Until a week ago I had never viewed actual footage of Hunter S. Thompson but I’d seen photos: a stony face and a cynical pair of eyes staring out from behind purple shades, his shoulders draped with the Stars and Strips, while the shelf behind is adorned with snake skulls and ox skulls and a Bowie knife or two. I’d bought in into the Great Hunter S. Myth. I imagined that the man himself would be somewhat like the image that emerges from his psychedelically-charged writings: a drunken stoned madman who has just enough insanity to see and write the truth about the rise and, more importantly the fall, of modern America. Perhaps he didn’t take as many drugs in real-time as he did in narrative-time, but I imagined him possessing the same free and energetic spirit as his famous literary creation, Raoul Duke. So when I received a brown paper parcel all the way from Basalt, Colorado, whose contents turned out to be Wayne Ewing’s little-seen documentary, Breakfast with Hunter I was all eyes and ears. The title promised an intimate look into Thompson’s life. Breakfast is about the most intimate meal you can have with someone: it suggests you’ve either stayed overnight, or arrived at a time when only family and friends would normally appear. I imagined sitting there at the table with Thompson drinking coffees or perhaps whiskeys, perhaps both, and catching glimpses of what makes one of America’s most famous cult writers tick.

The most interesting thing aspect of Ewing’s Breakfast with Hunter, however, is that in trying to consciously perpetuate the myth of Hunter S., Ewing manages to dispel it. From the film’s first image which shows Thompson pulling up to the Viper Room in a large convertible that reminded me of the Great Red Shark that cruised through the pages of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, we get a sense of a man who seems to be trying hard, too hard, to live up the image he created of himself in his writings. Ewing makes a half-hearted effort to generate a rough, on-the-spot, catch-the-craziness-as-it-happens visual style, an effort which consists of little more than swinging his camera wildly from one person to another in the midst of conversations. But nothing Ewing does behind the camera, and certainly none of Thompson’s self-conscious antics in front of the camera, manage to dispel the sense of a somewhat shallow deception. The Thompson we see sitting on stage in the Viper Room with Johnny Depp, surrounded by groups of devotees who shower him with praise, carrying around a perennial glass of whiskey which never seems to be drunk, and attempting to answer questions from audiences or simply talking to others, is surprisingly inarticulate, I would even say surprisingly empty of original ideas. Perhaps he took more drugs than I thought -- he certainly seems as though he would need a long runway to achieve takeoff, to achieve the kind of energetic outpouring that is so characteristic of his written work, a chaotic outpouring that prompted Bill Cardoso of the Boston Sunday Globe to describe a piece Thompson had written as, "...pure Gonzo!". Cardoso borrowed this term for ‘the last man standing after a drinking contest’ from South Boston Irish slang. ‘Gonzo’ described the man who drank more than his comrades, the man who went further and didn’t pass out, in short, the man who was left to tell the tale cause he’d been there to witness every last bit of it. Perhaps Thompson is such a man, or was such a man. Perhaps there are two Thompson’s: one who existed in the past, and one who remains in the present like one of those cast off shells washed up on the beach that the living animal has long since vacated. Or more likely, there is a Thompson that only emerges in fiction, and that needs to be artificially constructed and supported to exist in reality. Breakfast with Hunter documents the strange sight of a fictitious being tying to exist in the real world, and Thompson has the ungainly and awkward appearance of a spaceman trying to move whilst encumbered by the artificial environment of his suit. Perhaps we do occasionally glimpse the real Thompson, as in a scene towards the end of Breakfast with Hunter, where Thompson is sitting in a hotel room surrounded by guests, and in a rare, brief moment of silence, seems somewhat sad, dejected and uncertain. Perhaps Breakfast with Hunter does, in the end, offer us an intimate glimpse of Thompson even if it is not the glimpse the Ewing wants us to see. And this is what can make documentaries so fascinating to watch: in attempting to document reality they often reveal that the most they can achieve is an artificially-constructed representation. And in attempting to construct a particular representation of reality they often reveal that through the cracks, as it were, another representation, which they neither selected nor wished for, seeps in. After Breakfast with Hunter I sat down and re-watched Terry Gilliam’s film version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) with its hallucinatory visual style composed of swirling camera movements, bright lights, off-kilter colour schemes, and a Las Vegas that seems a kind of lucid rubbery dreamland. I never realized before just how closely Johnny Deep had observed Hunter S. Thompson’s mannerisms and how deftly he imitated them. And in the end, the Strange and Terrible truth that came swooping and screeching and diving down upon me like one those goddamn bats with razor sharp claws was that Johnny Depp played Thompson better than Thompson played himself.

Postscript: When I finished writing this review I went out to a press screening. I returned home to hear on the late night news that Hunter S. Thompson had died from what they called, in the carefully-chosen ever-diplomatic non-committal language of Australian news reportage, "a self-inflicted gunshot wound". It made me reflect on Thompson, not just as I’d seen him in Breakfast with Hunter, but beyond the bounds of that documentary. Whatever Hunter S. Thompson was or was not in his own life, he was one hell of a writer. He could write himself into a place that was somewhere between decadence and profundity, and when he did it was, as Bill Cardoso noted all those years ago, "pure Gonzo"

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