Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 2, Summer 2000 | Page 105

The Half-Baked Cultural Detective 101 reminiscent of the Wild West (Chandler’s mean streets). With the population explosion of the Western cities from the 1940’s through the 1960’s, the new American frontiersman/noir hero needed to find a new space to conquer or inhabit. With film noir, the frontier shifts from social/public space to psychological/personal space. Fear ami Loathing in Las Vegas reflects the advance of the (now) postmodern American noir frontier, in an era in which social/public space has become indistinguishable from psychological/personal space. Noir has moved from reality to hyper-reality in the postmodern hyper-real city of Las Vegas and has become entrenched in American culture and ideology. Consequently, the American postmodern noir hero becomes a cultural outlaw, stepping outside the assigned boundaries of culture in an attempt remove himself from the pervasiveness of noir. Gonzo Journalism as Postmodern Cultural Detection Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is written in the literary style of the movement known today as the New Journalism (i.e., Nornian Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, and Joan Didion), a product of mid- to late 1960’s American culture. The New Journalists (especially Mailer and Thompson') predominately write in a postmodern style heavily indebted to the wry, personally assertive language of the Hard Boiled Detective Hero and noir hero. The New Journalists asserted private consciousness or personal consciousness as the last stronghold in enchroachingly distorted, noir America, which had become steadily dominated by mass media and popular culture on one side and an oppressive, potentially violent elder generation on the other side. They drew back from attempting to objectively depict the social world and emphasized the cultivation of their own psychologically amplified personalities as purposely distorted frames of reference. Thompson calls his postmodern style ofjournalism, ‘'Gonzo Journalism.” According to Thompson, a Gonzo Journalist must always be a participant in the story that he covers. Effectively, he must have a distancing camera eye that can view himself obtaining the story, while he is obtaining the story. Gonzo Journalism is ultimately a form of deconstruction, where the “story” is portrayed from the framework of the reporter’s own personal subjectivity. The logic of this is based on the acknowledgment of inherent bias in reporting. As Raoul Duke (Thompson’s pseudonym in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) argues, “History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit” (179). Since all stories are subjective, the only worthy reporting is that which acknowledges its own subjectivity and fallibility. Thom pson’s ideal journalist is one who is ultimately aware of how he is (de)constructing his own version of “reality,” which in turn, influences the public’s image of “reality.” In a hyper-real postmodern world, fact and fiction have become confusingly indistinguishable. The world has grown too complex and pervasive for a standard logical detective to make sense of it. In a postmodern world, the