Word: sharked
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Benchley's fictional conceit that a Great White Shark of mythic size and ferocity has veered out of its normal deepwater territory and begun to pot-hunt off the swimming beach at Amity, L.I. The creature kills a young woman who is swimming alone at night. When bits of her body wash ashore the next morning, there is no mistaking what has happened, but the town fathers persuade Police Chief Martin Brody not to close the beaches. After all, it is the beginning of the tourist season, rentals are lag ging anyway, and with luck the thing will rumble...
...screen, believe it or not--into a landscape where society has eroded nature's richness. No one gives him directions. No one gives him a hitch. He trudges on and on, encountering symbol-people on the way--such as a loud, precocious little boy complaining because a card shark, that is, society, is giving him a bum deal...
...flow of raw human yearnings for wealth. Las Vegas is the ultimate embodiment of this process, stripped of genteel pretensions, and it is toward this mecca of the Horatio Alger dream that Thompson heads. He speeds dope-crazed along the desert in a rented convertible, The Great Red Shark, accompanied by his Samoan attorney. Ostensibly he is on assignment for an East Coast sporting magazine to cover the Mint 400, a renowned motorcycle race. But the story is thwarted when the plush and highly sophisticated atmosphere of the race is choked with desert dust, and press coverage becomes as futile...
...fact, nobody notices how twisted they are, for in Vegas, one can pursue his own dream, no matter how savage -- just as long as one doesn't "burn the locals." And the doped-up duo's antics reach outrageous limits. They terrorize the strip in the Great Red Shark; they successfully infiltrate a National District Attorneys' Drug Conference; burn two hotels by charging exorbitant amounts on phony credit cards, intimidate room service girls into loading their room with grapefruit and 600 bars of Neutrogena soap; trace down directions to the American Dream to a grassy plot of land where...
...like the rest, he somehow manages to retain a shred of self-respect. It alienates him from them, and causes repulsive hallucinations of lizards, moray eels, and huge reptiles standing in blood-soaked carpets sipping cocktails. The drive for success/money/power has created a world where an "eat the wounded" shark ethic prevails, but Thompson believes its apocalypse is imminent. He watches people burn themselves out in struggles for self-preservation, escaping "meat-hook reality" through dope, booze, and watching football -- "whatever short-circuits your brain and grounds it out for the longest possible time...