Thompson, Hunter S.. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. New York, NY: Warner Books, 1985.
Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan is, indeed, largely based on Thompson's infamous diary of the Nixon vs. McGovern presidential election of 1972. The players are all there.
The Beast is clearly Nixon. Thompson goes off, in at least a few places, on fantastical descriptions of the then sitting American President, calling him "a drooling, red-eyed beast with the legs of a man and the head of a giant hyena" (417). McGovern being forced to drop his running mate, Tom Eagleton, over Eagleton's effective refusal to come clean about his psychological history (shock therapy, pills proscribed to his wife, a history of depression and anxiety), matches up with Garry "The Smiler" Callahan's's brief running mate, Josh Freeh, literally grown in a vat so that he had no past, whom The Smiler is forced to drop. Bob Heller even somewhat resembles McGovern's main rival in the Democratic elections, George Wallace, whose 'man of the people' persona contained no small amount of racist invective, by Thompson's description. Then there are the obvious similarities between Spider and Hunter, the constant (and creative) swearing, the stunning drug use, the health problems, a radical presentation of a revolting world in their writing, even Thompson's penchant for having guard dogs parallels the Filthy Assistants and their 'attack wombs' (Spider's feminine translation of his own 'journalist gonads').
But past those elements, the stories are very different, and claims that Transmet is 'merely' a sci-fi version of Fear and Loathing proove to be superficial indeed. One suspects that anyone making that claim has either not read one or the other books, or did read them both and didn't pay any attention to them. Several years ago I had the eye-opening experience of reading Tolkien's refutation of the old "Lord of the Rings = World War II" critique of his fantastic epic (contained in the Forward to its revised edition). He rejects that reading on the facts, citing just how different his story is than the Second World War, but ends his description with a note of critical openness that I'd been taught to believe was uncharacteristic of Tolkien's academic era. The differences he cites destroy the notion of an allegorical reading of LotR, but he also remarks that he "cordially dislikes allegory," as both a literary tool and a critical one, and prefers, instead, analogy, active comparison rather than simple 1:1 relations. He rejects the notion that his book just is a fantasy re-telling of WWII, but also leaves open the idea that it could be read next to WWII, read analogously, read as comparison, read as commentary, read as (my personal theory) the way that perhaps Tolkien would have liked WWII to turn out.
And so we come back to Thompson and Ellis. In Ellis' own words, Spider is "somewhat influenced by Thompson’s writing, persona and life". I do not blindly accept Ellis' word as Author-God, here. His interpretation as someone whose read both books is apt and convincing. It is in the differences between the two narratives that we can find meaning, not simple sameness. The Smiler, for example, looks like John F. Kennedy, and not at all like George McGovern, and his politics are reminiscent of Tony Blair's (arguably) empty claims to be a man of the people. And let's not forget, he is the PM of the country in which Ellis happens to live. Spider, eventually, sides with The Beast over The Smiler, calling the former's beliefs evil but predictable, whereas the latter is devoid of any beliefs at all, except for hatred of the 'new scum,' the working people of The City. Thompson, despite one friendly car ride with Nixon during which they talked about American football, never relented in his utter hatred of Nixon and all that he stood for, and never stopped believing that McGovern would have made a very good president..
Transmet does what most good stories do: it collects various elements of the real world, including those stories that came before it, and shuffles them into a new arrangement, an arrangement that constitutes a new reflection of, and commentary on, the social and political context of the world at large. It openly references Thompson, there is a copy of Fear and Loathing on Spider's desk at the beginning of the election arc, and it is indirectly meta-textual; it's yet another story about storytelling, this time journalistic. Therefore, the use of a pre-existing narrative isn't a 'cheat' or a 'rip-off.' It's essential to exactly what the series is all about.
Posted by orion at August 11, 2006 6:28 PM