the cream-pie-in-the-face-gag. What starts out as an innocent joke (a cream pie for every minute passed), quickly escalates into pure mob rule. Laughing and giggling the entire time, his tormentors proceed to throw that single rule out the window, and pelt the loser at choice moments. When he’s told to light a cigarette. When he’s told to fetch the newspaper. When he’s told to sit on the can. A particularly awful segment involved the loser being ordered to take a shower, only to be met with fresh pies to the head, chest and groin. The final blow was served by the winner himself, as the loser, naked and pinned to his bed by a group of men, pleads for mercy.
Ouch.
While I do cringe at the whole debacle, I must tip my hat to the winner for devising the entire spectacle. “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” Oh, how true you were Doctor, how true you were.
Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, 1937 – 2005.
