Terry Gilliam Says ‘Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas’ To Blame For Rise Of QAnon: “That’s How F–king Stupid They Are”
According to Terry Gilliam, it was neither Donald Trump, nor Hillary Clinton, nor extreme disillusionment with the current state of the US government that bear responsibility for the birth of the QAnon conspiracy theory, but rather himself, as the extremely stupid conspiracy theory would not have sunk its claws into the American political zeitgeist were it not for his film adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
The famed Monty Python’s Flying Circus co-creator offered this reflection on his 1998 cult classic while speaking with Variety’s Ben Croll during the currently ongoing Torino Film Festival, whereat Gilliam is set to be awarded the event’s lifetime achievement honor.
Reflecting on his past career, Gilliam eventually came to the topic of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, at which point it dawned on him that “I’m responsible for QAnon.”
“That’s how f–king stupid they are,” he laughed. “There’s madness afoot. Adrenochrome is a complete invention — Hunter [S. Thompson] started that and we just carried it on. But what’s interesting about QAnon is this belief in secret cabals and hidden control. It’s not like that at all. It’s far more chaotic than they imagine. Really, it’s a desire to believe in structure — a displaced faith in God, except God was more open-minded than the world they’re talking about.”
“The world hasn’t changed that much, but people have,” he further asserted. “It drives me mad. I grew up during polio — vaccines stopped it. Now polio’s rising in Gaza. Measles in Texas. Then there’s graphene — conspiracies about Bill Gates putting metal in our bodies to control us. It’s insane.”
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For those out of the loop, a core pillar of QAnon is the belief that the world’s various elites engage in the violent torture and murder of abducted children in order to harvest the aforementioned ‘adrenochrome’ from their blood, which supposedly provides them with renewed youth and a drug-like high but in reality is a naturally occurring chemical compound that results from the oxidation of adrenaline.
And far from needing to be harvested from the human body, adrenochrome is widely available for research purposes, although it currently has no known medical benefits to the human body.
Rather than reality, this view of adrenochrome as a form of narcotic originates from the late author Aldous Huxley, who having just learned of then-recent theories alleging that the chemical could induce intense psychiatric reactions, in his 1954 book The Doors of Perception, itself a personal record of a previous and particularly enlightening mescaline trip, wrote:
“Then came the discovery that adrenochrome, which is a product of the decomposition of adrenalin, can produce many of the symptoms observed in mescalin intoxication. But adrenochrome probably occurs spontaneously in the human body. In other words, each one of us may be capable of manufacturing a chemical, minute doses of which are known to cause profound changes in consciousness. Certain of these changes are similar to those which occur in that most characteristic plague of the twentieth century, schizophrenia.
“Is the mental disorder due to a chemical disorder? And is the chemical disorder due, in its turn, to psychological distresses affecting the adrenals? It would be rash and premature to affirm it. The most we can say is that some kind of a prima facie case has been made out. Meanwhile the clue is being systematically followed, the sleuths – biochemists , psychiatrists, psychologists – are on the trail.”
But as is often the case, this idea of ‘recreational adrenochrome’ soon permeated pop culture, and thanks to both Anthony Burgess’ making reference to its supposed narcotic properties in his popular 1962 book A Clockwork Orange:
However, Huxley’s musings were not only based on contemporary speculation rather than personal experience, as he admits that he had been “athwart” the entire concept of drugs until trying mescaline, but were shortly thereafter disproven by subsequent research.
“They had no license for selling liquor, but there was no law yet against prodding some of the new veshches which they used to put into the old moloko, so you could peet it with vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom or one or two other veshches which would give you a nice quiet horrorshow fifteen minutes admiring Bog And All His Holy Angels and Saints in your left shoe with lights bursting all over your mozg.”
As well as Thompson using its name for a fictional drug in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, wherein it also received its first mention of being at its best when freshly harvested, as well as its association with child abuse:
“That’s about right,” he said. “That stuff makes pure mescaline seem like ginger beer. You’ll go completely crazy if you take too much.”
I shook my head sadly. “Jesus! What kind of monster client have you picked up this time? There’s
only one source for this stuff…”“The adrenaline glands from a living human body,” I said. “It’s no good if you get it out of a corpse.”
“I know,” he replied. “But the guy didn’t have any cash. He’s one of these Satanism freaks. He offered me human blood—said it would make me higher than I’d ever been in my life,” he laughed. “I thought he was kidding, so I told him I’d just as soon have an ounce or so of pure adrenochrome—or maybe just a fresh adrenalin gland to chew on.”
“Yeah,” my attorney was saying. “They nailed this guy for child molesting, but he swears he didn’t do it. ‘Why should I fuck with children?’ he says; ‘They’re too small!'” He shrugged. “Christ, what could I say? Even a goddamn werewolf is entitled to legal counsel . . . I didn’t dare turn the creep down. He might have picked up a letter opener and gone after my pineal gland.”
The compound has now become synonymous with ‘ritual Satanic child abuse’ in the minds of an unfortunate number of not just adults in the United States, but specifically those in its halls of leadership.
So, while Gilliam and Thompson did in fact play a part in QAnon’s creation, their role ultimately amounts to nothing more than a fun bit trivia – After all, in some universe, there likely exists a world where the conspiracy theory instead built its foundations on some other false belief about a bioorganic mechanism – Say, that the Sonic hedgehog protein, itself a major part of pre-natal development, was the result of a Japanese plot to spike autism rates in American children.
(And just to be clear: That last part is 100%, entirely a joke.)
