𝓦𝓱𝓮𝓻𝓮 𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓰𝓵𝓸𝓼𝓼 𝔀𝓸𝓷'𝓽 𝓬𝓸𝓶𝓮 𝓸𝓯𝓯
Duke at the Flamingo in Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
𝓣he flooded hotel room glowing a strange pink in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), shimmers in my mind's eye. Chronicling the free-wheeling journey of Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo, Fear and Loathing is the story of the pair’s drug-induced explorations of Las Vegas. Allegedly traveling for journalistic purposes, Duke spends a significant proportion of the film in hotel rooms or urgently slipping out of them. At the Flamingo Hotel, surrounded by the debris of his indulgences, he seems for a brief moment to be fully at home. This ‘being at home’, however, is fleeting; Duke quickly moves on, leaving the room service bill and the floating mementoes to his hallucinatory night behind.
Fear and Loathing is, among other things, a loose-fingered post-Beatnik critique of the American dream turned Hollywood. The allure of the free road and the unmediated self – the narrator unabashedly trawling through his psyche and indulgences – is given renewed gloss in its filmic version. Based on Hunter S. Thompson’s story of the same name, Fear and Loathing enjoys a similar cultish canonisation to its textual counterpart, and posters of the film adorn the student rooms of many a humanities bro. Whilst the acid-tripping Duke and Dr. Gonzo might ostensibly be seen to be digging deeper, getting to the heart of things and opening those all-too abstract Doors of Perception beneath the shine of the commodity-driven dream, I’m primarily thinking about the very gloss of the surface they seek to get beyond. The neon-white The Mint that shines brightly in the night sky as they arrive in Las Vegas, the chrome Beverly Hills Hotel sign that forms the background to Duke and Dr. Gonzo’s first bill evasion, and the glowing, saturated colour of the flooded Flamingo room in which Duke finally begins to write. The veneer and polish of these hotel rooms, despite the pair’s most indulgent efforts at destruction, retain a gloss that won’t come off.
Duke and Dr. Gonzo leave the Beverly Hills Hotel.
This insistent gloss is common to most hotels, and is part of the tension of hospitality that they evoke. This gloss is like lacquer on a wooden surface, a shimmering quality that resists your gaze from fully seeing the object itself, a layer that distances you from the thing itself yet never fully functioning as a separate material quality. Hotels invite us to claim them as our own private spaces yet will bear no trace of our presence after we leave. We are only temporarily reflected in the gloss we seek to see through, settle into. For me, the hotel scenes in Fear and Loathing epitomise this strange de/reflecting qualities, this hospitality that is simultaneously hostile, as both Jacques Derrida and Michel Serres suggest (in 'Hostipitality' and The Parasite, respectively). The rug is always clean, the bar is always stocked, and the bed is always made. It matters little how much mess you make. You seek to feel at home, but the home will never be yours.
To host is to define a relation of power in which both the host and the guest are held hostage in their respective identities (Derrida, 9). The guest is also the stranger, but an appropriate stranger, one who sufficiently accedes to the routines and regulations of the host, one who is always bound by the hospitality extended to them. In Fear and Loathing, we watch Duke pass himself off as Frank to check in at the Mint Hotel, nervously babbling as the clerk turns into an eel. The host in turn is bound by the hospitality they are socially obliged to offer, a hospitality that holds the guest on the boundary between stranger and friend, a hospitality predicated upon a relation of appropriate distance. The eel-clerk is part of the abstracted host that is the hotel, a host whose hospitality is clearly temporally bounded (and priced accordingly). The abstracted host of the hotel is one whose home is all the glossier for the fact that nobody permanently lives there.
The clerk turns into an eel at the Mint Hotel.
Abstract and still present, the hotel exerts regulations in part through the collective imaginary of its guest-strangers. We watch the Mint’s bar clientele transform into reptiles, as Dr. Gonzo rushes Duke off to the room in an effort to not reveal their human otherness. There, they indulge in a wild night of drugs and order hundreds of dollars worth of room service. The uniformed staff puncture the temporary feeling of being at home with their demands for signed bills and worried glances around the increasingly destroyed room. Derrida suggests that hospitality is a state of ‘should-be’ rather than ‘being’; a conditional and very much liminal state (8). This inability to move beyond the binary of host/guest and enter into a mutual state of commonality, is brought out in the ways Duke and Dr. Gonzo operate in the Mint. They might destroy their suite entirely, flagrantly disregarding conventions of behaviour, but their disregard is contained to their room. They move through the lobby fearfully, and ultimately sneak out without paying their bills, avoiding the conclusive ritual of gratitude or payment for the hosting they made home in.
There is a rhythm of escape and expulsion in Fear and Loathing. A constant leaving, as it were, from one temporary host to the next. Arrivals and departures at a hotel are timed, and the levels of our welcome are contingent on our abilities to blend in or pay up. Serres, like Derrida, plays with the doubleness of the French hôte, which means both host and guest. Whilst Derrida suggests that this relationship, hôte à hôte, is both inherently liminal, a holding one at the doorway, and underpinned by a distinction between self and other, Serres is more interested in the ongoing chain of relations, where each hôte becomes a hôte for the next (14).
This kind of unfurling endlessness, which Serres goes on to term the relation of the parasite, might be a means of thinking beyond the notion of the stranger to whom the host is obligated and the implications of this binary identification. For Serres, “to parasite means to eat next to”; to recognise the intersubjectivity of relations and the ways that objects define subjects as much as subjects define objects (7-9). The shape of the spoon gives form to how one eats, and so too, the defining of the stranger-guest forms the identity of the subject, and subjected-to, host. Key to Serres’ thought is that each parasite is always in turn parasited upon.
Our cultural imaginaries of what good hosting is bound by, is in part shaped by the hotels that host us. In turn, as we seek to live out our dreams of luxury, we are parasites of these hosts, asking them to take form in accordance with our imaginaries. Hotels, in this, become beholden to - or hosted by - the very subjects they were hosting. And our cultural imaginaries, should they lean now to a hospitality less rooted in a commoditised consumer/provider binary, might loop forward to a shimmering space in which hôte à hôte à hôte à hôte emerges.
Before this happens, to be hosted comfortably is perhaps to look and act wilfully askance, to accept the gloss for what it is and revel in its gleam. At the Flamingo Hotel, Duke checks in under his real name and the balance of power shifts. The clerk is on his side as he cuts in front of an increasingly livid fellow customer, and he makes himself sufficiently at home in the room to expel Dr. Gonzo’s guest, a hotel maid and the boy who delivers room service. By daybreak, he has flooded the room as he peaceably writes the newspaper article that prompted their travel to Las Vegas. These are the scenes that shimmer for me, that convey something more elusive than the heavy-handed symbolism of the American flag that Duke drapes in every hotel room he subsequently destroys. The American dream he is supposedly both losing and chasing, conveyed through this flag, is one that refuses to host him.
The Flamingo, during another wild night.
In these pink-tinted moments of excess at the Flamingo, the balance is held between the alienating gloss of the host-hotel and the nomadic dustiness of the stranger-guest. The encounter’s inherently temporary nature is captured in the assortment of plates and mementoes that now float in the flooded room. Floating, beholden to, parasiting on. The pink gleam of dawn that casts through the ripped curtains onto this high water is glossy, glossy in a way that almost allows Duke to finally become the host.
And perhaps, in that askance moment of brevity, he does. No longer beholden to the conventions of a bygone era, one that had already stopped making sense in the 1970s, but instead holding them hostage to his dreams of gloss. And perhaps, in our askance appreciation of this dream of gloss, we too might become both beings, unbounded from binary relations, parasitically unfurling, hôte à hôte à hôte à hôte -
The Flamingo, flooded, while Duke writes.
References
Derrida, Jacques. ‘Hostipitality,’ Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities 5:3 (2000), p.3-18. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Directed by Terry Gilliam. Lionsgate Films, 1997.
Serres, Michel. The Parasite, Translated by Lawrence R. Schehr. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1982.