***Channeling Doctor Gonzo- Hunter Thompson’s Where The Buffalo Roam  

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin

Where The Buffalo Roam, starring Bill Murray, Peter Boyle,   

Frank Jackman thought it was ironic how many times that he had been investigating for pieces that he wanted to write kind of came full circle. You know checking something out in one context and then having that same thing turn up in another. Like when you are thinking about a word or a song and a couple of days later they turn up in the newspaper or on the radio. Stuff like that. Frank had recently finished a sketch about the old days in his neighborhood of North Adamsville (that’s in Massachusetts) where he used to have a growing up love/hate relationship with the biker scene, you know hard ass, hard living motorcycle guys out of the Hell’s Angels mode who wreaked havoc around his town. He liked their outlawry, their rebellion but was ultimately repelled by their savage destructiveness and nihilism (to speak nothing of the fact that he could not handle the power of a serious bike like an Indian or a Harley).

Of course any serious investigation into the notorious biker scene back in the 1960s when they were seen as just a little less dangerous that the red menace coming out of the Soviet Union and its fellow-travelers here then had to include a perusal of the late Doctor Hunter Thompson’s in-depth rather definitive journalistic study, Hell’s Angels, which included getting very up close and personal with a few of the dudes. The ironic part came later when a friend of his, Peter Markin, whom he had met in San Francisco back in the  1967 summer of love days there called him up, or sent him an e-mail, he couldn’t remember which asking Frank to go over to his Cambridge digs and talk about the old days in the 1960s when revolution was in the air, when the two of them had been part of a mass movement to “turn the world upside down,” and had been defeated by the dead-enders who had all the guns, the prisons, the legal system, the governmental power, and used them to the fullest to thwart that search for a “newer world.” Both recognized that defeat, whether one called it a political defeat like Frank did or like Peter  a military defeat, led to what is now a forty plus year rearguard action against the bastards who took over and have made those kindred angels pay dearly for their hubris.

One of the “parlor games” that Frank and Peter had played over the years was to date the time when the bubble burst on the counter-culture’s efforts to bring forth that newer world although their theories are not germane here. What is germane in this mix though is that earlier Hunter Thompson reference. See not only did Hunter write serious and humorous, jabbing humorous, words about the Hell’s Angels but he was a moving force via the start-up Rolling Stone magazine behind the “new journalism,” behind what became known later when time came for naming such things, “gonzo” journalism, and hence his moniker of Doctor Gonzo. To kind of wrap things together here, to make the irony, Frank after reading what Thompson had to say about bikers as was his way when something appealed to him read everything he could get his hands on by the man and Hunter became something of a muse, a now long gone lamented muse. Although they were a million miles apart politically Frank enjoyed reading Hunter’s stuff for some general insights into the absurdities of bourgeois culture by a man who definitely knew how to skewer his victims. Relished it in fact. And that brings us full circle because one night, not the first night that Frank and Peter started cutting up touches about old days but later, Peter had ordered a copy of the Hunter Thompson-centered Where The Buffalo Roam to spark some memories of the times and the man.                  

While there is no need to discuss Markin’s or Jackman’s views on when the high tide of the 1960s ebbed Thompson’s is important, at least according to Frank, since one of the episodes in that semi-autobiographical film sketch, part true, part fiction deals with the 1972 presidential campaign where one Richard M. Nixon, sitting President of the United States swamped his opponent, Senator George McGovern, swamped him without regard to all the illegal activity he commanded in his efforts to win. This is Hunter’s ebb point, the point where the downhill slide worked its way down further. So it is no accident that the period which the film covers is between 1968 when all hell broke out here in America with the Chicago police riots in the summer of 1968 at the Democratic National Convention, broke out in Europe with the May Days in Paris, and most importantly broke out in Vietnam where the heroic DNV/NLF troops rained hell on everybody with the Tet offensive that signaled that the Vietnam war was unwinnable and the ebb 1972. This is also the period when Thompson made his mark as a gonzo journalist (again mostly through his hot and cold relationship with the management of Rolling Stone), perfected his skills as an active part of the stories he was covering.   

Obviously when a journalist is living out in edge city, when his whole illegal life-style (illegal not just in the technical sense of violating various drug laws, and other high crimes and misdemeanors but illegal as a model for behavior which those dead-enders hated even worse than the drugs and a life-style which if copied would create quite a sea-change) is on display in public, as a public actor the line between fact and fiction best be blurred. Deniability becomes the beginning of wisdom so it was never clear in his books, or in this film where fact and fiction worked out.  Most of the episodes in this loosely plotted film have a half-life in something that he wrote like the Democratic National Convention of 1972, Super Bowl 1972, and the like.

The central device used in the film is a flashback by mad monk Hunter now ensconced in in cozy Woody Creek (where the buffalo roam, or did) trying to meet another frenzied magazine dead-line, an article about his lawyer/comrade/soul-mate and kindred mad monk hell-raiser Carlos Lazlo. Lazlo whose whereabouts at the time of writing are unknown, although he is presumed dead, probably either by some  drug cartel or some third world security agency who did not like the idea of a revolution in their country by a certified mad monk. But all of that is speculation. What is not speculation is Hunter’s detailing of their friendship from Lazlo’s use of his legal education to fight for the “newer day” defending street kids being busted for personal dope use which wound up costing Lazlo his license to practice and his freedom and to the trip that would become the novel Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas to the Super Bowl story to the 1972 presidential story to his going over the edge, going to a place Hunter now endowed with celebrity did not, or could not, go. In the end Hunter missed the brown buffalo, just like in the end Frank Jackman missed his muse, warts and all.