A Slight Detour Into Hunter Thompson

Fear And Loathing In Gonzovision '78  is more a curiosity than anything else, a BBC mini-documentary shot in the late 70s.  If you've seen the posthumous Hunter S. Thompson doc Gonzo, then you've already seen a lot of this footage before.  But the original film is interesting on its own for a few simple reasons.  First, it happens to catch a formidable literary figure right on the cusp of a descent into self-parody and relative obscurity, and it depicts him fully aware of being on the cusp, grappling with what it,  trying to formulate some way out of the trap of his (self-constructed) public persona.  Also, it's just always interesting to see gritty, unvarnished footage of a legendary character in his element and in his own time.  It's just a nice reminder that the people you know through books and media, who exist mainly as avatars in your own mind, free-floating and near-god-like, were actual human beings, living flesh and blood in their own present, a concrete physical world that hemmed them in and defined them, no matter what sort of immortality their great creative works have achieved.

The most famous citation from Hunter S. Thompson is the great elegaic passage from Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas where he describes the high water mark of the 60s and then the ineluctable breaking of the wave.  One can't help but think that Thompson, the greatest chronicler of that wave there ever was, was also tragically bound up in it, riding it and describing its every pitch and roll.   So that when it did finally break, and he was left wiped out on the shore, what else was there for him to do but let the tide carry him out again, into oblivion?