Stupid Dreams
I am watching a very inspirational movie called A Million Miles Away that was just released. It is a 2023 movie about Jose Hernandez (born 1962 and played by Michael Pena), the migrant farm worker who grew up in the Imperial Valley of California into a hard-working migrant farm family and went on to become an engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Labs, working on laser technology, all the while pursuing his dream to be an astronaut by applying year after year for the NASA astronaut program. On his twelfth annual application, he goes personally to Houston to deliver his application to the head of the program and is asked what is different this time. He explains that as a holder of a Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering, he has done everything in his career to conform to the space program. He became a trained pilot, a certified scuba diver, a marathoner and more. And, yes, he got accepted that time into the astronaut training program, but that was just the beginning. As you can imagine, the program is designed to sort out the very best from all the rest with an emphasis on the muscle memory needed to handle any emergency that comes up in space. It is a rigorous program that requires not only Jose’s sacrifice but the sacrifice by his wife and family while he pursues his dream. He finally realized his dream by flying on the Space Shuttle mission STS-128 in 2009. From the time he met his wife, whenever he and she talked about her dream of opening a restaurant and his dream of becoming an astronaut, Jose would always say that his dreams were stupid. He was ashamed to have such a childish goal as to go into space.
This afternoon we went to LaJolla Playhouse, the best theater in the area on the campus of UCSD. We went to see The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical, which we had seen in workshop at the LaJolla Playhouse earlier this year. Kim has a cabaret friend, Lorinda, who has a pretty significant role in the show. We were anxious to see the full production since we enjoyed the workshop so much. After seeing the workshop production I was outspoken, telling people that I thought that this Joe Iconis musical has the potential to become the next Hamilton. The music is rousing (very 60s/70s), the lyrics are spot on and the story is perfectly tuned to these times since it is about that moment 50 years ago when our country was struggling with the divisiveness of the counterculture versus the Nixon Republicans. That strikes me as the perfect historical basis for addressing today’s dilemma without hitting it directly. The Hunter S. Thompson and the Richard M. Nixon characters play off against one another like Alexander Hamilton and King George III. All of the reviews so far have been very strong and from our conversation with Lorinda after the show, its clear that everyone on the cast is holding their collective breath in hopes of the show having its option picked up to go to Broadway, like so many other LaJolla Playhouse successes have. So far, it has outperformed any other LaJolla Playhouse debut, so the odds look strong.
As I watched the show for the second time and listened to all the dialogue and lyrics closely, I realized that the show is really about stupid dreams. The dream that Hunter had as a kid was to be able to write like F. Scott Fitzgerald. He retyped the entirety of The Great Gatsby just to see what it felt like to write such amazing prose. As he strives for his very conventional dream, he does it in an entirely unconventional way, the Gonzo way. The definition of Gonzo journalism is that it puts the author at the center of the story, contrary to the traditional objective of objective journalism, and not only did Hunter S. Thompson invent it, he perfected the genre. His most famous book was Fear and Loathing in las Vegas, and then there’s The Rum Diary, Hell’s Angels, Where the Buffalo Roam and Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72, based on a compilation of his articles published about the 1972 presidential campaign in Rolling Stone magazine. And his stories are not stories on their own (except perhaps Hell’s Angels, which predates his Kentucky Derby discovery of his Gonzo style), but are really extensions of the Hunter S. Thomson mystique and whacked-out history. That’s a history that’s all about his dreams and ignoring or belittling the dreams of others.
That becomes the real story of Hunter S. Thompson, not the story of the countercultural icon for whom books, movies and plays are written, but about the man who let his rather stupid dream get in the way of his life. It makes me really think. You see, I too want very much to write great prose and tell great stories, but I can’t get enthused about adopting a Gonzo style. My writing is personal to be sure, I can’t seem to avoid linking my stories to things I have experienced, but I don’t think I take it to the extreme of putting myself into the middle of the story and assuming the role as the primary protagonist. In fact, I always prefer the third party voice of the observer and often struggle with the admonition made to most fiction writers to show and not tell. I admit to wanting to tell more often than show. Hunter S. Thompson was the quintessential show-man (pun intended). And in his wake he left his wife, his son and even his grandson. Nothing survived the quest for his dream, not even the dream itself. At one point, after repeatedly ignoring letters from a young fan, he reads one of the letters only to find that its from a young man not unlike the young Hunter, who takes the time to retype the entirety of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, just to know what it feels like to write such great prose.
In the early days Hunter S. Thompson was the genuine article and original in his outlook and approach, but after years of doing countercultural battle, as epitomized by his very personal duel with Richard M. Nixon, he reverted to form and became just another celebrity journalist who eventually sold out in his own way. In fact, it seems more than coincidental that both Thomson and Nixon thought so highly of themselves that they insisted in being known by their full names with middle initials included. The Nixon character in the play makes a point of telling us and Hunter that they are not so very different except that he, Nixon, would go down in history as more memorable than Thompson regardless of how history would think about him. It is hard to understand someone who lets his dreams overtake his sense of right and wrong. That may be the ultimate definition of stupid dreams.