Reader Response to The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved

In Hunter S. Thompson’s article, The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved, the “real beasts” ended up being Thompson and Ralph Steadman. This piece is interesting on many levels, but this thread of caricaturization compels the narrative to a depth rarely seen in magazine writing.

First a note on Thompson’s voice: It’s strong. Really really strong. All manner of adjectives could lend themselves to describe it: irritable, frantic, violent, terse, on-edge, etc. But the ways he manages to command the voice through imagination and dialogue is what most interested me. It’s established from the get-go with his opening scene where he exchanges remarks with Jimbo about the imagined forthcoming riots at the Kentucky Derby.

"Well...maybe I shouldn't be telling you..." I shrugged. "But hell, everybody else seems to know. The cops and the National Guard have been getting ready for six weeks. They have 20,000 troops on alert at Fort Knox. They've warned us — all the press and photographers — to wear helmets and special vests like flak jackets. We were told to expect shooting..."

"No!" he shouted; his hands flew up and hovered momentarily between us, as if to ward off the words he was hearing. Then he whacked his fist on the bar. "Those sons of bitches! God Almighty! The Kentucky Derby!"

Thompson is speaking within an imagined realm, a sketch of the darkest impressions of American culture where all facets of humanity are in some surreal carnival of greed and filth. He’s operating within a sort of caricature of reality. It’s a totally outrageous viewpoint and he manages to bring the subjects of his story into his realm by entering into a dialogue with unsuspecting bystanders, (esp. with Steadman.) Whether what Jimbo or Thomspon said in the above exchange is true and 100% accurate reporting is besides the point. The point is that Thompson is capturing a cultural moment, by fitting this world of the Kentucky Derby in his cultural vantage point. In order to pull this off he has to impose a super strong voice. And it’s not just in his dialogue but all throughout the prose, such as in moments like, “Creeping Jesus, I thought. That screws the press credentials.”

When he operates with this assertive voice, these imagined scenes of drunken debauchery and soulless inbreeds become not so much imagined, but more like a stained canvas on which he’s working.

I guess what I’m saying, is that his voice comes from operating in a decadent vantage point and imposing it upon the situation that he’s reporting. And when it reflects a broader cultural feeling, like when he riffs on national news headlines about Black Panther movements and student revolts, it’s very effective and widens the scope of the story. Otherwise why would we even care to be reading about the 1970 Kentucky Derby forty years later?

In other words, this isn’t a story about the Kentucky Derby but more of story reflecting the sociological and political climate on the eve of the Kent State shootings in 1970. And it takes one hell of a narrative to turn a simple horseracing assignment into all of that.

One of the ways that Thompson, achieved, this full rounded narrative was by using a type of plot device. Obviously, the race itself, is only two minutes long, and Thompson could care less about winners or losers of it. Instead he writes a narrative about writing a narrative. You could look at this as a sort of a quest narrative. At first Thompson’s quest is about getting his bearings, finding Steadman, getting his press credentials, rental car, etc. It sets the tone of his off-the-cuff approach. Then Thompson focuses his lens on the caricaturization of derby-goers. In particular he’s trying to find a particular face, a sort of quest.  He describes what he’s after as “the mask of the whiskey gentry — a pretentious mix of booze, failed dreams and a terminal identity crisis; the inevitable result of too much inbreeding in a closed and ignorant culture. … a symbol of the whole doomed atavistic culture that makes the Kentucky Derby what it is.”

Thompson ends up getting too far into the carnival of the Derby and loses sight of any quest, and it’s almost pure reportage of scenes. When he references his stained red notebook, his prose almost takes the form of lists.

Then in the end, in the hungover dreariness afterwards, he’s reminded of the quest:

“There he was, by God — a puffy, drink-ravaged, disease-ridden caricature...like an awful cartoon version of an old snapshot in some once-proud mother's family photo album. It was the face we'd been looking for — and it was, of course, my own. Horrible, horrible...”

The reason that this quest maneuver is so successful is that it allows him to in the end cast his critical satirical eye on himself. This realization, is the climax of the narrative. It’s effectiveness is that by identifying himself as the epitome of the doomed culture he’s recording, he establishes a twisted sort of credibility for what might otherwise be an unreliable narrator. It, in a way, justifies his use of hyperboles and exaggerations within a piece of reportage.

“And unlike most of the others in the press box, we didn't give a hoot in hell what was happening on the track. We had come there to watch the real beasts perform.”