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Popular Culture Review
In keeping with this view, Gilliam uses television and television sets as
a leitmotif adapting and extending Thompson’s critique of the culture industry.
The “schiz-flows,” as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari term them, that
simulacra, like TV and Las Vegas, are meant to reify into “reality” can be
exposed by Duke’s drug-inspired schizophrenia that then works to upset the
simulacrum’s efforts at control and deterrence. As, for example, when under the
influence of a drug called “adrenachrome,” Duke watches a television sequence
that begins with a science fiction movie with an image of a giant spider followed
by a speech by President Nixon addressing his audience as “the great silent
majority.” Such incoherent contrasts are the lifeblood of the televisual flow that
disappears before our eyes as “programming.” This programmed hallucination is
short circuited when Duke’s drug-fueled hallucination blacks out the TV screen
encircling Nixon’s head that then emerges from the TV set as holograms
repeating the word “sacrifice.” Duke’s hallucination deprograms Nixon’s
televised image that works to keep the majority of its viewers silent, in a state of
preprogrammed non-response.
While the medium of drugs can upset the simulacrum, its hallucinations
are prone to the same isolation, paranoia, and schizoid violence that characterize
the simulacrum. Ultimately, Gilliam is unable to coherently resolve this
ambivalence, illustrated by two soliloquies Duke gives, one at the middle and
one at the end of the film. In the first soliloquy, we are in a fiilly nostalgic mode.
Duke reminisces about the “great San Francisco acid wave” of the sixties which
he describes as “a very special time and place” that is essentially impossible to
explain. Accompanying his narrative, the soundtrack plays the Youngbloods’
Flower Power anthem “Get Together” along with a montage of civil rights and
anti-war protests and followed by an open-air concert where Hell’s Angels
dance alongside vibrant and semi-naked youngsters sporting peace signs.
Gilliam’s depiction of people coming together to form a community wiio shared,
in Duke’s words, “[a] sense of the inevitable victory over the forces of Old and
Evil” is even further removed from historical comprehension than Thompson’s.
In a passage from the novel that is left out of Duke’s soliloquy in the movie,
Thompson writes:
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but
even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely
reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a
whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for
reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which
never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened. (6.7)
Thompson’s passage asserts that the kind of energy that characterized the sixties
can occur “every now and then” whereas the movie denies even this possibility.