Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis - Deep Dive Review

Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis - Deep Dive Review 

Introduction 

Elvis Movie Review  

‘Do You Know Who I Am?’ Elvis asked at American Sound studios in 1969. It is a question he could have put to any number of people surrounding him, his manager, his record company, film producers, critics, fans, and ultimately to himself. In 1966 he recorded a sublime version of Bob Dylan’s Tomorrow is a Long Time. Rather than lead to an artistic revival and the recovery of Elvis’ lost reputation, it was released as a ‘bonus’ track on the California Holiday album, a soundtrack that contained such gems as Adam and Evil, Beach Shack, and Smorgasbord. The song’s lyrics were apt: 

I can’t see my reflection in the water 

I can’t speak the sounds that show no pain 

I can’t hear the echo of my footsteps 

Or remember the sounds of my own name

Elvis had been living on the ‘edge of reality’ for a very long time indeed.   This is my review of Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, the Elvis movie that has met with both popular and critical acclaim. As an Elvis fanatic, I welcome anything positive and anything creative that puts Elvis back into the spotlight where he belongs. Being a fanatic, though, makes me rather protective towards Elvis’ name and reputation. I don’t like creative liberties being taken, giving us an ‘Elvis’ to meet the expectations and fantasies of others. I tried to write a brief review, one that would offer a quick guide as to whether the movie is worth watching. But being an Elvis fanatic, I was soon involved in a deep dive. So I shall preface the plunge with a quick review – it’s a good film, well-acted, wonderfully paced, sympathetic, and well worth seeing, whether you are an Elvis fan or not. 

But is ‘Elvis’ Elvis? ‘The image is one thing and the human being is another. It's very hard to live up to an image, put it that way.’ The image can be anything the image-makers want it to be; the human being is necessarily fragile and flawed and may well contain elements that contradict the ideal. My review extends to 40,000 words, broken up into four parts. 

Part One - The Movie

1. Elvis back on top

2. Approach to the Movie

3. The Movie as a Biopic

4. The Movie’s Style – Baz Luhrmann’s approach to film-making 

Part Two - The Story and the Cast

5. Mytho-genesis 

6. The Creation of a False Narrative – Elvis’ multiplicity of influences

7. Elvis as Symbol, Icon, and Person

8. Austin Butler as Elvis

9. Tom Hanks as Tom Parker

10. Tom Parker as Narrator 

Part Three - The Fifties

11. Puppet Show – Elvis’ character buried behind a cartoon legend

12. Reconstruction of Events

13. Black Roots

14. Concert Scenes 

Part Four – Sixties, Seventies, Conclusions

15. The Sixties

16. The Selection of Music

17. The ‘68 Special

18. Las Vegas - Caught in a Trap

19. Unchained Melody - The End

20. Omissions – The Real Elvis  

Part One – The Movie

1. Elvis back on top

When I heard that the Elvis movie was #1 in the Box Office I was most pleased. It brought back happy memories of my younger days, when Elvis was still alive and I would be cheering his latest single up the charts in expectation of the top ten and hope of another number one. The release of the movie coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of my first ever Elvis album – my first ever album - so to see that Elvis is still in the building and still #1 cheered me immensely. I have for years read articles which predicted that the day would come when Elvis would be forgotten. Musical tastes are fragmenting along with our culture and society. With more and more people retiring to their own private words and fantasies, the space for shared meanings and symbols is much diminished. These predictions faded a little in the late 1990s and 2000s but have recently returned with a vengeance, with claims that Elvis will fade into nothing in an era in which people are able to choose their own music with all their gear and gadgets. Our own personal gods are available at the push of a button. The claim is that Elvis means little to people today. The box office returns – and the excited discussions the film has inspired – suggest that this is not the case. Not for the first time the people who write have been discovered to have been merely feeding their own prejudices. 

That they may one day come to be proven right says more about the times we are living in than it does about Elvis Presley. Fifteen years ago I remember standing at a busy train station in St Helens, Merseyside, on my way to Liverpool, listening to a group of men aged around thirty arguing with one another. One man was being teased for never having heard of Johnny Cash. The other men continued to question him merely to amuse themselves at his ignorance. Folsom Prison? Ring of Fire? Boy Named Sue? The poor guy was non-plussed, but at least he was smiling as he shook his head. 

Such ignorance reveals nothing about Johnny Cash and the stellar career he had and everything about the selective ways in which people can now entertain, amuse, and indeed inform themselves. There are huge gaps in knowledge and understanding as a shared culture unravels. The change was predicted in Lester Bangs’ famous obituary on Elvis in August 1977, when Bangs wrote that whatever your view of the man and his music, we will never agree on anything like we agreed on Elvis Presley. 

If love truly is going out of fashion forever, which I do not believe, then along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more contemptuous indifference to each other’s objects of reverence. I thought it was Iggy Stooge, you thought it was Joni Mitchell or whoever else seemed to speak for your own private, entirely circumscribed situation’s many pains and few ecstasies. We will continue to fragment in this manner, because solipsism holds all the cards at present; it is a king whose domain engulfs even Elvis’s. But I can guarantee you one thing: we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won’t bother saying good-bye to his corpse. I will say good-bye to you.

The words were prophetic. In 1977, Bangs saw commonality in culture unravelling as a result of a narcissism sliding inexorably into solipsism. Whether you loved him or loathed him, we all knew who Elvis Presley was in 1977. The shared culture of common meanings has unravelled since. The amazing thing in light of that is that Elvis Presley still means something that is recognisably something to most people – even if that ‘something’ refers to the refashioning of his history to make him a the personification – and actual agent – of cultural appropriation and racism. Even the people who make him a symbol of all that is wrong with the world recognise his centrality; they are merely inverting the judgement of history that Elvis is the central man of popular culture. 

There are still a lot of Elvis fans in the world. And since there are a lot of Baz Luhrmann film-fans, too, I entertained hopes that the film would bring people to the cinema and thereby spark a new interest in Elvis. The film hit number one at the box office, so that was part of the job done. 

But what about that renewed interest in Elvis? Very many people are discussing ‘Elvis’ without going deeper in search of Elvis. Not for the first time, Elvis is being compared and contrasted with an image of himself, and not for the first time the real Elvis is being found to be less than perfect. 

In life, Elvis found that he was competing against himself, his present identity constantly being pitted against impossible images of himself. I remember this clearly as an Elvis fan in the 1970s, his latest releases – Now, Fool, Good Times, Promised Land, and Today – selling poorly in comparison with the Legendary Performer and 40 Greatest – and looking decidedly old and tired when set against The Sun Collection and the two volumes of the ‘56 Sessions. The Elvis movie presents a very definite and appealing view of Elvis the rebellious spirit and innovator brought down by external forces of commerce and control. The individual asserted freedom against ‘the system’ is a story that never fails. Of course, those who know little about Elvis, but who have found the image projected in the movie appealing, have pursued their interest with a little ‘research’ (Google), only to discover that Elvis may have been more proactive in his drug taking than the pristine image would suggest; that Elvis was a relentless womaniser with some unusual sexual predilections; that Elvis was a gun-obsessed law and order man who feared and hated hippies, radicals, and communists; that he condemned The Beatles as un-American and wanted them deported; that he visited President Nixon at the Whitehouse and that … he may not have been quite the rebel he is portrayed to be in the film. Cue accusations of hypocrisy. That there is no hypocrisy indicates just how complicated a figure the real Elvis Presley is. 

The problem lies with people who project and swallow myths and fantasies in the first place. I feel like I am reliving the shock of Elvis’ death and the trauma of seeing the idol I worship crack into a thousand pieces in the prolonged aftermath. I read all the tales about Elvis’ affairs with women, I read all about the drug taking, I read all about how Elvis ‘stole’ his music from much more talented artists, both black and white, but mainly black in a climate that racializes everything in order to divide each and all. And these are the people who think themselves radical? The principles and ideals of the Left in politics are universal and affirm a common humanity that is expressed in and through solidary practices and relations. The slicing and dicing of that common humanity according to identity is the most suicidally stupid thing the Left could have done. The intellectuals and politicians remote from the people, and with too much time on their hands, did precisely that. Devoid of substance, they have to speak and act in order to prove and justify their existence. 

I’ve been there and done it. I abandoned Elvis in the eighties under the weight of the revelations as they came thick and fast. It all started the day Elvis died. The newspapers were quickly full of stories, feeding the popular interest. Knowing I was an Elvis fanatic, my granny would save all the newspapers from family relations, collecting all the articles on Elvis, and bring them to the house. I was twelve, and reading about Elvis’ affairs with half the women in Christendom. It’s no wonder he died young, I though. I was only surprised he found time to make any music. The assault on his reputation continued with allegations of drug addiction, and then in the 1980s came the accusations of racism and cultural theft. By the mid-1980s there wasn’t much left of Elvis’ reputation, either as a person or an artist. He was a bad man and his music was secondary and derivative, plastic, cheap, and commercial. 

In time I came to realise that the fault lay not in Elvis but in the impossible idealisation that charged him with the unbearable task of living as a myth and legend. My advice to anyone seeking to generate interest in Elvis or anything now is simple, ‘tell the truth.’ If you tell anything less than the truth, if you peddle fantasy, you will be forever involved in a holding operation against a reality that will once day catch you up and burn you up. Elvis has to be taken whole or not at all. I’m leery of myth-making, even if the source of mythologizing lay in Elvis and his larger-than-life career itself. I insist on Elvis flaws and all. Flaunt the imperfection! In my reading, Elvis is not a king but a democrat, someone who, in his life, affirmed a democratic individualism. The more you read of his flaws, the more you restore his humanity, and the more you actually elevate him by getting full measure of his achievement. Which is how he became an icon in the first place. 

Was Elvis an icon? The term, like genius, is much overused. But I have no trouble in identifying Elvis as an icon. Which begs the question as to what that iconic status was based upon. I would say three things: 1) his voice, which was remarkable, encompassing the full range of human emotions, touching the human roots that feed politics and culture; 2) his cultural impact, which was without parallel; 3) his genuine multiplicity in music, Elvis singing ‘all kinds’ of songs for all kinds of people. 

The claim to sing ‘all kinds’ of songs was the claim Elvis made when entering Sun Studios and being asked by Marion Keisker, Sam Phillips’ assistant, what kind of singer he was, what kinds of songs he sang. ‘I sing all kinds,’ Elvis replied. That’s a revealing phrase. Unfortunately, the myth-making that has always surrounded Elvis tends to work in precisely the opposite direction of Elvis’ multiplicity in music and universal appeal in culture. The taste-makers get to work on the Elvis story and proceed to reduce the man to preferred and acceptable interests and influences. R&B is in, country is so-so, it depends, pop and Dean Martin and Mario Lanza are out. People like ‘folk’ and street cred. This film does precisely that. In being so concerned to establish the black roots of Elvis’ music, and establish Elvis’ rootedness in black music and culture, the film neglects pretty much everything else that went into Elvis’ musical mix. Gospel features, but only briefly, and in the form of black gospel, with the emphasis firmly on the music and not at all on the religious dimension. God is out, too. The only interest, in other words, is in identity – in the colour black. Black is good, all the rest is derivative, and has to pay homage or invite accusations of appropriation. Not only does this make a nonsense of Elvis, the idea that it will appease those who are keen to condemn Elvis as a cultural appropriator is risible. The last thing people out to stoke division are interested in is the setting straight of the historical record. This controversy has been alive since the early 1980s and no amount of stating the plain facts has served to silence the charges. Rather than get involved in the controversy, either to oppose or to appease, it is better to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And that means emphasising that blues and R&B was but oneof many influences in Elvis Presley’s musical make-up, and that to reduce Elvis to just those influences to the neglect of the all-important alchemy he performed is to miss precisely Elvis Presley’s creative genius and historical achievement. Elvis was not a blues or R&B singer, he was a pop singer who created a new and universally accessible pop form from his ability to sing and integrate a remarkable range of musical genres. By focusing almost exclusively on the black influence, the movie misses who Elvis Presley really was by a very wide mark. And in bending over backwards to acknowledge debts, the film effectively concedes that a debt is owed and an apology is to be made. This is entirely wrong. No apologies are ever accepted in face of this charge. 

Elvis is to be valued for his creative synthesis of musical influences. The pop music form that Elvis created and made available to all without cultural, racial, and geographical implication was more than the sum of its parts. The question of influences is always a difficult one calling for sensitivity, nuance, and understanding. To identify, separate, and isolate influences is to unravel the entire tapestry, leaving us in precisely the segregated position we were in before Elvis performed his act of dream-weaving. 

Having made it clear where my take on Elvis comes from, let me come to my review of the film. It’s a review for people who have seen the film. I’m not interested in either encouraging people to watch the film or in warning them away. I’m interested in the issues arising from the film.

Social Media ‘Experts’ on Elvis  

The first thing that struck me as the film did the rounds of the cinemas was the explosion of articles and reviews, online and in print. I’ve been writing on Elvis for years and have barely interested anyone other than existing Elvis fans on my social media pages. People tolerate my eccentric interest in Elvis, but rarely investigate further, putting my views down to fanaticism (I call it expertise). Now, all of a sudden, having watched the film, any number of said people all have a view of Elvis. It is apparent that they love movies more than they do Elvis. This was the latest big film, so they paid a visit to the picture house. Overnight, people have become Elvis Presley aficionados. Greatly helped by Google, they have become experts by way of nothing but their own concerns. It’s inevitable that this would come to happen, but still irritating for a long-term Elvis fanatic such as I. I have briefly engaged with some of the controversies, only to be confronted with internet articles on Elvis’ relation to Nixon, the allegation that Elvis ‘stole’ black music and that Elvis was a racist, that Elvis was a drug-taker who wanted to have The Beatles thrown out of the U.S.A. as drug-taking un-American commies and hippies, Elvis was a womaniser who ‘groomed’ his future wife Priscilla as a 14 year old girl. That Elvis was a hypocrite. Basically, sex’n’drugs’n’rock’n’roll, then. And there was me thinking people were genuine in their excited response to the rebellious image. The censorious tone reveals, yet again, that pop and rock rebellion is as safe as houses, something we have known since the ‘rebellious’ youth joined their parents in denouncing Jerry Lee Lewis back in the fifties. 

Such people love transgression as entertainment, just so long as no actual boundaries are actually transgressed in the process. My response to all such people who sought to inform me is a very tired and unimpressed ‘yes, I know.’ I’ve been dealing with all the controversies surrounding Elvis’ less than ideal persona since 1977. My first response was to defend him, claiming the stories were not true, then to reject him as a phoney, which seems to be what many seduced by the rebellious on-stage persona the new film projects on screen are now doing. In time I came to understand that I was rejecting not Elvis but a created myth and image and that the real man was actually much more interesting, more complicated, more conflicted, more challenging, and infinitely more rewarding. I don’t think the film has done Elvis any favours by reinstating the myth in a very particular, and easily challengeable, form. 

As for the current crop of Elvis ‘experts,’ they tend to be telling the tales they already believed to be true, and which they proved to be true by instant internet research. They are using the public debate incited by the film to tell us what we already knew and what they already believed. It is wisest to engage with those who are prepared to look beyond the received wisdom.

Remythologizing Elvis 

I penned a quick critical response to the Baz Luhrmann Elvis movie, which struck a chord with those Elvis fans who were as uneasy with the movie’s portrayal of Elvis as I was. I have had time to reflect on the film and the view of Elvis it presents. This text is my considered view in respect of my knowledge of Elvis’ life and my fifty years’ love of his music. Elvis is a good film, considered as a film. It is well acted, superbly paced, easy on the eye, and engaging. My criticisms pertain to the films’ interpretation of Elvis and the Elvis story. I don’t like to rain on people’s parades, and am indeed thrilled that Elvis is being introduced, enjoyed, and ‘discussed’ by people again. But I feel the need to write an extensive commentary to check certain misleading myths being promoted by the film, myths that may appeal in the short-run but which can only serve to damage Elvis in the long-run. If reality is bent, distorted, and twisted out of shape, there will be consequences. Indeed, the film does the very thing it accuses Elvis’ manager Colonel Tom Parker of doing to Elvis’ natural talent and rebellious spirit. Much of the film is accurate, and much of the creative licence it takes is justified in articulating the truth much more clearly and concisely than a plodding chronological narrative ever could. 

But there is plenty about the filtering and remythologising of Elvis that is misleading. The purpose of this review is to encourage those who have seen the film – or who are thinking of seeing it, or simply joining in the discussions - to properly research Elvis’ life and make the effort to gain a genuine appreciation of his remarkable musical range and in the process form an informed opinion of their own. Listen to his music, and all of it. Treat Elvis as a musical education initiating you into ‘all kinds’ of music. Read the books on Elvis, and read them critically and sympathetically. Don’t take the things you read as gospel truth. And put your prejudices to one side. Many people have made many claims about Elvis that are plain false. Try to corroborate the claims made and facts presented, and try to remember that Elvis was neither a god or a king, a perfect being to be idolized or an icon to be smashed, but a flesh-and-blood human being with flaws and weaknesses like the rest of us. To criticise Elvis for failing to live up to his god-like status is really a criticism of those who believe that the fallen creatures humans are could aspire to be as gods. Some iconoclasts give the impression of having wanted to believe the icon to be the real thing, such is the fever they bring to the destruction. Even as the image lies in ruins on the ground, many continued the attack. Find the interviews Elvis gave and pay attention to the things he said. Elvis didn’t give many interviews and isn’t known for saying much. But he said much more than people tend to think, and there is a wisdom in much that he did say. When asked his political views he said he was ‘just an entertainer.’ That may seem evasive. But it was wise. Elvis knew that he had a wide fan base, people of all races and classes and nationalities, and of all political persuasions. He knew that people would seize on his words and use and abuse them, sowing division where he sought to unity. He also believed that the political views of pop stars, actors, and TV personalities were no more relevant than those of ‘ordinary’ citizens. In an age when celebrities of all kinds feel the need to parade their virtues in public and lecture us on their pet causes, Elvis’ view is most refreshing. I find the politics and ethics of stars with a cause to be lame, predictable, hypocritical, and boring. Not least because it is not they but those they lecture who bear the costs and suffer the consequences of the principles held at a safe distance. This is merely a logical extension – or reductio ad absurdum – of pop’s new pretensions in the sixties, when, in the words of Nik Cohn, ‘everyone took to peddling politics and philosophies and social profundities by the pound.’ Elvis didn’t join in, and now stands condemned for the lack of an overt political dimension to his music. 

It is a sure sign that you are in the presence of ideologues and activists whenever music, comedy, art or any cultural form is scrutinised for its having the ‘correct’ politics. As for the political content of these songs, Cohn continues: ‘inevitably, most of it was a joke, most of it was total foolishness’ and ‘it shut down rock’n’roll’ (Nik Cohn Awopbop-aloobopalopbam-boom: Pop from the Beginning p.181). One day it will finally happen, politics will pervade everywhere and ruin everything. The truth is that the political changes Elvis wrought through rock and pop music, and through the cultural changes he inspired, not least the race-mixing, were far more extensive and enduring than the simplistic, silly slogans of the more overtly political stars. The lesson is plain: don’t go to pop stars and celebrities for politics, go to politics – the former is easy, the latter is hard. I don’t consider such stars as being extra-smart and earnest for adding political commitments to whatever it is they do for a day job. I find their demands for peace, freedom, equality and everything about as politically useful as the belief in unicorn land. 

One final introductory point, watch his movies too! Elvis’ movies are routinely dismissed, and at some point Elvis himself realised he was being had by Hollywood and he would never be offered the serious part he craved. The only thing worse than a bad movie is being in one, Elvis is reputed to have said. But the Elvis movies are not of a piece. There are good movies in there, the odd serious role (Wild in the Country, Flaming Star), some genuinely funny comedies (Follow that Dream, Tickle Me), some great musicals (Viva Las Vegas, Frankie and Johnny), and some frankly bizarre ventures into the twilight zone that are weirdly compelling (Kissin’ Cousins (where else can you see two Elvis’ and Batgirl?!), Live a Little, Love a Little (where Elvis is captured by a woman with no name)). Even the worst ones need to be seen to understand the depth of tragedy of unfulfilled potential and destroyed dreams. The Elvis movies packed them in and were the face of Elvis throughout the sixties. The movies tell a big part of a very complex story and cannot be dismissed in a minute the way the Elvis movie does. That strikes me both as lazy and as evasive. Jailhouse Rock, King Creole, and more than a few others are very good movies indeed, with stellar soundtracks. 

2. Approach to the Movie

I shall be critiquing the Elvis movie as objectively as I can as an Elvis fanatic who has not only heard pretty much everything Elvis ever sung (including alternate takes and live concerts) but researched his life intensely. I can’t claim to have read every book on Elvis. So much has been published on Elvis that it is well-nigh impossible to read everything. Much that has been written on Elvis isn’t worth the paper it is written on. I have learned to spot the lies, distortions, and deceptions, and from friends as well as enemies. 

It wouldn’t be true to say that I went to see the film with an open mind, not quite knowing what to expect. I had seen the trailers and seen the reviews. I am also used to people praising or damning an Elvis of their own imagination. I penned some initial comments on the dangers of a tendentious portrayal of Elvis to fit certain preferred narratives, giving us an Elvis for politically and ideologically sound consumption. My critical judgement must be fairly sound, judging by the hundreds of people who gave my comments ‘likes’ and ‘loves’ on social media. So I went to see the film with certain concerns, if not exactly preconceptions. 

I am reading plenty of people denouncing this as a terrible movie, I am seeing many more say precisely the opposite. Such views are not helpful, they merely express personal likes and dislikes. I shall try to say something that transcends personal preference. From the outset, I shall declare my own preferences openly. I am not a film buff, I find films slow and boring and much prefer to speed-read through a book. Not only am I not a fan of Elvis movie biographies and reconstructions of his life, I tend to openly grimace and grit my teeth when watching such things, for the short time I can bear them. I’m a historian by training and thus prefer documentaries, and documentaries without an angle or agenda, but which let the facts unfold in their natural course. I accept that many would find my approach to Elvis pedantic and tedious. As an Elvis fan who prefers documentaries to movies, facts to fantasies, I may not be a member of the target audience for this movie. 

With all that understood, people may find my verdict somewhat surprising. I think Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis an excellent film considered as a film. It takes a vast and complex subject and, rather than get bogged down in details, takes a particular theme, hones in on the essentials, and weaves a narrative around certain set-pieces – black roots, Louisiana Hayride, concert riots, the Draft as deradicalisation, the wasted years of the movies, the affirmation of authentic being with the Comeback Special, the return to roots with the early Vegas performances, the trap that finally closes in on Elvis and first squeezes the hope out of him and then the life. It’s like writing an essay on a complex subject: you have to define the spinal assumption and then select and interpret the material accordingly. And meet the word count. The clear sign that this film has got the themes and the pacing right is that although it is a massive two hours and forty minutes long, it flies past in no time. The acting, too, is superb. The characters are believable. I think it’s the first time I have ever watched anyone play Elvis and not had any issues with the look and the portrayal. I was rather excited watching this film and would watch it again. It did its job well in getting me out to the cinema and keeping me on the edge of my seat. I very rarely go to the cinema. Considered as a film, Elvis is excellent. In terms of the film’s portrayal of Elvis, his music and his life … things were always going to be complicated here. 

I went to the film with plenty of reservations, so many indeed that I very nearly didn’t bother. But people who know I am an Elvis fanatic/expert kept asking my opinion of the new film, so I felt the need to join in the wave of excitement. I already knew it wouldn’t be the biopic I wanted to see. I had seen the trailer and read the reviews, so had a good idea as to the approach the film would take, and didn’t like it. So I didn’t expect much and had some definite concerns. The only thing I knew about Baz Luhrmann was his Moulin Rouge which, as a lover of French chanson, I disliked intensely. So I was aware of the director’s style and anticipated the razzle-dazzle and the possibility that it would blind us to the facts of Elvis’ life. Then again, I thought, that triumph of style over substance could also fit the Elvis story to a T, charting Elvis’ ascent – or descent – from the folk authenticity of the Sun rockabilly to the capes and spangles of Las Vegas. The trick of good film-making is not merely to ‘tell the truth’ but to hook people emotionally on the plot and its character in order to tell a tale that tells a truth. 

At 160 minutes, the film was at obvious risk of becoming tiresome. I heard a couple of people expressing concerns about the runtime as we waited for the picture to start. I watched the film at Cineworld Llandudno. The film was due to start at 1-20pm. At 1-45pm the film had still not started. The woman sat to my left got up and walked out, saying she had things to do (a life to live). Which was a shame. Her presence nearly allowed me to claim I had been to the pictures with an attractive lady, even if she was sat a few seats away. Near enough. I am something of a myth-maker myself. People were already getting edgy, losing patience. The eager anticipation and excitement you take into the theatre was already lost. This did not augur well. I wondered whether everyone else in the theatre had sufficient endurance to stay the course. As it was, all stayed and the film seemed to fly by. At 160 minutes it’s a long film. But because of the breathless pacing you don’t really feel it. When I first thought to check my watch as the film played I was surprised to see that we were already in the final hour. The movie is light and liquid rather than heavy and solid. That’s quite an achievement for such a heavyweight theme, although it does beg the question in the aftermath as to how much was missed or skirted. I hear that the director’s cut is four hours. I could happily watch it. 

Elvis as subject matter in movies, documentaries, and books 

Baz Luhrmann is one of the most unique filmmakers working today, and is certainly a rarity in the mainstream. His name carries anticipation and expectation and not least because this is his first film since 2013’s The Great Gatsby. That’s quite a gap in film-making, and a long time to be gestating a film. They started shooting in 2019. Covid delayed the production. That’s time enough for those involved to have put a lot of thought into things. When I heard that there was a film about Elvis Presley in the offing, I feared some cheap and cheerless rush job, not least because the subject matter is such well-trodden ground. There have been many movies, TV movies, TV shows, and documentaries about Elvis, and it is only these past decade or so I’ve been impressed. This film is unlike any other Elvis film you have ever seen. The direction, production, cinematography, and acting are excellent. But it’s the approach that stands out. It is a recreation of the Elvis fable for a new age. That was probably needed and it is well done. One of my most favourite film directors is Ken Russell. But whilst I loved his idiosyncratic takes on Mahler and Strauss, I very much doubt that the fans of either did. 

I loved his Elgar and Debussy, too. The mind boggles as to what Ken would have made of Elvis Presley. Probably something along the lines of a cross between The Boyfriend and The Devils. But I suspect Ken would have thought Elvis too vulgar and low-brow a subject to be worthy of his creative concern. The creative liberties that Luhrmann takes remain on nodding terms with reality, stretching the facts a little to better express the truth. Or the truth that is consistent with the filter and the narrative that is established at the start. 

3. The Movie as a Biopic

The Rise and Fall of Elvis Presley in Outline 

Before moving more deeply into critical commentary, it is worth underlining the daunting task that Luhrmann had in trying to capture the romance and the tragedy of Elvis Presley. The sheer scale of the subject is intimidating. Where to start? At the beginning, of course, with the rebellious icon of rock’n’roll, shaking his hips and causing the girls to scream as they never had before, at least not in public. Except that that is not quite the beginning. It is the beginning of the public image of Elvis, but the truth is that Elvis started life singing the country weepie Old Shep at school and on country shows and singing blues ballad Tomorrow Night to local girls in the street. He entered Sun studios as a ballad singer, not a blues singer. But, yes, Elvis came to prominence with his exciting blend of blues and country. But where next? Elvis drew the anger of the more conservative elements of society, causing the authorities to seek to repress his influence. The people who see only cultural appropriation from the vantage point of now see nothing. Ironically, they presume the advantages that were won by Elvis’ efforts all those years ago, to condemn the architect whilst standing at the top of the building he raised. The authorities at the time saw race-mixing and were well aware of the cultural and ultimately political threat it posed to existing social arrangements. Elvis was a liberator and integrator through affirming his natural love of ‘all kinds’ of music, racial implications be damned. That made him a rebel, but implicitly so rather than explicitly. Elvis never spelled the liberation out, he merely acted. Some people are so clever they need things spelling out to them. Like ‘war is stupid.’ And ‘racism is a very bad thing.’ Elvis didn’t make clever political statements. He didn’t verbalise his deeds, he simply did them. This makes Elvis a tricky subject indeed. You have to render simple things very complex so that the clever people are able to understand them. 

The movie portrays Elvis as being more of an explicit rebel than he actually was. This may make him appealing to the present age of permanent protest, but that isn’t quite Elvis, and this age will pass. Already I have seen people who enjoyed the film express disappointment upon coming to learn that Elvis was somewhat conservative in his views, on politics, on patriotism, on women. 

I have news for the people who charge Elvis with hypocrisy here, he always was conservative in his views. There are some terrible misconceptions and remarkable misunderstandings here. Elvis was ‘different,’ certainly, in the way he dressed and the way he greased his hair. He was also different in the way he broke the segregation codes and would mix with black people. For many people, that made him a rebel against an iniquitous society. But be careful. Elvis’ ‘difference’ was more about the personal and the cultural than the political. And whilst there would appear to be a necessary connection between the two, so that changes in the former would more than likely issue in changes in the latter, there is no causal inevitability. It is not for no reason that Elvis was once described as ‘the world’s most beloved solipsist.’ If Elvis was a democrat, then it was democratic individualism that he affirmed, and not some homogenous collectivism. There is a narcissism to Elvis’ cultivation of difference that doesn’t fit political readings too well. Elvis didn’t ‘sell out’ the revolution with fame and fortune for the simple reason that he never ‘bought in’ in the first place. If you want a leader for your political cause, then try politics. Elvis is not your man and you will quickly be disappointed. But if you have the nerve to be different, and to allow others to be different, then you may well have what it takes to appreciate Elvis after all. Sadly, the searchers tend only want the Elvis of the rebel years, which goes well until they discover that Elvis wasn’t quite the rebel he thought he was. It’s Elvis who suffers from the disillusionment as people who see him through their own deluded preferences feel let down and turn on their former idol. 

Elvis didn’t change over the years to anything like the extent his critics insist. The alchemy of the original Sun synthesis was something that Elvis, as a non-writer, could accomplish only the once. After that, we are treated to more mature variants of that blues-country-gospel-pop-rock blend. It got slick in the early sixties under the influence of the Nashville sound, with a greater focus on ballads, too; it got more raucous between 1966 and 1968, albeit only sporadically, running second to the soundtracks; was given a contemporary blue-eyed soul stamp at American Sound in 1969; given a full statement in the Nashville marathon in 1970; and a mature reading at Stax ’73 and then with Today in 1975. Same but different. The Elvis fans who like Elvis from first to last have no trouble tracing the musical thread that holds his sound together. There is no opposition between young and old Elvis musically, just a realisation that the man has grown older and songs of innocence have become songs of experience. 

The time comes when the old rock’n’roll answers no longer suffice. The liberation of the early days gets the question: ‘And where do all these highways go / Now that we are free?’ Elvis was trying to answer that question before Leonard Cohen had posed it. His answer is in his life and music. Elvis sought but never find the community that could accommodate his vision of freedom. 

But Elvis was as different at the end as he was at the beginning. He seemed to be in a world of his own. This was held against him, but it is that made him in the first place. Whilst everyone else was playing the clubs and touring, Elvis was at home listening to and absorbing a great variety of musical genres. It is this that made him different when he did come to make his presence known publically. He was still confounding expectations at the end, singing material that baffled the critics but pleased his fans, or enough of them at least. 

The Elvis that I like is the Elvis that doesn’t fit neat categories, doesn’t conform to expectations, and doesn’t quite do as he is told by critics with impeccably good taste and correct political views. It doesn’t do to have taste, still less impose it. Elvis isn’t clubbable, he is different. Elvis seems to be the ultimate outsider. The point seems so obvious and yet evades so many. And he evades being captured by the fantasies of rebellion peddled by so many. In comparison to the real Elvis, such fantasies appear to be tediously predictable and conformist to the core. I like that Elvis would spot Ed Ames in his concert audience and embark on an impromptu rendition of Ames’ When the Snow is on the Roses. It’s not the stuff of rock’n’roll rebellion, but anyone who has ever heard the songs Elvis sang in private will know the propensity of ballads and songs outside of and pre-dating rock – I Wonder, I Wonder, I Wonder.  

There is a lot to the Elvis story, the rock’n’roll insurgency, national service, domestication, the loss of edge, The Beatles, the eclipse, the 1968 Comeback Special, artistic triumph, Las Vegas, drugs, the great unravelling, death from cardiac arrest at the age of 42 years old. The fact that the ’68 Special is described as a ‘comeback’ when Elvis had received his first Grammy award the previous year, and for gospel. It’s a complicated tale. Elvis never went away, but clearly there were different Elvises, expressing different musical preferences and predilections, with some favouring one Elvis and others favouring another. Or others. It is incredible to think that Elvis was only 42 when he died. He seemed to be so much older than that. And it is no wonder, given the extent to which he was subject to contradictory pulls and pressures. 

In 1977, Elvis seemed to have been around forever, done so much, and seemed a ubiquitous presence. He also sounded a whole lot older than he actually was. In truth, his recording career spanned just 23 years, with two of them spent in the army, and the first two releasing just five singles for Sun. He had done so much in so short a time, yet had so much more to do. ‘Why did you make all those stupid movies?’ Leon Russell asked Elvis. ‘Last thing I remember I was driving a truck’ Elvis replied. He was caught in a trap, the Elvis movie says; he was caught in the maelstrom he had unleashed. There is little time to contemplate and plan when you are forever moving. 

It is doubtful that any film is capable of capturing all of that. A selective approach is imperative, which means that certain facts and details are selected according to a certain theme and the rest ignored. My criticisms concern the nature of the selection, with some things being deemed to be more important than others, and other things considered to be not important at all. Some of the things which explain why Elvis was so popular with so many and for so long, and why he remains so popular to this day, are missed entirely – clue, it’s not the blues root, which is very much a minority strain. There is much more to Elvis’ appeal than the blues. I come from a family which contained several females who were Elvis fans, starting with my mum. The Elvis they loved is not the Elvis in this film. My favourite female singer by a trillion million miles multiplied by infinity (or million trillion, depending on which is the larger number) is Françoise Hardy. She was an Elvis fan and cited Elvis as an inspiration and influence. She preferred Elvis the ballad singer to Elvis the rocker, and modelled her trademark sad simple style on the Elvis ballads of the early sixties. The Elvis movie ignores this. Clearly, there is a view being taken here that what is of value in the Elvis legacy is the black and blues root. And that is false. 

The film disappoints as a biopic. The narrative is very much premised on the idea of ‘the rebel years’ as the authentic Elvis, which imposes a narrative of decline from the outset. The narrative is also a reinstatement of the kind of mythologizing which destroyed Elvis, with nefarious external influences – Elvis’ manager Tom Parker - being blamed for the destruction. In truth, it is the swallowing up of the man into myth-making that is self-destructive. How could Elvis not have seen a decline and a destruction so obvious? 

Because for all of the tragedy, there were incredible triumphs at every step of the way. It is possible to lose yourself in success. Elvis was the biggest thing on the planet. Those hankering after the stripped back rockabilly sound of Sun as the real Elvis really want an Elvis of the minorities and the margins. Elvis knew what it was to be poor and marginalised, and couldn’t afford to fetishize oppression as an exotic condition. Elvis was heading somewhere else and was determined never to return. ‘Authenticity’ in such a context doesn’t pay. 

For all of the heavy emphasis on the blues in this film, the simple fact is that the money was elsewhere. Elvis was been praised as a blues singer throughout his career. The question as to why Elvis didn’t sing more blues has been posed often. The simple answer is that there was no money in it. By the sixties blues had been eclipsed by soul and by what the white kids from England were doing with it. The theme running throughout this film that Elvis would have thrived had he stuck with his blues root begs an awful lot of questions. The movie cuts back and forth between Elvis and Arthur Crudup at Las Vegas when That’s All Right is being performed. We take the point, and it’s definitely a point worth making. But it was so heavily laboured that the impression was given that Elvis was nothing without that blues root. I enjoyed that the film recovered the vibrancy and vitality of those early Las Vegas years. I enjoyed immensely the inclusion of Polk Salad Annie. But there was more to Elvis’ Las Vegas concerts than this southern fried excitement (which was certainly an important part of those shows). And Elvis the blues singer would not have been packing out Las Vegas. Good, say the hipsters, with Elvis restored to his music roots. But where would this Elvis have been playing? 

The fact is, with respect to That’s All Right, the trick had already been performed. Elvis’ great creative contribution had been to blend blues and country, up the pace, and add a pop sensibility. He could create that synthesis the once and once only. Once done, he could only develop and unfold. He was not a blues singer in the sense of an artist who stays with blues material and performs it as blues over and again. For all that the film keeps returning to That’s All Right, Elvis himself could make that return only in performing his past achievements as a victory celebration. Polk Salad Annie is more suggestive in being new and original material, written by Tony Joe White in the late sixties, indicating where Elvis could and should have been with his Sun synthesis. He was there, in one part of his whole identity, singing the likes of Proud Mary, Never Been to Spain, Walk a Mile in My Shoes. But Elvis transcended his influences by specialising in everything. 

A lot depends on who the audience are and what the expectations of the audience are. Many people loved the film Bohemian Rhapsody about Queen singer Freddie Mercury. I found it significant that a lot of the people who raved about the film were not really Queen fans and didn’t know an awful lot about the band beyond the hit records. I have been a Queen since 1974 and I have to say I didn’t like the film. It just didn’t seem true to my experience of being a Queen fan over all those years. I don’t mind factual errors. This is the world of movies and story-telling and not of documentaries. The film just didn’t excite me, not in the way Queen always did. It just didn’t seem true at any level. I saw the film twice, hoping it would reveal qualities hidden to me the first time. I think what you see is what you get. And I don’t care that Rami Malek won the Oscar, I felt that he fell far short of Freddie Mercury. The Elvis film is infinitely superior, as is Austin Butler’s performance as Elvis. I will confess that I am a hard audience to please on this. I am a diehard fan who knows an awful lot about Elvis. The film gained and retained my attention, I never felt bored, and I found the characters believable and engaging. It helps that I know the Elvis story and so could handle the constant zig-zagging back and forth in the film, keeping the story in chronological order. Those who know little about Elvis may well have found this aspect of the film confusing. I enjoyed it. It avoided a plodding narrative with its tendencies to bore. 

But there’s the problem – the story. This film is less the story of the real Elvis than a highly filtered Elvis Presley Estate approved and culturally acceptable view of what certain people think Elvis ought to have been. Elvis was never as he ought to have been, that’s what made him truly rebellious. Elvis the rebel who was tamed and toned down, sold out, and finally separated from his one and only true love of his life. There have been entire books written on Elvis and his ladies. Try Baby, Let's Play House: Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him by Alanna Nash (2010). In the Elvis movie we just see Priscilla, with him dying in the next scene after she divorces him. That’s not quite how it happened. Elvis had a number of girlfriends between 1972 and 1977, most notably Linda Thompson. She is nowhere to be seen. But it may well be true that Elvis really did die of a broken heart, for any number of reasons. His song titles from 1972 onwards certainly suggest as much. 

There were times when I was wondering what story it was I was watching. I was shaking my head on four or more occasions, not caring what anyone sat around me may have thought, and doing all I could to stop myself from shouting ‘rubbish’ at the screen. I have been known to throw things at screens on occasions, although they at least my own screens. I am more restrained in public, where I tend to maintain my dignity for the most part. But I was head-shaking at times, for the reason I don’t think that this is what Elvis’ character, life, music, and career were actually like; this is what outsiders who have a particular view of the Elvis they favour think he was like, or ought to have been like. 

A lot depends on what you are looking for. I wouldn’t mind a conventional biopic about Elvis, but am not averse to the Baz Lurhmann approach at all. I would prefer a documentary for factual accuracy and chronology, no matter how dull others may think such things, and welcome creative licence with respect to film-making. But I am an Elvis fanatic. A film-maker needs to make the story accessible. I am sure that the very many people who have watched Lurhmann’s Elvis will have found it very entertaining, which is at least half the victory. That may spark renewed interest in the real Elvis, which could be a good thing. I would welcome a second film, too. I just hope people go to the music, the movies, the books, the facts with an open mind and generous heart, putting the image of Elvis of rebel roots to one side as pure entertainment. 

Although there are some straightforward biographical scenes for extended periods throughout the film, this is not strictly speaking a biopic. This movie is a morality play which is firmly based on real life events. It isn’t remotely a Ken Russell flight of fancy, but perversion and puppetry there is all the same, with Elvis being twisted and bent out of shape. Which is indeed the true story. 

With respect to the actual story, the movie keeps the biographical aspect light and fluid so that we speed along at the surface. The facts of Elvis’ life are selected to a very definite theme. So if you are in search of an in-depth biographical drama, then this is not the film for you. But, if facts and details are your concern, you should know them all by now: there have been plenty of books written on Elvis to satisfy any demands in this respect. Further, the problem with in-depth biographical dramas is that in being heavy on the biography they tend to be much less than dramatic. I love Charlie Chaplin and I love Richard Attenborough’s film of Chaplin’s life. But I love it out of loyalty. I remember insisting my parents and friends watch it, and becoming irritated by their ‘impatience’ (their need to exercise their legs, eat and drink, find refuge in the bathroom) as the very long and boring film dragged on. The film Chaplin appeals to a handful of Chaplin bores, geeks, and nerds like me. It didn’t do much to renew interest in Chaplin, and I don’t think a similar approach would have done much for Elvis, either. Baz Luhrmann’s movie picks out a clear theme and riffs around it at high speed. It’s a long film but you don’t really notice the fact. And for that I sing the movie’s praises. If you want biographical details in chronological order I can highly recommend that you watch The Searcher which is a great two-part documentary about Elvis. The Elvis Presley Rebirth” from 2017 is good, too, as is Elvis, A Boy from Tupelo. And as much as I may – and will – complain about the liberties taken in the Luhrmann film, I will concede that documentaries, facts, and chronologies are not everyone’s cup of tea. I should mention that in addition to being an Elvis fanatic, I am also a historian by training and inclination. I should also add that in knowing how history is made, there is real value in cutting to the root of the matter and grabbing people in their emotions and motivations. People who insist on facts have little idea as to how the facts we study in history are made. History-making is a synergy of material interests, metaphysical ideals, and moral motivations, with agents aiming at one thing only to bring about something else entirely. It’s messy and complicated, and those who take a slide-rule approach are really talking about engineering. 

The relationship between biographical details and storytelling

I thought Elvis was superb considered as a film. The movie paints with broad brush strokes, but these strokes are broadly correct, or have the right direction, and focused on the essential. It just missed too much that is also essential for it to hit the mark. As an Elvis pedant with a deep and abiding respect for history, I have a problem with a creative licence that bends the facts too far out of shape, or simply ignores facts that don’t fit the narrative. When so much is omitted, the narrative simply ceases to be true, no matter how much it is based on fact. The film is guilty more of sins of omission than of sins of commission, and gets away with it because the script is both very literate with respect to its subject and adventurous in the way it moves an engaging story on. The film is unafraid to sing a familiar song in a different voice. Or so it would seem. I think that is how the film-makers would see themselves, but I’m not so sure. 

I’ve read many versions of the Elvis story over the years, some favourable, some deeply unfavourable and unpleasant to boot. I pay no regard to those stories which portray Elvis as plastic and phoney, a derivate non-talent, for the simple reason my ears don’t deceive me. As for the stories of Elvis’ personal life, it is hard to separate fact from fiction. And there is a ‘so what?’ quality to all of them. Do people still think that Elvis was God, or ought to have been? The stories that catch my eye are those by the radicals and hipsters, by Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs, which portray Elvis as rebel and former rebel, reminiscing about the rebel years and portraying them as a paradise lost and never to be refound, only glimpsed, sporadically, here and there. It’s an appealing image, which is why people are drawn to it. People mired in a world of complicity and compromise are forever yearning for a pre-lapsarian wholeness and wholesomeness, and Elvis in the early days fits the bill. But it isn’t Elvis and it isn’t rock’n’roll. Chuck Berry told us so: ‘maybe one day your name will be in lights.’ 

So I praise the film as a film, then. It is not praise that is lightly given, because I am somewhat neurotic in my insistence on facts, details, and accuracy when it comes to Elvis’ story, by which I mean the whole story. Old Shep and The Last Farewell included. Miss those and you miss Elvis. The difference is that my attempt to cover everything would weigh weight the storytelling down. I would tell the whole truth, but few would still be awake, or alive, to be listening. The movie has a wonderfully kinetic quality which means that it’s thrilling, that it moves the heavy themes on, and that it takes people along. And such things are praiseworthy. 

But does it get the story right? Those whose view of Elvis aligns with Baz Luhrmann’s view will rave about the film, because it tells the story well. It’s just not my view, hence my criticisms. 

The movie has all of Baz Luhrmann’s signature style, which I know mainly from Moulin Rouge. This saves it from becoming a plodding ‘by-the-numbers’ recitation of the facts of Elvis Presley’s life. But it would be wrong to claim that this is not a biopic. The truth is that this really is a by-the-numbers recitation of Elvis Presley’s life, it just doesn’t quite seem so. The frenetic visuals, the non-linear structure of the story-telling, and the at times symphonic, at times cacophonous soundscape make it appear something else. I know the Elvis story well, so had no trouble fitting the scenes to a chronological structure and so didn’t get confused and lost. Perhaps the filmmakers have made the guess that most Elvis fans would know the story well enough to make all the connections and fill in any gaps, whilst non-Elvis fans wouldn’t care so long as they were being taken on a thrilling ride. 

I think the film-makers also guessed that since this movie looks like a deep dive into Elvis’ life story, and into times now long gone, it may struggle to excite much interest and hold it. That would explain the decision to use a lot of modern artists and modern music in a very anachronistic way. The presumption seems to be that Elvis and past music would neither appeal nor hold the attention. Whether that’s a good thing depends on where your interest lies. I would suggest that the casually or moderately interested movie goer would appreciate that approach far more than the hard-core Elvis fan. And if you are a film-maker, you live or die by the numbers of bums you can put on seats. As an Elvis fan, I would obviously like to hear Elvis songs throughout the film. And I bitterly resent the implication that Elvis’ songs would not be appealing enough to draw an audience. If that is the assumption at the heart of the film’s approach, then it is hard to see how it could have any positive impact when it comes to recovering Elvis’ reputation in an age that is inclined to see him as a secondary, derivative non-talent. The pertinent question to ask with respect to this film is this: where is Elvis as a musical presence? I can praise the lead performance and emphasise that Austin Butler should be in the awards conversation at the end of the year: he puts in a superb performance as Elvis. But where is Elvis in this film? Elvis seems buried in his influences and in his mercenary allegiances. He is struggling for independent life throughout. 

There are plenty of Elvis documentaries out there, which Elvis fans will know and non-Elvis fans never watch. The case for this film is that it will introduce new generations to Elvis. Whilst that would seem to be a good thing, it depends upon which ‘Elvis’ excites their interest. If they come to the real Elvis thinking he is the character in this movie, then they will be quickly disappointed and interest will turn to scorn. I am already hearing from people who saw the film and felt moved by it now denouncing Elvis as a phoney and a hypocrite. They have been seduced by the wrong image of Elvis and now turn on the real person. This is an extension of the same problem that plagued Elvis in real life. ‘The image is one thing and the human being is another,’ Elvis said in 1972. ‘It's very hard to live up to an image.’ The effort proved to be impossible. 

And now we have a film that saddles Elvis will another impossible image to live up to in death. It can’t be done. All that we can hope is that people will, somehow, find the nerve to face realities, and embrace them sympathetically rather than condemn them judgementally. In other words we can hope that people are prepared to look deeper than appealing surface image. Nobody does Elvis better than Elvis, and it is to be hoped that people put the shadow-boxing to one side, go direct, and that an interest in going deeper is sparked that way. I’m old enough to remember Elvis in the seventies. Whilst not considered prime Elvis, it seemed impressively grand at the time, with singles like Always on My Mind, Burning Love, and An American Trilogy topped by the Hawaii world-wide concert via satellite in 1973. Although Elvis’ demise now seems to have been inevitable, it came as a huge shock at the time, for the reason that Elvis looked like a colossus bestriding the world he had created. For those old enough to remember Elvis when he was alive, the film is shallow and superficial, and a very pale imitation of what those years were really like. That may seem overly critical. There are times of genuine excitement in the film which do capture something of the vital, visceral quality of the real Elvis’ presence. And that is genuinely impressive. But it isn’t sustained, and is quickly buried in the tale of entrapment and decline. The sixties and seventies are buried in regret and lamentation, indicating the extent to which the movie is presenting yet another version of the ‘rise and fall’ narrative. That narrative is too easy, too pat, to do justice to Elvis’ story. Take a listen to Elvis performing the blues version of I’ll be home on Christmas Day in 1971, and put aside notions of decline. 

The dark details that made Elvis less god-like and more human

Many Elvis fans may well prefer the thrilling image of Elvis portrayed in the film to the darker aspects of the man. We have gone through the painful experience of learning just how deeply flawed Elvis was as a man. There is a long list of disappointing details that came as hammer blows to the fans who idolised him in life, some hitting harder than others. It never bothered me that Elvis thought The Beatles were un-American. It even amused me to read Elvis claim he had studied ‘communist brain washing techniques,’ thinking The Beatles communist subversives. I found the facts surrounding his drug addiction to be simply sad. It didn’t worry me that Elvis met Nixon. Was Kennedy any better? The fact that Vietnam was the liberals’ war tends to be forgotten. Nixon also enacted all the civil rights legislation the Democrats promised but didn’t deliver. 

Nixon promised to pull the US out of the war. Hypocrisy runs deep and wide and tall and far. Elvis collected police badges and approached Nixon for a narcs badge. He never actually voted for Nixon. He wasn’t actually registered to vote. He was asked to perform at the Whitehouse for the President, only to have Elvis’ manager Parker demand a fee. No one is paid to sing for the President, Parker was told; Elvis doesn’t sing for free was Parker’s response. It all served to keep Elvis isolated. Johnny Cash, the man in black, voted for Nixon and performed for Nixon, as did James Brown, the Godfather of soul. These facts are never mentioned, it is always ‘Elvis and Nixon’ without any of the above context, portraying Elvis was a card-carrying reactionary of the worst order. Elvis never made political statements and stands in public. And yet he is still condemned. For what? For not being with Kennedy and Vietnam? Elvis had drug problems, a fact that was hard to bear when people who idolised him considered him to be the epitome of everything good, fresh, and pure. He also had an obsession with guns, anger issues, and ran a Memphis Mafia that could have been a case study for toxic masculinity. This was noted at the time. I remember watching the ’68 Special and hearing the fake, over the top laughter from Elvis’ cronies. Family members commented on it, saying that they don’t like the hangers’ on. But when you are isolated by fame and fortune and live in a world of your own, how do you make friends with people? There can only be friendship among equals. Where were Elvis’ equals? The Elvis operation erected an iron curtain around Elvis, closing out creative influences and closing Elvis in. I remember the story of someone who was talking with a member of the Memphis Mafia, who was a fair distance away from Elvis in the room. This character burst out laughing when Elvis, at the other side of the room, made a funny comment that had the people around him laughing. ‘Why are you laughing?’ asked the person. ‘Elvis just made a joke’ replied the Mafia member. ‘But you never heard it.’ These were the stories that made Elvis’ world seem somewhat weird and warped. And Elvis too, surrounded as he was by inauthentic behaviour on the part of servants and sycophants. The revelations that Elvis was a womaniser were hardly revelations at all, and those who were shocked could never have heard Baby Let’s Play House, So Glad You’re Mine and countless other of the early Elvis songs. Loving You, Elvis’ second movie from 1957, closes with a rousing rendition of Got a Lot O’Livin’ to Do, ending with Elvis singing: ‘Oh yes I've got a lot o' living to do, A whole lot o' loving to do,’ with the message ‘And there's no one who I'd rather do it with-a than you’ spelled out three times in slow motion gyration.’ 

The idea of Elvis the womaniser had been utterly normalised by his films and by his seeming determination to kiss every female member of the audience during his concerts. The central theme of most of the Elvis movies seemed to be girls, girls, girls. In one of his concerts he can be heard joking ‘who’s key did I get?’ I also heard the story that Elvis conducted affairs with all of the leading ladies in his films except one (which was Mary Tyler Moore, who identified herself. No one else denied it). Who could have been surprised, let alone shocked? It would have been more surprising had the converse been true. 

Anne Helm, Elvis’ co-star in Follow that Dream, revealed in interview: ‘We did have a romance; it was quite wonderful. Elvis was away from the madding crowd. It was like a shipboard romance. In those days we were very promiscuous and of course I knew he was having a lot of affairs, but we really adored one another.’ Helm said that Elvis ‘really liked sex,’ from which you can conclude that she did, too. ‘I had fun,’ she added (Peter Harry Brown and Pat H. Broeske, Down at the End of Lonely Street: The Life and Death of Elvis Presley, 1998 pp.242-244, 449). There’s none of this in the film, so much so that you are left with the impression that there were only two women in the world, Elvis mum and Priscilla: ‘Everyone knew about Priscilla, although he didn’t talk a lot about Priscilla to me,’ says Helm. 

The film skates over other things too, like the drug addiction, and the poor diet and obesity/ill-health. The most deeply distressing aspect of the darker side of Elvis was his timidity to the point of silence when it came to his exploitative, parasitic manager. This is the central theme of the movie, which speculates as to the reasons behind a complicity so supine as to seem like cowardice. Elvis was ripped off and humiliated, stripped of his artistic reputation and credibility in the process, leaving fans like me forever trying to re-establish his standing against those who dismissed him as a joke. 

The real Elvis is deep and dark, troubling and contradictory. Those who remain on the surface merely conclude that Elvis was a secondary talent, ‘plastic,’ and a hypocrite. There has been so much written on Elvis that it is impossible to read it all. So I adhere to strict guidelines to save time. Anyone who argues along these lines I take to be the quickest way to prove they are uninformed and have nothing relevant to say – certainly nothing I haven’t heard a million times before. 

In the end, I got over the pain of seeing the idol fall, shattering into a thousand pieces. All the revelations concerned stuff that made him human after all, like the rest of us. It was painful learning the less than ideal truth about Elvis. But it contains an ancient lesson taught by all the great religions. Human beings are made in the likeness of God and can aspire to live up to that likeness; but they are not God themselves. Elvis wasn’t a god, he didn’t die for our sins, he died of them magnified by money and power and the opportunities for transgression they bought. You can be flawed as a fallen creature and still be a good person at your core. I think that is a point that the film is trying to establish, identifying the pure Elvis early on, then showing the pressures and forces that took it all away from him, perverting his healthy potentials. Everything I have read about Elvis indicates that he was a good man at heart whose virtues as well as his vices were exacerbated by the wealth and power he had and, crucially, the isolation in which he had to live. He was a human soul trapped in an inhuman situation. He gave generously to others, so much so that he was effectively broke by the end. He seemed to be forever running to escape his demons, and the remarkable thing is that he outpaced them for so long. But they finally caught him up and destroyed him. As to where these demons came from, psychologists suggest that he carried the weight of his deceased twin throughout his life. That there are several other candidates, all equally plausible, suggest that Elvis didn’t so much have a Hellhound on his trail as a whole pack of them. 

Beyond biography to the reasons why Elvis matters

As a huge Elvis Presley fan, I was hoping to see a film that went past biography to indicate why Elvis is so culturally and musically important and is so beloved by so many generations of people, why his voice still resonates, and why his songs are still played. I didn’t get a sense of any of that at all. Instead, the film leaves us with the impression of wasted talent and lost potential, the career that might have been had Elvis not been diverted into mere commerce. The impression is given of a creative artist whose ability was diverted into sterile channels, leaving us with the great early years, before induction into the army, and brief creative resurges after, in the midst of a relentless decline. Elvis’ career is thus one long disappearing act. That may be part of the truth, and an important part, but it is far from being the whole truth, and when it is presented as such it is plain false. There’s nothing new here, it’s the old fable we have heard told many times before. 

This fable accepts the John Lennon view that ‘Elvis died when he went into the army’ without reservation. But, when based on misinterpretation, is demonstrably false. ‘Before Elvis there was nothing,’ Lennon also said. The meaning of that statement is clarified when we read Lennon saying elsewhere that ‘Nothing really affected me until I heard Elvis.’ The Elvis died in the army statement is harder, and does indeed imply that Elvis’ career was over by 1958. In truth, it was Lennon’s image of Elvis that died. And, in truth, it was a good thing that Lennon moved past idealisation and idolisation and embarked on a career of his own. But Elvis was far from dead in 1960. Entirely missing from the familiar fable is the struggle for artistic integrity that Elvis waged at every stage of his career. He wasn’t as passive and as supine as he seems on the surface. If you study the facts of Elvis’ career in any depth, you can see him struggling over the material for the ‘lost album’ of 1964, you can feel his frustration over the focus on movies and movie soundtracks in 64-65, you can see him coming back as an artist in 1966 with his Grammy Award winning gospel album How Great Thou Art as well as in his recording of blues, ballads, folk, and country at the same session (Down in the Alley, Love Letters, Tomorrow is a Long Time, Come What May etc.), the same with respect to the country rock and blues of 1967-1968 (Guitar Man, Big Boss Man, Too Much Monkey Business, You’ll never Walk Alone etc.). You have to be wilfully blind to miss the high quality material Elvis recorded in 1966-1968. To describe the ’68 TV Special as a ‘comeback’ is something of a misnomer, seeing as Elvis had never been away. But it did indeed feel like a comeback, signalling the return of Elvis as the blues-based rocker. The truth is that by this stage of his career, Elvis was largely known – and dismissed – as a movie artist. The movies were the image of Elvis in the sixties and, by 1968, it wasn’t a very good image at all, certainly not when set against the rock and soul revolution of that decade. The important point to establish is that, through bad management and poor career choices, Elvis the artist was having to struggle against Elvis the easy money spinner. It is easy to blame his manager Col. Tom Parker, for the reason that there is good reason so to do. But it is not strictly true that Elvis went straight into sun’n’fun’n’girls’girls’girls movies in 1960. For the first couple of years in the sixties, Elvis alternated between serious roles and light musical comedies. The problem is that films like Flaming Star, Wild in the Country, Follow that Dream, and Kid Galahad generated much less interest at the box office than did Blue Hawaii. Commerce is about the bottom line and the bottom line is money. Hard numbers based on the choices made by Elvis fans sealed the fate of Elvis’ movie career. 

The same monetarist calculations sealed the fate of Elvis as a studio artist, too. The great Elvis is Back album of 1960 – easily one of the best five albums of Elvis’ entire career - sold a mere 200,000 copies, a mere fraction of the millions shifted by the soundtrack albums G.I. Blues and Blue Hawaii. That same ratio applied to Something for Everybody (1961) and Pot Luck (1962) and the movie soundtracks recorded at the same time. Elvis wasn’t considered an album artist, his public profile had been shaped by singles and movies. Elvis was retired from live performances in 1961, meaning that if fans wanted to see Elvis they would have to watch his films. It was a perfect control strategy, with Elvis’ every move and line scripted for him on screen. It was also soul-destroying. Elvis was enthused by live performance and by direct connection with an audience. He was closed down and shut away. 

By 1963-1964 it was apparent that Elvis’ studio work was now being subordinated to the films. To that extent, the narrative of the film is right, but only if you keep the focus on the surface level. Look below the surface and you will see that Elvis the artist was still alive. The really drama here lies in Elvis’ struggles with the Elvis machine, with him as the exploited proletarian trapped within the business of his own making. To examine that drama would restore agency to Elvis and expose more clearly the weight of the forces bearing down on him. Elvis as proletarian ended up working for the people who should have been working for him. It is a classic story of alienated production characterised by the transposal of subject and object, perversion through the inversion of agency and structure, the pathos of means and ends. The movie misses all of this struggle by portraying Elvis as passive, as someone who is acted upon, a mere puppet of nefarious forces. The movie years are skirted past in a minute, and in a way that conveys the disposable nature of the product, but ignores entirely Elvis’ frustration at their futility. It also misses – to complicate matters further – the fact that many of these movies were very good, and a lot more of them than critics are prepared to allow. I have seen Ray Charles in Ballad in Blue. I would take Tickle Me over that any day. And the films were popular. People looked forward to them, and enjoy watching them to this day. The films also produced a number of great songs. The problem is that there were too many of them. If you think I am wrong, then cut the 31 films down to those you consider to be the best 10, and see how better things look with balance. And then see how others’ doing the same produce different lists. The movies are a legitimate part of the Elvis story, and ought to be recognised as such. To sweep past them in a minute is a travesty. It is lazy. It is a way of accepting rather than challenging the conventional view, and avoiding having to address the truth. As a result, the force and meaning of Elvis’ release and return as the rocker in the ’68 Special is missed. An Elvis fan will grasp the significance of the moment, but the drama of the moment may be lost on a casual observer. 

4. The Movie’s Style – Baz Luhrmann’s approach to film-making

If you are expecting Luhrmann to break the habit of a lifetime and ‘behave’ to deliver a straightforward biopic, then you are going to be disappointed. But that’s a problem of expectations. That said, for all of the trademark maximalist style, the movie is far more of a by-the-numbers account of Elvis’ life than you might imagine. There is a clear chronology to the movie. 

The movie definitely has a Moulin Rouge type of presentation. Its artsy, fast paced, and highly theatrical. Whether this appeals is a matter of personal taste. I have enjoyed this kind of presentation by, say Ken Russell, when I have been less attached to the subject matter. As a lover of French chanson I disliked Moulin Rouge intensely, seeing it as an appropriation of the music and culture I love for a music and culture I most vehemently do not. I found it a garish, trivial, and over-blown waste of time which bore no relation to its subject. So I feared the worse with respect to Luhrmann’s Elvis. To be fair, the film is much more respectful of its subject matter, the period, the culture, and the person of Elvis. At the same time, the opening scene prepared us for what was to come, effectively setting the film up as a puppet show, with Elvis cast in the role of puppet and his manager Tom Parker as the puppet-master. Had the Elvis story really been so simple and straightforward then it would be entirely without drama, interest, and pathos. The internal dynamics of the true story are flattened out and buried underneath a surface-level morality play between the forces of good and evil within an overarching narrative of rise and fall. In fact, the fall is built into the premise. That’s far too simple to be anything other than grossly misleading. 

I have no real objection to the loud and glitzy and oversaturated approach. It catches the eye and prevents us from getting bogged down in details. But it also detracts from the complexities and complicities that are at the nub of the Elvis paradox. If those are ignored or misappropriated to support a narrative superimposed on the facts in outline, then Elvis is as effectively buried as the movie makers claim he was in life. I am reading very mixed reviews from Elvis fans on this movie. Many Elvis fans are pleased to see Elvis’ name in lights again. Let’s be brutally honest, too many Elvis fans were too easily pleased when Elvis was alive, something his handlers exploited to maximum advantage. Ask some Elvis fans what their favourite Elvis song is and they will say ‘anything by Elvis.’ To which I ask: do you really think that Old MacDonald is as good a song as Suspicious Minds? Elvis didn’t like all the songs he did, and openly derided some as he worked on them. The albums tended to be just called ‘Elvis’ and be put out with a picture of Elvis on the front. There were no details of the musicians in the sleeve notes. In fact there were no sleeve notes, only the obligatory promotion of other ‘Elvis’ albums that every real fan must have. The fans opted for the easy over the hard, the movies and movie soundtracks over serious studio work, and the more facile films over the more serious. The reduction of Elvis’ career was fan-driven. The Elvis movie has manager Tom Parker, normally blamed for Elvis’ demise, claim that Elvis was loved to death. Wasn’t that the lesson of Tennessee Williams’ play the Sweet Bird of You, with Marlon Brando playing the Elvis character in The Fugitive Kind? In live performance, Elvis noted that his throwaway rock’n’roll medleys of memories went down just as well, if not better, as his immense performances of much more substantial and more vocally demanding material. If more artistically challenging and rewarding performances met with such indifference, then why bother? Elvis stopped extending himself and resigned himself to serving up the same-old for fans who wanted no more than memories, a victory tour, and a communal celebration. 

So I take a lot of comments from Elvis fans to the effect that ‘the film is great’ with a pinch of salt. Anything with Elvis in or on would be ‘great’ to some fans. We know this to be the case, because these are the Elvis fans who bought it by the bucket load when Elvis was alive. I’m more interested in the more discerning Elvis fan, the fan who loves Elvis for his distinctive qualities rather than for his image. Here, the reception is decidedly ‘mixed.’ I’m reading the verdicts of Elvis fans who had the privilege of having seen Elvis in concert. These are the people who were fans when Elvis was alive, and who know that this narrative of endless decline and destruction is false. The movie makes no mention of Elvis’ record breaking run at Madison Square Gardens and reduces the global triumph of the Hawaii via satellite concert of 1973 to a strategy on Tom Parker’s part to prevent Elvis from performing abroad. This may well be true, but it was a massive triumph all the same. The fans who knew Elvis’ career as a career of sustained success are calling the film out as false, a frustrating and infuriating mess that makes a nonsense of Elvis’ achievements. In fine, had Elvis’ story been one of manifest decline, the fall in 1977 would not have come as the shock it did. But maybe we were all blinded by the iconography? 

Let’s move on and look at the direction. Putting aside the big issue of how true to the subject matter he is, Baz Luhrmann does a wonderful job directing this film, bringing all his stylized instincts to bear to make a film that is easy on the eye and on the backside. It’s not a straightforward biographical presentation of the facts of Elvis’ life, but is very stylised, as might be expected. I’m not a film buff and tend to spend most of my time in the movie theatre squirming in my seat and looking for the exit (to be fair, that is my normal reaction when I visit most places). It’s clear that Luhrmann relishes tackling the subject matter here, that he believes in the narrative, and that he has a genuine respect for Elvis and understands that Elvis matters. As to why Elvis matters, things are more complicated. The main point of contention for me is that he has a very distinctive view of Elvis, giving us an Elvis that is sanitized for contemporary consumption. The bitter irony is that Luhrmann does precisely to Elvis what his movie claims his manager and the music industry did – he domesticates him to make him fit expectations and preferences. The Elvis I love is the Elvis who escapes such enclosure, the Elvis who is ever out of reach, the anarchic excess that is both grounded and transcendent, forever reaching beyond imposed limit and constraint. Luhrmann’s ‘Elvis’ is no more Elvis than was John Lennon’s ‘Elvis.’ 

Luhrmann’s auteur take on Elvis Presley the artist sets the man’s enduring significance within the context of his time and place. Luhrmann sets his stall out early on this, but it is the most predictable take, something which all the stylised, maximalist, flourishes cannot hide. And it is precisely the wrong take. If Elvis Presley achieved anything, it is that he drew on his influences to change the culture, whilst at the same time being more than the sum of his influences, transcending time and place as well as genre. True, Elvis came to be lost in the world he had created. Who wouldn’t be? As a pioneer, he found himself alone in a new world, even if it was a world of his own creation. Such is the story of alienation. Those who came later found a home in that world, taking the creative forces unleashed by Elvis further on and in their own terms. It was a real world, in other world, a world with possibilities that, for various reasons explored by the film (management control), were largely unexplored by Elvis. But it was not a false, inauthentic commercial world, playing Hell to the Paradise Lost of origins. Elvis’ origins were dire poverty and limited life chances. He was destined for a life of cheap labour, ill-health, and early death. The view that the only authentic bluesmen are those wearing overalls singing of their days on Parchman’s Farm is very much a white middle class indulgence and folk fantasy. Elvis’ dad had a spell on Parchman’s Farm. Elvis knew that it wasn’t the place to be. I remember reading the biography of John Lee Hooker, in which the dollar sign which Hooker wore as a lapel badge in his sharp suit was explained – Hooker was making it clear to his admirers that he played for money, not for an authenticity that would serve to keep him broke. He wasn’t the pet of others’ artistic expectations and demands. The impression given by the film is that Elvis should have stayed with his roots and never strayed from home, never blended music forms, never changed the world, never transcended the material poverty of his background. There is nothing new at all in this view. This is the view of hipsters in the fifties and sixties, the kind of people who accused Louis Armstrong of betraying his art by performing for the people, the people who lectured Armstrong on the meaning and importance of jazz, not understanding that the artist himself didn’t recognise the terms of the ‘debate.’ 

It is easy to see why Luhrmann’s Elvis will likely divide opinion. Elvis is a figure who divides opinion, no matter what you say or do. Say ‘black’, someone will say ‘white’; say ‘stop,’ and someone will say ‘go’; say ‘yes’, and someone will say ‘no.’ There are serious criticisms to be made of the film, key points to raise and clarify. That said, it qualifies as a good movie. It does its job, it engages and entertains, and it didn’t have me hurling obscenities and oaths at the screen, which is always a good sign. I shook my head a few times, but managed to keep my silence. (Had I watched the film with someone, I fear that I may have inflicted a long and critical commentary on the theatre goers, at least until I was escorted out). 

The film has all of Luhrmann’s stylised elements, superimposing images on top of each other, moving rapidly through scenes by way of captivating images, all to a pulsating rhythm. On a couple of occasions I looked to the sides of the room, having sensed noise and movement all around me. The movie is fast-paced and cacophonous. That could be evidence of style over substance, of course, a reversion to tricks and techniques to move the plot on in tricky situations. The movie is a quick, surface-level sprint through Elvis’ life, which works well as a spectacle. Although the film is two hours and forty minutes, it never feels that long at all. But in the appeal and attraction there is also distraction and diversion. And I was left asking, where did Elvis go? 

The movie is kinetic, musical (symphonic, cacophonous), turbo charged, irreverent, tragic. But it’s not as overblown and inflated as it could have been. The movie is this blitzkrieg kaleidoscope of sound and vision, flashing back and forth. Some like this, some don’t. Accepting that this was never going to be a documentary, I reconciled myself to the approach. I just think that if this was the approach that was to be taken, then there was great scope for flashing between the many and varied music forms and influences that went into the musical make-up of Elvis Presley, instead of reducing these to just the one. This gives a very false view of Elvis. Further, in bending over backwards to emphasise Elvis’ roots in black music and culture, it rests the Elvis legend on uncertain ground. If there is nothing more to Elvis than black music then the question is begged: why do we need Elvis? Why not just go direct to source and cut the middle man out? The genius of Elvis is that he was more than the sum of his many parts. By focusing almost exclusively on the blues, the film misses this crucial point by a country mile. It delivers an Elvis that is easily knocked down by critics. Like the Deists’ God of Reason, this Elvis of acceptable musical form and taste is the easiest God of all to refute. 

In my mind’s eye I cannot help but imagine what Ken Russell would have made of Elvis. Probably an outrage and an abomination that would have had the Elvis world in uproar and would never come close to securing the approval of the Elvis Presley Estate. But maybe it would have made much more sense of Elvis Presley’s ultimately uncontainable, uncontrollable, self-destructive excess than any movie made by those with ambitions to work again. I wonder if anyone has the nerve to make the ‘what, all of it?’ movie of Elvis’ life? And I wonder how many would have the nerve to watch it. 

Luhrmann’s approach is grand and glitzy, like the career of the subject, but maybe invites the disappearance of the character

The subject matter could have been made for Ken Russell’s aesthetic (Luhrmann’s too). It’s over the top, it’s inflated, it’s unreal, it’s glitzy, it’s elaborately symphonic, it’s Elvis as the King, the God rising above and beyond Heaven and Earth, a man whom neither Hollywood nor Las Vegas could capture and contain, only destroy. It’s big, it’s fast, it’s extreme, it’s colourful, it’s chaotic – a spectacle in bright large lights. Like Elvis. I was going to say like Elvis in the seventies then. But what tends to be forgotten at this distance in history is how remote and other-worldly the Elvis of the sixties movies was. The Elvis movies tend to be dismissed as mere ephemera now. I remember watching Blue Hawaii for the first time at the local picture house and being transported to another world. It’s the same with respect to the rock’n’roll. Elvis may well have seemed alien in the fifties; fifties Elvis certainly seemed alien in the fifties. Little film of Elvis in the fifties was shown at the time, there was a clip in Elvis on Tour, but, in the days before videos, we were reliant on the TV. We read the stories of Elvis in the fifties and the storm he provoked, and we listened to his fifties’ sides. And he seemed to be from another world entirely. Bryan Ferry notes this quality: ‘There’s sexuality throughout the history of rock and roll. Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Fats Domino… they had a kind of sensuality. The music is abstract, it’s rhythmic and can be romantic. It takes people into another realm, which is quite nice’ (Bryan Ferry, musician and dandy: ‘Rock and roll is not just jeans and T-shirts’, El Pais, October 13, 2024). Elvis seemed to be on another planet long before he played Las Vegas in the seventies. Luhrmann goes all out on this Elvis with the fast-paced editing, the soundscape, the kaleidoscope, the riotous rock’n’roll, the costumes, the sex, the glitz and glamour. Without the sex, only Priscilla. But does he really give us the passion, the depth, the drama? Does he really give us the excess? I think he gives us a carefully selected, sanitized, and controlled version of the truth, which is much less than the whole truth. Which, with Elvis, is no truth at all. And still leaves us guessing what, actually, Elvis did and where it all went wrong. 

One issue that needs to be addressed head-on is Baz Luhrmann’s style and approach to movie-making. Luhrmann divides opinion as a director. Some people love him, some people loathe him. He has a very distinct approach. I don’t know him, except for Moulin Rouge, which I didn’t like one bit. But I tend to quite like the brand of joyful, spectacular maximalism that is his signature style, just not in relation to a subject matter I care for deeply. But praise where praise is due, Luhrmann’s unabashed, flamboyant, theatrical style is in short supply in these most miserable and neurotic of times and is something that very few directors can pull off. As I said, Ken Russell was one of my most favourite directors. Russell was erratic, got plenty wrong, but when he got it right there was no one to touch him. And when he got it wrong he was still hugely entertaining. I remember Amanda Donohoe recounting the tale of when she read the script to Russell’s The Lair of the White Worm and thinking ‘I’ll never work again.’ I think it was the scene with the bath and the boy scout. I thought it a most enjoyable film. And the approach is not inappropriate to Elvis, at least not to the Elvis of the larger-than-life legend who transcended the planet. But, of course, Elvis’ tragedy lay precisely in having to live up to that impossible image in a world that couldn’t contain him, leaving him mired in a world at ever further remove from reality. 

By turning sound and vision up to 11, Luhrmann manages to take a vast and complex subject and make it entertaining. But only rarely, and in a most superficial sense, does he get under the skin of his subject. He does it enough to make the character believable, engaging, and sympathetic, which is an achievement (I’ve seen many portrayals of Elvis which have turned me off immediately). The film highlights certain key aspects of Elvis’ character, fits them to a simple structure, and then let’s the movie play itself out to the conclusion. A doom foretold. In its tragedy, the conclusion has all the inevitability of inescapable fate. Elvis’ story is tragic in that sense. The movie’s end, however, is characterised more by a predictability born of the script than an inevitability arising out of Elvis’ inability to outrun his demons. Trapped in Las Vegas, trapped in a contract to a parasitic manager, with marital break-up severing the connection with something, someone real, followed by death. It came too quickly in the film, as if ticking boxes in the narrative. It’s too neat, too pat, and too quick. It misses Elvis’ many triumphs in the sixties and seventies (it misses his many girlfriends, too, for that matter). The end comes too quickly, straight from the divorce from Priscilla in 1972 to death in 1977. That’s five years in which other possibilities were played out. 

The Movie’s Pacing

Luhrmann takes us into different stages of Elvis’ life, focusing on certain things and periods much more than others, and hardly, if at all, at some things and periods. This is more a look at Elvis’ life through certain set-piece events and showdowns, with the relentless normality of Elvis’ everyday unreality assumed rather than shown. The long frustration which lay behind the yearning for release is stated rather than shown, as when Steve Binder tells Elvis that his career is ‘in the toilet.’ Why Elvis was so down in the part of his career isn’t really shown. The Beatles invaded and took over and Elvis is too trapped in Hollywood to respond. As an Elvis completist I want it all. As a film director, Luhrmann knows it all can’t be shown. He thus goes for depth around certain key events rather than a breadth that, in covering everything, reveals nothing. It’s the right approach. But in missing so much there is a suspicion that he has revealed little. But the movie is good to look at in being colourful and vibrant, in conveying the different time periods, a real credit to the editors and photographers. 

The chief characteristic of Luhrmann’s direction is its fast pacing and, shall we say, courageous editing. The criticism that Luhrmann has missed certain things out is not criticism at all, merely a statement of fact relating to the job at hand. Since you can’t cover it all, a director is faced with having to make selections. True criticism focuses on whether the inevitable choices made were the right calls. Was the truth revealed or concealed? The breathless pacing and editing divert attention controversies arising from the selection of contents. Certain key influences are neglected, certain key elements of Elvis’ character, certain aspects of his career, not to mention certain relationships. It is no exaggeration to say that an entirely different movie, with an entirely contrary take on Elvis, could be made from the elements of the Elvis story that have been cut out or skimmed: the white country roots, the love of God and religion, the mediation of the radio and love of pop and ‘popera’ (Dean Martin and Mario Lanza), the TV appearances as bringing Elvis into the mainstream, national service as a willing and genuine patriotism on Elvis’ part (not a mere alternative to jail), the slick Nashville pop of the early sixties securing Elvis at the top, the million dollar movies that packed audiences in, the hot-blooded affair with Ann-Margret (and Elvis’ many other affairs, not to mention ‘peculiar’ sexual tastes), Grammy Award winning gospel, the holy and the profane, country-rock-soul from ‘Guitar Man’ to American Sound in ’69 to Stax in ‘73, the ’68 Special as drawing attention to where Elvis already was in his music (missed by the Hollywood image), the towering musical achievement of the Nashville Marathon 1970, the very interesting, if aborted, folk turn of 1971, along with more Grammy winning gospel in the seventies, the record-breaking run at Madison Square Garden in 1972, the record breaking Hawaii via satellite concert of 1973, the losing of interest through the sheer boredom of having done it all and having run out of challenges, the return home to … country music in the material from 1973 to 1976. Elvis by the end was as country as it was possible to be. The very last song he recorded in the studio was the Jim Reeves’ classic He’ll Have to Go, Elvis singing his vocal alone, his band members having laid down the track and departed for a tour with Emmylou Harris. Elvis ended as he had begun, just him and his voice, bluesing up a country song. This narrative would focus on the immense and continued achievement and triumph, something which tends to go missing in too many accounts of Elvis’ life. The impression is always given of a vital early Elvis who made it big commercially and who promptly disappeared artistically. That is errant nonsense. All you need to do is select an Elvis song from every year to the end of his life to see a career of sustained quality. The hardest part of that exercise lies in limiting the selection to just one outstanding track from a wide range of candidates. In 1969 alone you are selecting one from Suspicious Minds, In the Ghetto, Kentucky Rain, Any Day Now, Long Black Limousine, Stranger in My Own Home Town, Gentle on My Mind. Elvis died when he went in the army? I don’t think so. The only lean year in Elvis’ career is 1965, with only So Close, Yet So Far (From Paradise), Frankie and Johnny, and Please Don’t Stop Loving Me, and maybe Beginner’s Luck coming close to quality Elvis. Instead of pitching partial views against one another, how about putting all the elements together? Or would that be ‘too much’? Like Elvis himself. 

Having praised the pacing and editing of the movie, I shall now clarify the nature of that praise. My praise is for the way it keeps the story moving rather than coming to be swallowed up by the vast content. That said, the movie comes over as less a story unfolding and more as a series of trailers around set-pieces and showdowns. The movie doesn’t quite transition from scene to scene, but cuts back and forth instead. That’s fine if you already know the story and can easily place the action, or don’t know the story and don’t care so long as you are entertained. Certain scenes certainly are worth seeing over and again. But now I have had time to reflect, I can see that certain themes and scenes in the movie would really irritate as I watched again. The movie is too unfocused and erratic, maybe hoping that style can help us skirt past some inconvenient details in the complex subject matter. 

Part Two - The Story and the Cast

5. Mytho-genesis

 The movie goes for the myth of Elvis, but fails to capture the legend of Elvis. Instead, it seeks to remake the image of Elvis in a form more acceptable to certain tastes. Or acceptable to current tastes. The danger of the approach is that tastes change with fashion and politics. It holds that the Elvis who drew on his black roots is the authentic Elvis, with everything else an extraneous addition and deviation. That is just plain false. And identifies Elvis as a derivative talent. My challenge to everyone who imposes such impeccably good – and ideologically sound – taste on Elvis is to have them explain Elvis’ love for songs like The Last Farewell, a middle-of-the-road song he loved and would play over and again. We know the songs that Elvis loved, we have the tapes of him singing in private. These home recordings reveal the real Elvis far more than movies and documentaries that define Elvis’ taste through a selective filter. You can hear Elvis’ tastes in the Million Dollar Quartet, when, in Sun studio in the December of 1956, Elvis shared favourite songs with Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash. Although there is a Chuck Berry song, the remarkable thing is how little rock’n’roll and R&B there is (Elvis impersonating Jackie Wilson impersonating Elvis on Paralysed) and how much country and, especially, gospel there is. Elvis sings a couple of ballads, too (That’s When Your Heartbreaks Begin and Is It So Strange?) In the home recordings you can hear Elvis reaching back to the pre-rock songs sung by the likes of Ed Ames and Eddy Howard. When things that are core to Elvis’ musical identity are expunged from the narrative, the narrative is false. Such things might not suit the impeccably good taste of the taste-makers, but such people have always wanted Elvis to conform to their wishes and fantasies rather than leave Elvis free to pursue his own. One of the tragic elements of Elvis’ life is that he was a man who incited so many dreams and passions among others only to become subject to their contrary pulls. In death, it is still happening. Elvis was called ‘the King.’ The paradox was that in asserting a democratic individualism, he impressed so many people so much that they came to crown him king. As a liberator, Elvis told each and all to develop their own particular genius and become kings and queens in their own right. In addition to the variegated nature of Elvis’ musical tastes and talent, the film also skirts around a number of aspects of Elvis’ life that don’t fit the narrative of a natural talent and rebellious spirit that fell into the clutches of commerce. It certainly brushes right past the more troublesome aspects of Elvis’ life and character. Elvis’ reliance on drugs is explained as a consequence of his hopelessness at being trapped in an impossible, soul-destroying situation. Elvis’ problem with anger isn’t addressed, his tendency to excess likewise. He was a man who, having made it so big so quickly, was without boundaries, and unable to take check from others. The people he put around him were sycophants who served him and indulged him. Elvis lacked authentic relations to others. He lacked space to grow. There is also nothing on Elvis’ womanizing, the facts of which are so well-known as to make the omission here deeply suspicious. I’ll address all these things later. The movie is concerned to locate the authentic Elvis behind the image, but in doing so engages in a remythologising itself. Peculiarly, despite its ambitions, the film doesn’t come close to capturing the legend of Elvis Presley. The movie identifies an important aspect of Elvis’ appeal and the reason for his impact, namely the black influence on his music and style. But it neglects the other elements that went into the making of Elvis. To simplify greatly, the missing white is also the missing black, because if you lose one thing it skews relations so as to distort the nature of the other within the blend that transforms and transcends both. The problem with the tale told by the movie is that in reducing Elvis to black influences and in constantly relating every high point in Elvis’ career back to those influences, Elvis’ uniqueness is blending a variety of musical forms is entirely lost. You are also left with the conclusion that the only reason Elvis made it so big was because he was white and sang black. That view is strongly implied at several points in the film, from very early on when the dollar signs light up in Tom Parker’s eyes when he hears that the Sun singer with the coloured sound on the record being played is white, when B.B. King tells Elvis that he would make more money singing Tutti Frutti than Little Richard ever could, all the way to the scene at Las Vegas which has Elvis singing That’s All Right, only to cut back to Arthur Crudup. There’s no subtlety, no nuance. This is crude and simplistic, laying it on trowel-thick. The whole question of why Elvis still resonates today, why he matters culturally and musically, is reduced to his whiteness. His colour is the sole reason why he made it so big in the first place. This is errant nonsense, a view that is compelled to extinguish the bulk of Elvis’ catalogue in order to establish its case. The music of the early sixties is completely ignored, the million selling It’s Now or Never and Surrender are as far removed from the blues as Alpha is from Omega. But, of course, the strong undercurrent running throughout the narrative upon which this view of Elvis is based is that pretty much everything Elvis did after Sun and the early RCA sides is a decline, a deviation, and a corruption of the authentic Elvis. It was a view heard at the time, with critics regretting that Elvis had ceased to rock’n’roll. I have the Elvis Special annual from 1963, which contains an article which insisted that Elvis is no more! In 1964, John Lennon dismissed Elvis as ‘the new Bing Crosby.’ The assumption was and remains that Elvis the ballad singer is not the real Elvis. Wrong. Elvis’ first efforts to make it as a singer were all ballads. The first songs he tried at Sun were ballads. The note at Sun written against his name was ‘good ballad singer, hold.’ Elvis was singing ballads from the first: That’s When Your Heartaches Begin. Blue Moon, then Love Me Tender, Loving You, the haunting Is It So Strange. In 1957, he was explicitly seeking to branch out into more mature balladeering, trying his hand at Bing Crosby’s True Love. These were not choices forced on Elvis against his will, they expressed his own preferences. Elvis set out from the first to become a ballad singer, and by the early sixties he had become one of the very best around. There is something deeply amiss in an interpretation of Elvis that demotes Elvis’ own musical ambitions, abilities, and achievements. The simple truth is that we are being presented with image of rebel Elvis favoured by hipsters since ever. This is the Elvis of their very excited dreams and fantasies, the Elvis who would always be twenty one forever shaking up the world. Loving Elvis’ version of So Glad You’re Mine, I can understand the excitement. The problem is that such moments in history, however much they hold the attention in being explosive and exciting, are brief. They pass, and we recall them at every opportunity we get. Elvis had his moment. He did it, he embodied and acted out the fusion, the explosion happened, and the world turned on its axis. Now what? Elvis was not a writer. His creative ability lay in the act of vocal re-composition. But the trick of fusing blues, country, pop, and gospel could only be done the once. The Elvis favoured by the hipsters had little longevity and would have faded away quickly, and would never have sustained the massive career that Elvis had. It is significant that the hipsters’ view of Elvis wallows in the long decline and descent into inauthenticity, so much so that you would never guess that Elvis, alone of the fifties recording artists, maintained a very handsome chart profile to the end of his career, that Elvis had a string of #1, top five, top ten, top twenty smash hits, more gold records than any other artist, and a succession of box office Hollywood smashes. It is also worth pointing out that the poorest performing single of the five Elvis released on Sun was Milkcow Blues Boogie, a song purists single out for being a supreme slice of blues. It’s sublime. But Elvis could never have built and sustained a career on it, and those who would have Elvis cleaving to the roots here are indulging their own personal fantasies. The movie makes the point that Elvis was trapped in a gilded cage, and it is a very good point. But it might have been worth exploring the reasons why Elvis kept on striking gold when his fifties rivals faded from view. Poor movies? Has anyone ever seen Ray Charles in the truly execrable Ballad in Blue, a film so sickly as to make Elvis singing Queenie Wahine’s Papaya with annoying children seem almost tolerable. Selling out to Las Vegas? Fats Domino, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis were all playing Las Vegas in the sixties, long before Elvis returned to live performance in 1969. The different is that Elvis played and filled the biggest hotel in the town, and not the small lounges. Elvis’ rivals in the fifties themselves had fallen on hard times. They found that the few fans that remained with them wanted to hear only their old hits, not their new material. The tale is told in Rick Nelson’s excellent Garden Party, a song which also issued a warning to Elvis: ‘if memories are all I sing, I’d rather drive a truck.’ Elvis got trapped into performing a perpetual victory tour. But other fifties’ stars found themselves similarly trapped, only at a much lower and much less lucrative level. And I’ll be damned if I, as an Elvis fan who knows the truth about Elvis and who appreciates his musical many-sidedness, will be party to the constant demeaning and devaluation of essential parts of his catalogue. There was a reason why Elvis was so big, so successful, and so beloved, and it wasn’t Milkcow Blues Boogie, as undeniably great as Elvis’ rendition of that old blues is. The hipsters give us an Elvis who would have been confined to the margins and majorities. They have a romantic myth of the underdog that they refuse to let go of. They are of the same stripe of opinion as those for whom everyone who didn’t make it was better than Elvis. To them, commercial success and popularity are marks of inauthenticity. They love to take the side of the dispossessed and the expropriated, but hate nothing more than when one of the downtrodden make it big. And they hate it all the more when the dispossessed and the expropriated, the ‘ordinary’ folk who flocked to Elvis in their millions, are the ones putting Elvis on top with their purchases. I’m not buying the purists’ view for a single minute, for the reason that it involves deliberately missing, even dismissing as crazy ephemera, the real reasons for Elvis’ huge popularity in life and his continued popularity in death. It may not be a major artistic highpoint of the twentieth century, but Elvis’ Wooden Heart is something of a cultural touchstone. It might be far from being the best song Elvis ever recorded and it may have induced rage in old rock’n’roll fans, but it was popular and it earned Elvis a profile in mainstream culture from which he has never been ejected. ‘I guess you folks have never been poor,’ Elvis said to one of his critics in interview. It is in having been so poor that Elvis was disinclined to make as great a fetish of life on the margins as did the hipster critics, people who, interestingly enough, tend to earn a nice living as writers, journalists, and academics pouring over ‘folk.’ I remember Wooden Heart as a song that was popular among mums and aunties. I also remember that my staid, straight-laced and somewhat austere music teacher, a woman whose brother was a canon in the Catholic church, would never allow us to sing modern pop songs in music lessons. But she did like Wooden Heart, telling us that it was an old German folk song, and encouraged me to bring my G.I. Blues album in so that we could play both versions back to back and sing them both too. It might not have been rock’n’roll, but it earned Elvis a place in the hearts of millions of people of all sexes, ages, and descriptions. And that multiplicity, I say, is the authentic Elvis. It might not please those who want Elvis to have been some obscure blues rebel missing in the dim and distant with Robert Johnson and Hank Williams down some lost and lonely highway, but such views are the idle indulgences of people who have made it and like to be rebellious through the failures and travails of others. We should be clear that Baz Luhrmann is engaging in mythogenesis, which is the formation or production of myths or to invest something with mythical status. He is not the first to have done this, of course. Indeed, Elvis became something of a myth in his life, becoming this larger-than-life persona who transcended the music, transcended the times, and eventually transcended the planet itself. Which is to say that Elvis found it impossible to live as a mythical figure, or compete against his own myth. Many people have played around with Elvis’ mythical status, most notably Greil Marcus. There has always been this search for the ‘real’ Elvis, to get at the root of his appeal. Basically, people just project their fears, desires, and fantasies upon Elvis, who is never quite as he ought to be. Truth be told, it is this myth-making by way of projection that tore Elvis apart, subjecting him to contrary pulls as in Orpheus Descending. The word icon is overused and much abused. The word itself has undergone a massive change of meaning, from being a small religious picture worshipped by worshippers to any star who lasts longer than Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame. Does Elvis deserve the iconic status he is accorded? Yes, and for many reasons, some good, some not so good. Let’s take the not-so-good first. Elvis was worshipped and adored as a king, even a god, by millions. This adulation took the critical edge off his music and put him under constant pressure to keep the customers satisfied. He was contradicted to deliver product. But this mass worship was a bona fide cultural phenomenon and on such a scale as to make Elvis an icon. Now the good reasons, namely his songs, his voice, his style, his swagger, and, most of all, his ability to touch the soul of every man and woman. The technically great singers impress you with their vocal prowess. Elvis had technique. More than that, though, he had soul. He was a heart singer of the highest order. The great singers impress you; the greatest singers move you. Elvis moved millions and still does. And the important point to grasp is that his voice moves people in different ways across a wide range of material. Elvis didn’t always sing the songs critics with impeccably good taste thought he ought to sing, and often sang songs the sage and sober felt he ought to have stayed well clear of. But had Elvis been controlled by people so intent on imposing taste and reinforcing boundaries, there would never have been an Elvis in the first place. Elvis’ ‘difference’ lay in his drawing on a wide range of influences and blending and mixing things which others preferred to keep clear and distinct. In the end, after all the iconoclasm that is necessary to catch a glimpse of the real Elvis, there is no avoiding the conclusion that Elvis was an icon of some description after all. I’m just cautious of myth-making. In my own writing on Elvis, I try to check the flights of fancy and fantasy Elvis attracts. I love to read people like Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs, for the reason that they grasp Elvis’ huge musical and cultural importance. But I am always left with the impression that their elaborate speculations on Elvis take us a million miles away from truths so simple that everyone’s granny could understand them. Mine did. My Nin could have told you simply why Elvis mattered so much, without the need to put pen to paper. We don’t really need to mythologize. This is what happens when intellectuals with too much time on their hands start to speculate. I like to deconstruct the myths, bringing Elvis down to human proportions, identifying him as less of a king and more of an everyman and everywoman, a democrat. It’s just that whenever I do that, the scale of his achievements become all the more impressive, and he starts to assume legendary and mythical status once again. But the basis of inversion and perversion is there in the tendency to mythologize, in the transgression of natural limits. The movie portrays mythical Elvis as someone in tune with his black influences, the pure, authentic Elvis who is bent out of shape through the twist of exploitation. The purists see the myth as perfect, locating its unravelling in external nefarious forces and influences. I tend to identify the myth as containing the seeds of its own self-implosion, in its inherently inhuman quality and the way it draws a person away from authentic being. 

The Eternal Story of a Beautiful Dreamer

Baz Luhrmann presents us with the eternal story of a dreamer and a free spirit seeking to break free in a world that keeps people tied and tethered to unalterable realities. Elvis is the dream weaver who makes a pact with a dream stealer. It’s a story about the American Dream and the way that it is destroyed in the process of its realization, a true tragedy in its inevitability and inescapability. Without knowing the details of Elvis’ life, this story in outline is already the basis of a great movie. All you need to do from here is to select the relevant details and weave them into certain broad themes and you are away. The combination of romanticism and tragedy that lies at the heart of the Elvis story fits Baz Luhrmann’s signature style perfectly. What could possibly go right? 

Romanticism and Tragedy – The Gilded Cage

That Elvis was trapped in a gilded cage is true enough. The movie got this right. But the movie focused more on the traps of Tom Parker’s long-term contracts with Hollywood and Las Vegas and hardly at all on the gold. It is stated that Elvis was successful, but never actually performed nor laboured. The immensely thrilling early shows at Las Vegas are re-enacted wonderfully well, making it crystal clear that the criticisms of Elvis as a tired cabaret artist and ‘showbiz’ are lazy. When? Elvis did grow tired of Las Vegas and did grow tired of performing much the same material much the same way too much the same reaction. Elvis declared himself sick of Las Vegas on many occasions. But he was chained to Vegas as a result of his manager’s long term contracts and also by his manager’s need to pay off his gambling debts. The movie does a good job of making clear the nature of Elvis’ predicament. Elvis wanted out and when you want out you will either escape or die in the attempt. Elvis made the attempt, saw the odds ranged against him as impossible, and so drew back, resigning himself to his fate. Elvis lost control of his career, lost hope, and then lost his life. It’s the story of a man who reached heights that were well beyond his dreams and ambitions, changing the world gloriously, only to lose himself tragically in the process. By the end he was performing as a parody of his myth and legend. The fans still lapped it up, or enough of them did to keep the show on the road. The saddest part of the tale is that by this stage Elvis knew but was too tired to fight for a new direction. Being on stage was killing him, but he needed the adulation to stay alive. The worshipping crowd was the only place where he could find validation by the end. It’s a tale of triumph as tragedy, the stuff of Shakespeare. At the same time, there is a need to underline the triumph, otherwise there’s a danger of portraying Elvis’ life and career as one unmitigated disaster with brief interludes. That’s a common view, but is no more true the umpteenth time of telling than it was the first time it was told. That view expects us to count as fallow periods times which include box office smashes, gold records, Grammy awards, and ground-breaking concerts. In other words, Elvis’ tale is too complex to fit the simple contours of a morality play of good and evil. 

Controversies over false images

The problem with mythogenesis is that whilst it produces an image of Elvis that is appealing, it tends to appeal for certain transitory reasons to certain kinds of people but not others. Elvis told the truth straight and simple before he had even recorded a record when he said he sang ‘all kinds’ of music. Elvis sang ‘all kinds’ of songs for all kinds of people. Mythogenesis mires us in a war of images, trading and chasing shadows, with real persons and things nowhere in sight. Ironically, the movie has a powerful scene in which Elvis is lost in the Hall of Mirrors at the carnival. The scene makes the point that this was how Col. Tom Parker trapped a lost Elvis into a Faustian bargain. The Faustian nature of the deal made between the pair of them may well have cost Elvis first his identity and then his life if not his soul. But by turning Elvis into a myth, a myth of pure rebellious spirit in touch with roots authenticity, the movie also loses Elvis in a Hall of Mirrors, with each of us seeing in Elvis only what we want to see, fans and critics both. That the image portrayed of Elvis is not the real Elvis sparks endless debates over shadows. It is not the least of an inverted world’s achievements that it embroils those trapped within its confines in endless and debilitating dispute about illusory images arising out of unreal dichotomies. We live subject to a system which must continually generate false contradictions in order to more effectively conceal its true ones. And Elvis? He’s nowhere to be found in this world. My advice to one and all is to avoid all speculation and controversializing, the endless cycle of claim and counter-claim as to what he was and what he ought to have been, and simply go to the records and listen to them, all of them, without prejudice. Apart from Old MacDonald. 

Woke Elvis

In some reviews I saw criticisms of a ‘woke Hollywood’ creating a ‘woke Elvis.’ I feared the worse, and the close up of Elvis in the Hayride scene did strike me as ‘ambiguous.’ But .. so what, frankly? We know that Elvis was a peacock among the ducks, very much the dandy who dressed ‘differently,’ greased his hair, dressed in pink, and wore make-up. Elvis was transgressive. It was certainly noted at the time. Many were shocked. Chet Atkins, a most imperturbable man, noted that Elvis was wearing mascara. He made no judgement on that, merely saying that he had never seen that before. So I am not going to make a massive issue of this ‘woke Elvis’ manufactured by a ‘woke Hollywood,’ other than to say that the Elvis of this movie is transgressive in all the right ways. I could add that Elvis has been remarkably de-sexed, but I suspect that has more to do with the need to get the approval of Priscilla and the Elvis Presley Estate than anything else. Elvis was shockingly transgressive at the time in his appearance. At the same time, he was also a raucous rock’n’roll superstar, with all that that entails. The Elvis of this movie doesn’t strike me as being raucous at all. He seems more like a moody, introspective, submissive, brooding wallflower. Which might well reflect Elvis’ true persona as an introvert. The movie plays safe when it comes to sex’n’drugs’n’rock’n’roll to give us a sanitized myth for the woke age. This cannot but rebound against the real Elvis, who was transgressive but definitely very unwoke. There are strong grounds for arguing that surrounded by the Memphis Mafia, Elvis lived in a culture of ‘toxic masculinity.’ I don’t think many will approve of Elvis’ relations to women, with the defence that the women themselves were uncomplaining from first to last cutting no ice. The tale tells a truth that culture would prefer not to know. I’d prefer to just present the facts rather than draw a moral. I know what the teachings of my Catholic upbringing say, and I know that the age doesn’t want to hear those, either. But I am happy to call the bluff of those who accuse Elvis of having indulged in sexually licentious behaviour with a firm restatement of Catholic sexual ethics. We live in a schizophrenic age, with people asserting liberty as licence on the one hand and insisting on an almost sexless purity and judgementalism on the other. You can’t have it both ways. Like images, sexual morality soon has us lost in a Hall of Mirrors. 

The Filtered View

The Elvis Presley Estate is certainly so protective of Elvis’ image that we can reasonably question the accuracy of any portrayal that receives its official sanction. We should approach the film in the full understanding that we are seeing a highly a filtered version of Elvis’ life, with a certain restraint and economy replacing the excess. Elvis was a man who knew no boundaries and, in terms of his life, had no one to establish those boundaries for him, at least after the death of his mother. His father occasionally attempted to assert some authority, but was himself working for the company. The members of his Mafia were his servants. There was no one else, other than Tom Parker, the man who trapped Elvis and kept him trapped. A filtered, sanitized, restrained version of Elvis’ life gives us, once more, an image rather than a real human being. I would argue strongly that Baz Luhrmann has done to Elvis in death what precisely what Col. Tom Parker, RCA, Hollywood, Las Vegas, fans, journalists, critics et al did to Elvis in life, which was to manipulate Elvis’ image in such a way that the actual Elvis was erased. The likes of Parker manipulated Elvis directly, and RCA and Hollywood were in on the parasitism and perversion. The other influences operated more indirectly, often for the best reasons. But the result was the same – the real Elvis disappeared, supplanted by mythical Elvis. Luhrmann has given us a new myth. The problem with this is that myths tend not to survive the confrontation with reality. The facts of Elvis’ life are known. It took two decades at least for Elvis’ reputation to start to recover from the aftershock of the revelations that came out after his death. The idol was shattered into a thousand pieces, and the reverberations were felt for decades after. The very last thing we need is the creation of a new myth, inviting another era of iconoclasm. My fears on this were almost immediately confirmed when I saw people whose interest had been sparked by the film commenting on Elvis’ links to Nixon, his dislike of The Beatles, his taste for guns, his drug taking etc. etc. as if these were all revelations! The movie sets up an appealing myth, incites box office interest, counts the money, and leaves the rest of us mired in debilitating disagreement over phantoms arising from illusory dichotomies. I served my time in these wars a quarter of a century ago, we ought to be well past this stage. There is a case for arguing that Elvis was loved to death. Many Elvis fans simply projected all their fantasies on Elvis, seeing no wrong in the man, consuming everything that carried his name and image. Seemingly every Elvis album was called ‘Elvis’ and had an image of Elvis on its cover. Parker himself paid no attention to songwriters, so long as he got a deal on publishing. He paid no attention to musicians either. Elvis played with some of the very best musicians around. They were never credited on his albums. Elvis frequently alleged that someone was messing around with the mixes, turning the musicians down and turning Elvis’ voice up. Parker wanted to clean up and control Elvis’ image, make him safe and predictable, a guaranteed money spinner. I would say something like this sanitizing of Elvis’ image has occurred in Luhrmann’s film, which polishes up Elvis’ life and music to the point of erasure. Those Elvis fans who like the image of Elvis as the race-mixing, taboo-busting rebellious rock’n’roll spirit will love the portrayal of Elvis in the movie. This is an Elvis purged of all his dubious musical taste and politics, an Elvis whose failures are explained as the result of extraneous forces. The movie reveals why Elvis was unable to redeem all his early rock'n’roll promises, but reinstates all those promises in a highly attractive way. But the movie makes Elvis a puppet in just the same way it portrays Parker as the puppet-maker and puppet-master, the only difference being that one puppet is much more appealing than the other. Those who know little about Elvis will likely watch this film and be captivated by the image of Elvis it portrays. This is fine, so long as people don’t make the mistake of thinking that as they are being enthralled they are also being informed. In many respects, the movie isn’t true to either the personal or the professional Elvis. Elvis’ many triumphs and achievements are reduced to money and commerce and condemned as a gilded cage. Elvis’ personal tastes, beliefs, and .. foibles are ignored, everything from his love of God and country to his love of girls and guns. Elvis was conservative in his views. There is no doubt that Elvis was sincere and serious in his patriotism. This is not something certain audiences are comfortable with. Such people will have a hard time reconciling Elvis the rebel with the Elvis who, of all the awards he won, was most proud of being made one of the Ten Outstanding Young Men in the U.S. in 1971 by the Jaycees. The movie repeats words from Elvis’ acceptance speech, but not the whole speech. Elvis’ tribute to fellow recipients for ‘building the kingdom’ on Earth are cut, with only the ‘without a song .. I’ll keep singing the songs’ bit included. Elvis’ religious upbringing and beliefs are also excised. When people called him ‘the King,’ Elvis would emphasise ‘there is only one King.’ It doesn’t fit the rebellious image and so is expunged. Elvis won three Grammy Awards in his life, all of them for gospel. Backstage, Elvis would sing gospel into the early hours. Gospel was the root of Elvis’ musical persona. The Elvis on Tour movie of 1972 captured this essential aspect of Elvis’ emotional core. This is cut. It doesn’t fit. The movie constantly presents Elvis’ return to roots in terms of blues and the black influence. This is massively overdone. Elvis ends his freewheeling jam on Muddy Waters’ Got My Mojo Working with the comment ‘it’s that type of material that’s not good or bad, it’s just mediocre s**t.’ ‘He couldn’t be more wrong,’ writes Joseph Hudak praising the performance in Rolling Stone. I would say that Elvis was wrong on both counts with respect to the material and the performance, and that high spirits explain such casual dismissal. But it indicates something about how Elvis himself viewed different kinds of material. I’m going from memory here and don’t have the exact quote to hand, but I remember Elvis in interview in 1970 dismissing Hound Dog as a song compared to modern songs like In the Ghetto and Bridge Over Troubled Water. I have heard him in concert, too, dismiss Hound Dog as a silly song that ‘means nothing.’ He’s wrong, but his views shed light on the controversy over the roots of Elvis’ music. There’s a need to be careful, though, in setting different music forms above and against one another. To Elvis, all songs swam in one big sea of song. He sang ‘all kinds’ and didn’t see the need for ranking. In a 1972 Madison Square Garden press conference, Elvis explicitly defends Hound Dog and says he likes to mix contemporary ballads with older rock songs, which is indeed what he did to the end. Here’s the relevant exchange (press-conference transcript): 

Q: ‘Would you favour a contemporary ballad such as Bridge over Troubled Water or an oldie such as Hound Dog?’

Elvis: ‘It’s a conscious thing, you know? I like to mix ’em up. In other words, I like to do a song like Bridge Over Troubled Water or American Trilogy or something, then mix it up and do some rock’n’roll, do some of the hard rock stuff.’

Q: ‘Are you tired of the old stuff?’

Elvis: ‘No. I’m not in the least bit ashamed of Hound Dog or Heartbreak Hotel or whatever.’ 

Elvis felt, with good reason, that he got better as an artist. In another interview in 1970 he is asked whether he ever listens to his old Sun sides. Elvis laughs and says ‘they sound funny, boy!’ before commenting that songs, sound, and production have all got better. I am in no doubt that Elvis, too, felt that he had also got better as a singer and as an artist. Las Vegas may not have been the best testing ground for artistry, but there is simply no comparison between the shows that Elvis put on there in 1956 and the shows he delivered in 1970. The film portrays Elvis the performer very well. The scenes from the fifties, the ’68 Special, and from the early seventies captured the power, the vitality, and the excitement of Elvis as a live performer. I have no quibbles here, only praise. But Elvis’ personal taste in music is defined in a most partial and tendentious way, fitting the acceptable tastes of others but bearing no relation to Elvis’ own tastes. We know what Elvis’ tastes were, they are all over his catalogue and can also be heard in his home recordings. We know the music he sang in rehearsal and backstage. An enormous amount is made of Elvis’ boxing-ring performances in the ’68 Special, which were based on the jams Elvis would have in his dressing room. This is the real, raw Elvis, said ’68 Special producer Steve Binder. It was. The same with respect to his home recordings and backstage sings. There is all of this to tap into when it comes to revealing the real Elvis. Instead, once more, we are presented with an image of the Elvis that some would prefer, an Elvis purged of all dubious tastes. On the personal level, we don’t really get to know the real Elvis. I think the test here is the extent to which the tragic ending moves you. I’ll leave others to judge that for themselves. I thought the end came quick, straight after Priscilla’s departure (coincidentally enough …) ‘Oh, is that it, I thought.’ And now the end is here. I knew it was coming, but didn’t see it coming. There was no build up. It was only as the final scenes unfolded that I felt moved in some way. I thought it was sad. I’ve seen others say it left them unmoved. I’ve seen documentaries on Elvis which are much more moving when the end comes. I’ve seen people moved to tears by scenes of Elvis’ funeral cortege as An American Trilogy is played in This is Elvis. I didn’t get that depth of feeling here, it all seemed more cerebral, more calculated. It shows evidence of thought and reflection. But I don’t like to see the mechanics at work, I prefer to go straight for the gut. I don’t think the film portrays a bad image of Elvis at all. On the contrary, the film gives us back the Memphis Flash, and portrays the Elvis of the early years at Vegas as a powerhouse. As an image, it infinitely superior to the appallingly dismissive, condescending portrayals of fat, racist, redneck Elvis we had to suffer from the 1980s onwards, ‘The Burger and the King’ and all that mediocre middle brow dreck from our lovely liberal lovers of all humanity. But, and it’s a big but, there are immense dangers in polishing Elvis up to fit a certain appealing image. Somebody will check the facts and then instigate a debate over non-issues and non-controversies that should have been laid to rest long ago. Such debilitating disputation is to be avoided. I’ve heard it all before and don’t need to hear it again. It used to be irritating but is now just plain boring. When the same issues keep cropping up, you know that political axes are being ground. When we are presented with conjectures that have been refuted a million times, we should know that they are not conjectures, they are prejudices expressing political preferences. My fear is that by presenting an image of Elvis that neglects, even conceals, certain key aspects of the man’s life and music, the movie risks reigniting old controversies that had run their course. Elvis has been filtered, remythologized for present tastes, and more effectively erased than he ever was in life by his handlers. That this has been done for good reasons, presenting an ‘Elvis for the woke age’ (as I saw someone complain), changes nothing. An image that is out of kilter with the facts will be subject to scrutiny and found wanting. That’s not a place where the Elvis world needs to be. Worse, the movie has set up Elvis for a fall by validating certain criteria of evaluation at the expense of other no less legitimate standards. This opens up the real Elvis to the scathing judgement of people who fall for the shadows cast by others. If authenticity is to be gauged by faithfulness to black blues, then who can meet the test? The old bluesmen of the authentic folk blues condemned the pioneers of the electric blues like Muddy Waters in the early forties and early fifties. It might be instructive to go through Elvis’ catalogue and break down the songs he sang by category and then work out the balance of country recordings to blues, also gospel and ballads. But it is difficult to say precisely where the balance lies with Elvis given the extent to which he incorporated all styles into his vocal performance and merged it all in a universally accessible and acceptable pop form. It’s really a mug’s game to play the different music forms off against one another, since Elvis’ real achievement lies in his musical range riding, Elvis seeing music as music, without distinction. The age has lost nuance, discernment, judgement, but most of all sympathy, creativity, and imagination. The truth is that Elvis can’t be reduced and can’t be categorised and classified, except as pop. Elvis is a good film, but people shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking they are being informed and educated at the same time they are being entertained. The view it presents is so filtered as to be false to the core. And it sets Elvis up to the predictably jaundiced criticism of the shallow and the superficial. Perfect for the age, then. It’ll make money and win awards. The bitter irony is that it will win all the film and acting awards that were denied the real Elvis when he was alive and well. Hollywood – the cemetery of hopes and dreams. I’ve been to Hollywood. The best thing about the place was Elvis. And being accosted by five different Supermen, at least four of whom must have been fake. 

6. The Creation of a False Narrative – Elvis’ multiplicity of influences

For a long time, the dominant narrative held that rock n’ roll was purely the creation of black musicians and that white people came in, stole it, and reproduced it for white consumption and profit. It’s a simple story of appropriation which reduces a complex history to a simple black and white, as in the cartoon world stories of the clash between the necessarily good and the irredeemably evil. It’s the kind of tale we were taught to distrust and dissect when I was taught history as an undergraduate. Those with axes to grind like their history as simple – and as divisive – as their politics. The narrative is simple, and simply false. As well as blues, rock’n’roll grew out of country music, which in turn originated out of European folk music (Celtic, etc.). This influence is easy to detect in rockabilly, going back to Western Swing. Chuck Berry was not alone in acknowledging that he was influenced by Hank Williams, who in turn was influenced by blues musicians. The more you are aware of the complexities and intricacies of the music, the more you notice the interplay and inseparability of the influences. Chuck Berry’s first hit was Maybelline, which was a re-write of country tune Ida Red. Chuck Berry effectively did from the black and blues side what Elvis was doing from the white and country side, mixing and blending blues and country and meeting in the middle to go beyond both. The controversies over Hound Dog are also instructive. Elvis has been frequently accused of stealing a black woman’s blues and turning it into a million-selling pop song. That claim is so wrong on so many levels it is difficult to know where to begin. Elvis’ hard as nails rock version was as unlikely a pop hit as could have been imagined. It was Elvis’ innovations here that were distinctive (although not completely original since Little Richard was also recording extreme rockers at this time). Hound Dog was written by two young white singers, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who had to sue Willie Mae Thornton and Johnny Otis, who were claiming copyright and credit. The flip side of Hound Dog is even more instructive. Don’t Be Cruel was written by black songwriter Otis Blackwell, a man who wrote a number of Elvis’ greatest hits, All Shook Up, Return to Sender, (I always thought Paralysed should have been a #1 smash too). In interview, Blackwell declared country music to be his favourite, having grown up listening to the Grand Ole Opry. He named ‘singing cowboy’ Tex Ritter to be his favourite singer. Such complexities are beyond the simplicities of the separators. Before rock’n’roll, or its fifties incarnation, there was a thriving jazz/swing scene which was inhabited by both black and white musicians who influenced each other in turn. Country artist Jimmie Rodgers sang with Louis Armstrong on Blue Yodel #9. Because of segregation, Armstrong couldn’t be credited, but there was no mistaking who it was on the record. Rodgers was known as the ‘yodelling brakeman.’ Great blues artist Howlin’ Wolf declared in interview that it was from Rodgers that he got his famous howl. There was segregation and there was racism, but it was in following these examples of mutual influence and exchange that Elvis helped to subvert the pernicious hold of these things on society. The facts reveal a complexity that totally contradicts the simplistic good and evil narrative that contemporary culture likes to sell the children. That narrative will one day unravel, for the reason that it simply doesn’t accord with the facts. My concern is that we have a new Elvis film that seems more concerned with rebutting the charge of cultural appropriation than actually proceeding from Elvis’ own musical multiplicity. In other words, it remains within the narrative of cultural appropriation in an attempt to overturn the charge. It can’t be done, for the reason that it is still working within its inverted parameters. In an attempt to show the authenticity of Elvis’ black roots and connections, Elvis still appears as an outsider with an eye for taking what he likes. It comes out clearly in the scene in which Willie Mae Thornton sings Hound Dog, whilst Elvis explores Beale Street, with her singing ‘you’re just an old Hound Dog, snooping at my door.’ The subliminal message is that Elvis was ‘snooping’ on Beale, seeing what he could appropriate. I have read reviewers claim that the film does a good job in establishing the authenticity of Elvis’ connections with black music and the black community. I think that verdict must arise from the force, and sheer viciousness, of the contemporary denunciation of Elvis as a cultural appropriator. I have been much less intimidated for the reason that first and foremost I go to the facts and last and least of all to the heat of controversy. Controversy feeds on itself. Once you start with the controversies you never finish. The authenticity of Elvis’ connections with black people and culture is not in doubt. I don’t have space to deal with it here, so would advise people to do their own research, check what actual black voices who knew Elvis at this time say, Rufus Thomas, B.B. King, Nat D Williams and many more. These connections stand in need of full recognition. That the film attempts this is to its credit, going against a powerful narrative in contemporary culture, but the execution is flawed, still giving the impression that Elvis is an alien outsider who took his entire force from black music and culture. It’s still black and white, with little interplay and mediation, and almost nothing of the other elements that were crucial to the final mix that transcended all forms. Those defending the film argue the need for a selective approach and that we should appreciate what is in the film rather than what is left out. We would need to see the four hour cut that is said to exist. But the things that are left out here are so important as to alter the character of what is left in. The missing one is the missing other in that it skews the relation that holds between all the influences that went into the making of Elvis. There was much more to Elvis Presley than the black influence, as hugely important as that was. 

7. Elvis as Symbol, Icon, and Person

Elvis’ buried character

I hesitate to criticise the portrayal of Elvis as a person, for the reason that this film may well be the first time I haven’t grumbled at the ludicrously lame depiction of Elvis. Austin Butler’s ‘Elvis’ is a character you can believe. But Elvis is a complicated character indeed, with many layers beneath the surface. You simply can’t cover every aspect of Elvis in one movie. This movie took the relation between Elvis and his manager as its organising theme. To get under the skin of Elvis as a character would take an entire movie in itself. There are hints of Elvis’ struggle with self-identity, but they are secondary to the fast moving plot. Elvis was an introvert who lacked confidence. Even with fame and fortune he rarely spoke up for himself against his manager. He never used his star power to take direction of his career. He was polite and shy and it was this that allowed Parker to bully and manipulate him the way he did. It is remarkable how Elvis’ determination to do the ’68 Special his way, as against his manager’s preposterous demands for a Christmas Special, are portrayed as a rebellion. Parker had had Elvis on the road to artistic suicide since the early years of the sixties, retiring him from live performance in 1961 and putting him in increasingly lame movies. Elvis knew there was a need to turn his career around. You can hear him in the studio, beginning with the blues, ballads, and gospel of 1966, then with the country rock of 1967-68, making his ‘comeback.’ This was missed in the film. What was significant about these sessions is that they reveal the extent to which Elvis’ struggle for artistic integrity was thwarted by Parker’s insistence on control. The ‘Guitar Man’ sessions with Jerry Reed in 1967 were cooking until Tom Parker’s team intervened and attempted to bully Reed out of his publishing. Reed stood his ground. ‘Elvis has more money than he knows what to do with, and I don’t need the money,’ he said. Guitar Man was saved, but the creative spirit had been destroyed by the intervention of commerce. The same fight over creativity, commerce, and control is there in the ’68 Special, which the film rightly showcases, and showcases well. It changes the facts a little, but makes the point effectively – Elvis was fighting his own manager for artistic expression. The ’68 Special was a triumph, but it was merely one rare victory for Elvis in a long defeat at the hands of his manager. Elvis never spoke with ’68 Special producer Steve Binder again. Parker made sure that he won the war, and kept Elvis as a prisoner. That so much is made of Elvis’ brief finding of his voice in ’68 indicates just how silent a character Elvis was. With fast paced plot, the narrative, and the back and forth style, Elvis as a character disappears behind yet another image of him. There is so much going on, and so much more left out, that you really don’t get to know Elvis as the person behind image and events. At the end of the movie I observed people leaving as the credits played. They seemed to have been less than moved. They didn’t seem to be contemplating the sadness of Elvis’ demise and the poignancy of In the Ghetto and the ‘men with broken hearts’ speech. I left the theatre feeling that we didn’t come any closer to knowing the real Elvis. The speed with which some made for the exit suggested that they had been enduring a marathon watching. The ending did attempt some reflection and was well done. But I don’t think we had entered deeply enough into Elvis’ spirit to be as moved as we ought to have been. I would guess that those who will be moved by the ending will be those who already know Elvis well and enjoy his music very much, all of it. 

Elvis as the Symbol of America

It is clear that Luhrmann attempts to portray Elvis as a larger than life icon whose immensity, complexity, and ultimately unreality links him to the U.S. experience. The approach runs directly contrary to my own attempts to deflate the image in order to restore Elvis’ humanity, indeed to restore health and sanity all round. I can understand why Elvis inspired such adulation, and continues to inspire it to this day, but it just isn’t healthy, either for the adulators or the adulated. The inflation is dehumanising. Seeing Elvis as god burdened him with the challenge of trying to live up to an unliveable image. I read Elvis as a democrat, affirming a democratic individualism. Not that that in itself is necessarily a good thing. Individualism can easily become a narcissism that cuts a person off from the demos. And narcissism is just one step away from solipsism, leading to a world in which each has their own idols, with no communication between one and all possible, or even sought. We sit separated by our screens, until the robots turn up and restore connection by aping humanity. But at his best, Elvis affirmed an authentic individuality. His life shows the extent to which people who dare to be different come to be confronted by a world that plays the percentages. In Mystery Train, Greil Marcus writes of the way that the U.S. tends to corrupt its own natural genius, referring to Elvis specifically. Luhrmann’s movie seems to go down this route. But it does well to have Parker as the narrator, giving the other side. If Elvis was corrupted – and he was – then he was complicit in his own demise. Like the devil with Jesus Christ, Col. Tom Parker led Elvis up to the heights and offered him the entire world, but, unlike Jesus, Elvis took what he was offered. It was what he had sought, after all, and, alas, the bargain was honoured. With the Hawaii via satellite concert of 1973, Elvis finally consumed and transcended the entire planet. It was a triumph. But friends recall Elvis watching the recording of the show in silence, switching off the TV when it had ended, and retiring to bed without saying a word. There was more tragedy than triumph in Elvis manner. In a concert that went out to a billion people Elvis sang I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry. He was alone with everyone, without connections. He also sang an emotionally charged version of What now My Love, with the line ‘I feel the world closing in on me.’ Elvis had transcended Earthly bonds to find that only God is made for that kind of thing. The movie does identify Elvis as someone who was ‘caught in a trap,’ but the theme is simply drawn, with Elvis ensnared by his manager. There is much more than this going on. As for the U.S. ability to corrupt its own innate genius, Tom Parker was a Dutchman. He wasn’t a Colonel, either. He was the ‘lying Dutchman.’ 

Elvis as the embodiment of America

It is clear that Luhrmann considers Elvis to be the embodiment of the USA, both its good and its bad aspects. Tim Rice said that Elvis changed the world triumphantly and himself tragically. It might be truer to say that his engagement with the world without transformed Elvis within. ‘He got what he wanted and lost what he had,’ said Little Richard. It’s there in songs like I’m Leavin’ but notions of Faustian bargains are too simple a theme for Elvis. With Elvis considered the personification of US culture and history, the movie is also a commentary on how America changed over time, from the 50s to the 70s. Again, an entire film based on Elvis’ catalogue alone, apart from issues of fame and fortune, could have been made on this alone. By the 1970s, Elvis the rebel liberator was looking back to the culture and community of his younger days. Unable to go forward, he was looking backwards and singing about Bringing it Back. In Talk About the Good Times he sings: Well I remember when I was as children / The time the people used to treat the neighbor like a fellow man / And all their singin' and big prayer meetin's / When a man was proud to walk up and shake his neighbors hand / Times are harder and the people are changin' / Now most folks couldn't tell you who their neighbors are / All their guns are loaded, the front doors are bolted / Ain't this ol' world takin' hate and fear just a little too far This from a man who had a certain fascination for guns, another of Elvis’ ‘fascinations’ that wasn’t explored in the film. You can’t, of course, cover everything. But the danger of presenting an ideologically cleansed and sound Elvis is that it exposes the real man to the easy condemnation of the new Puritans stalking contemporary culture. There is Elvis on screen singing about love and peace, when the real man disliked hippies and had a gun fetish. Hypocrite? That’s the easiest thing to say, and so the shallowest minds among the contemporary moralists say it. I’m always impressed by those who have the nous to go deeper than the surface. There has been so much written on Elvis that you cannot read it all. So you have to ration your time and select your reading. You soon learn to identify those who exist only in shadows and shallows, the ones overly impressed by the obvious anomalies and move hastily to judgement. And you move on. The US was changing rapidly throughout Elvis’ life, with the liberatory spirit of the ‘50s crashing in the violent uncertainties of the ‘60s. If I Can Dream can be heard as as much a lament for a dream that was dying on Elvis’ than as a plea for its realisation. Those overly-impressed by the photograph taken of Elvis and Nixon need to remember that the sixties was the liberals’ decade. The dream way already dying. 

8. Austin Butler as Elvis

Beyond the rights and wrongs of the film are the acting performances. Basically, the film is about Elvis and his manager Col. Tom Parker. People have criticised Tom Hanks’ portrayal of Parker. It’s a bit cartoon-villainy, but not wrong – extremes magnify the truth. I’ll come to Hanks shortly. Austin Butler’s lead performance as Elvis is a revelation. It is Butler’s performance that lifts the movie beyond the inevitable controversialising. Let’s be fair, no movie can hope to capture Elvis whole but must take a particular line that results in things being missed (inviting bores like me to argue for the film that should have been made. In my view, Elvis films stand and fall on the portrayal of Elvis – I’ve never been happy with any of them, they just aren’t Elvis. It’s not an issue of looks but of spirit. I think Butler has it, which is no mean achievement, because no one this far has been close. I won’t say Butler’s performance ‘saves’ the movie, as some have claimed. It would have remained a challenging and entertaining movie even with a lousy Elvis. That probably indicates that the movie isn’t deep when it comes to Elvis’ actual character, staying on the surface. But Austin Butler looks, moves, and sounds well on the surface of things, with hints of hidden depths. I like to go deep, but that could take forever. The movie sprints breathlessly for 160 minutes, which is quite an achievement. Not everyone is an Elvis obsessive like me (and the bulk of his fans, it can seem). There is a need for a light touch, speed, and economy if Elvis is to be introduced to a wider audience. Regardless of any reservations you may have about the movie, Austin Butler delivers an exceptional performance that recreates Elvis as a real character, not merely a dummy to hang well known facts on. Butler also does exceptionally well to capture the impact Elvis had on audiences in the fifties on screen in 2022. It is well-nigh impossible these days, when the boundaries have been transgressed so often that it seems they no longer exist, to convey the truly transgressive nature of Elvis in the fifties. That the movie does this is thanks in no small part of Austin Butler. If I have a criticism, it is that the re-creation of Elvis’ pelvic gyrations at the Louisiana Hayride concert are a tad overdone. I mean, how many thrusts and crotch close-ups are required to get the rather obvious point? I can imagine what this might have done for Elvis’ female admirers, but I felt the need to look away and put an end to my wincing. But as George Melly wrote, ‘the early Elvis appearances induced mass orgasms,’ quoting a promoter to the effect that ‘there wasn't a dry seat in the house.’ He continues: ‘Combined with his pelvic thrusts, it was lucky he wasn't run out of the South at that time. I suppose the rednecks thought that, if their daughters had to scream at male erotic gyrations, it was better that at least their perpetrator was white’ (George Melly, Ain’t Nothin’ but an Icon, The Guardian, 2002). The movie caught this, having B.B. King saying that they would put him in jail for such things, being black, but not him, for being white. ‘White privilege’ is just such the wrong way of looking at this. If the King of Rock’n’Roll could only have been white in a racially divided society, that white king still had to perform the role, incite the passions and face the oppositions, and withstand the resulting storm. Since we live in Elvis’ world, we can miss what was truly distinctive about Elvis in those early years. Much that was transgressive has been normalised, thanks in large part to Elvis. It is a tribute to the movie and to Austin Butler’s performance that the transgressive nature of the early Elvis is conveyed with force and vigour. Butler captures something of Elvis’ thrilling, captivating, commanding presence as a performer, and something of his vulnerability. My only quibble would be that that vulnerability is not examined deeply enough at the level of character, giving the impression that Elvis was, in the words of Jerry Lee Lewis, ‘a weakling.’ Such a verdict is shallow in that it isn’t based on a deeper understanding of Elvis’ character and the depth of his complicity/entrapment. Lewis imploded under a millionth of the pressure that Elvis faced. Beyond this, Butler delivers a superb performance. Some a calling it an award winning performance. Elvis is a star-breaking role, but Butler pulls it off with aplomb to deliver a star-making performance. He’s thrilling and electric as Elvis the performer, charismatic as Elvis the person, and vulnerable as Elvis the client of his manager. The performance is revelation. I didn’t know Butler as an actor, and it seems that not many did. He was in some TV shows and some films, but nothing big. This relative anonymity I think is helpful. The fact that I didn’t know who he was meant that I could see him as Elvis and not some famous actor playing Elvis. There is always the fear that someone who looks a little like Elvis physically, but has none of the charisma, would get the role. That’s not the case here. Austin Butler kills the role physically and vocally, channelling the spirit of Elvis Presley throughout the different phases of his life. The only limitations are limitations of the script and character, but that’s not his fault. It should be remembered that Elvis has been portrayed quite a few times in films, and by good actors, too - Kurt Russell, Michael Shannon, Val Kilmer and others. I’ve never found any of them persuasive. And I’ve never been too impressed with the scripts, either. Although I am criticising Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, I think this is by far and away the most impressive Elvis movie so far. And Austin Butler’s Elvis is by far and away the best Elvis. Elvis fanatics like me are just impossible to please. We want nothing short of Elvis. It’s very difficult to do Elvis without falling into caricature. Austin Butler is at the polar opposite of caricature (although he is helped here by the fact that the film doesn’t spend too long in the later years of Elvis’ life). His performance should be a career-making and indeed star-making role. When I watched Bohemian Rhapsody I always had the impression that I was watching someone play Freddie Mercury. I never had that feeling watching Austin Butler. It probably helped that I didn’t know who he was, but I didn’t know Malik either. I felt like I was watching a real character and not an impersonation. When he goes at it full tilt, Butler takes the movie into the stratosphere, particularly when Elvis is on stage. I read that Butler studied Elvis for two years and that hard work pays off. The outstanding performances really elevated the movie. You really got some kind of feeling of how exciting it must have been to have attended an Elvis concert. This was so much more than an impersonation and was in a different league to caricature or homage. Butler captured the spirit and essence of Elvis as a performer. 

9. Tom Hanks as Tom Parker

I come now to Tom Hanks’ portrayal of Elvis’ manager Colonel Tom Parker. Or the mediocre miscreant mismanager the parasite Parker, as I’ve been known to call him for short. There are people who object to the presentation of a Parker as a pantomime villain, Dr Evil. I think if anything the portrayal is kind to Parker. It focuses on his manipulative side, but Parker was a bully, a sociopath, and the worst kind of person to hand your career, indeed your life over to. And Colonel Tom Parker was neither a Colonel nor a Tom nor a Parker, either. He Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk, an illegal immigrant from the Netherlands with a decidedly shady past. Some people are complaining about the heavy use of prosthetics. None of this worried me. I think Parker a rogue and a villain. The film did well to have Parker narrate the story, so he could offer something of a defence from his state of villainy. Tom Hanks definitely creates something of a fictional persona here, giving Parker a weird accent that the real Tom Parker did not have. It seems a caricature, a portrayal of evil incarnate. I’d have given him a hook and an eye-patch. And maybe a hump on his back. The portrayal is so evil that we may fail to see the nuances in Elvis’ relation to his manager. Parker promised to deliver what Elvis claimed to want, so in what way is he the bad guy. Hanks’ portrayal is weirdly compelling, but possibly takes us away from Elvis’ role in his own descent into ‘business.’ In having Tom Parker narrate the story, Luhrmann follows the idea in Amadeus, a film about Mozart’s life narrated by Salieri. Living out his final days, Parker is telling his stories even though no one is really listening. It’s a form of apologetics and self-defence by someone whom history has increasingly seen in harsh light. The trick of the script is to cast Elvis’ manager Colonel Tom Parker as the villain of the story who doesn’t see himself as a villain. Whatever he wanted, Elvis wanted; whatever he did, Elvis licensed him to do it. The nuances in the relation could have been explored in greater depth. Instead, the relation is reduced to the overfamiliar ‘deal with the devil.’ And deal knowingly. That’s part of the truth but far from all of it. But, to be fair, there is only so much that a film that is charged with covering so much can do. Hanks performs his role as a scheming, villainous persona well. Elvis and his manager are the only two fully developed characters in the film. The film could easily have been titled ‘Elvis and the Colonel.’ Or ‘Elvis and the evil lying Dutchman.’ The dynamic between the two is at the core of the movie, especially the almost Faustian bargain that is struck between them. My criticism here is that this ‘deal with the devil’ is too obvious and too familiar to really make sense of the relation between Elvis and his manager. Given that this is a film and not a documentary, criticisms with respect to weight, accuracy, and omission are secondary to the liveliness of the narrative. But the contrast between good and evil is too stark. Elvis himself was at least partly complicit in his demise. There is some suggestion that Elvis hid from difficult decisions and liked to have Parker do his dirty work for him. It’s just ‘business.’ That said, there is something seriously creepy about the way Elvis felt his every move was being monitored, knowing his relations to people outside the gilded cage were being cut off. Let’s examine the movie’s framing of the narrative. In life we have surely learned that the world isn’t divided into wholly good people and wholly wicked people, so the answer to any controversy is always going to be neither one nor the other. Is Tom Parker a manager of genius who turned Elvis’ million dollars’ worth of talent into a million dollars? He would have seen himself as that and would claim to have done precisely that. The figures seem to prove it, even if Parker took at least half of the money. We are all the heroes of our own movie, of course. Here, Tom Parker is sharing centre stage with Elvis, the man who was best positioned to disagree, but tended not to. Which in itself cannot be taken as proof of agreement. That doesn’t mean that external observers who know the facts would hold them to be benevolent figures that the self-image suggests. Or is he more akin to a parasitic exploiter? Which parody is most plausible? We know the morality play and know the main protagonists. What we know from the main players in this tale is that if none of them are angels, few of them are demons. But Tom Parker just might be. The sagest advice is to look beyond what a person says and examine what a person actually does and avoid the cartoon clown world, the puppet show world, version of heroes and villains. Tom Hanks has received criticism for the accent he employs as well as for the prosthetics applied. He sounds not unlike Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, which is fitting, seeing as he has Elvis turning on Parker as a bloodsucking vampire who is working him to death in Vegas in order to pay his gambling debts. Hanks has won the Oscar twice for a reason, he knows what he is doing. Once you get used to the unusual approach he takes, the character starts to do its work. Parker is the imp of the perverse, the devil that never lies. He beguiles and bullies you with the truth, not least the truth about Elvis – the truth about yourself – the truth that you don’t want to hear. He tells you straight away that he’s a carny, he tells you show-business is snow-business, that the name of the game is to trick the audience, the paying customers, into handing over their money in return for the satisfaction of desire. We see him on the country packages with Hank Snow and with Hank Snow’s son, looking for ways to trick customers. We see him moving nefariously upon Elvis, taking him on a ride on the ferris wheel to promise to send him into the stratosphere. He gets Elvis to declare the full extent of his dreams for the first time, and Parker promises to take him there. Elvis wants to be on top of the mountain. Parker takes him there and, like the devil with Jesus, promises him the whole world. Elvis wants it and accepts the offer. His fate is sealed. I wonder how many will realize the fundamentally religious moral of the tale this movie tells. For what will it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, but lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? Matthew 16:26 If you want the world so badly, you will forfeit your life, your very soul. Parker will claim that he kept his bargain. Colonel Tom Parker is presented openly for what he is, a carnival huckster who managed to get his clutches into the biggest musical star history had ever seen. His defence is that he made Elvis that star. The accusation is that with the talent he had, Elvis would have made it bigger and better without Parker. And would certainly have lived longer than his mere forty two years. And that without Parker he would have been much more than a star. Having Parker narrate the story is an ingenious way of presenting the nuances of Elvis’ relation to his manager. We see Parker employing his techniques of temptation, persuasion, and control and can easily understand why Elvis fell for it. What is less understandable is why Elvis couldn’t spring the trap once he realised he had been ensnared. The movie has Parker virtually blackmailing the Presley family over the public revelation of his father’s imprisonment, whipping up fears of the press portraying Elvis as coming from a family of delinquent hillbillies. Is it true? Details of Vernon Presley’s imprisonment on Parchman’s Farm only came out in 1980, three years after Elvis’ death. There is also the scene in which Elvis sacked Parker, only to be met with a bill demanding payment of everything Parker claimed Elvis owed him, a bill which ran into millions. Elvis had his uneducated father handling such financial affairs instead of seeking a showbusiness lawyer. Ruthless, cutthroat, exploitative, parasitic managers are not unknown in showbusiness. It beggars belief that no-one around Elvis suggested he contact a showbusiness lawyer and move Parker out of his affairs – as Priscilla did in 1981. We see the damage done to Elvis by Parker’s strategy of keeping his golden goose isolated from fellow artists and creatives, people who would have had a better idea as to how Elvis should manage his affairs. 

10. Tom Parker as Narrator

We see Elvis through the eyes of his manipulative, parasitic manager Col Tom Parker, who is elderly and looking back in self-justification on his relation to Elvis. The opening scene has him walking by himself in this kind of hazy, dazed multiple images of himself. The camera is a little off kilter and the images are hazy. Parker is holding his medical stuff as he walks around through the casinos, with his visions, thoughts, and memories of the past. He tells his story as a form of self-justification, to no one in particular. The story is a soliloquy. That gives us some sense that the verdict is already in on Parker, and he is considered guilty. People know what Tom Parker is, and don’t want to hear his defence. Without Elvis to leech off, he is alone and friendless. Parker is not necessarily an unreliable narrator on events, but he is certainly a narrator with an agenda and a purpose. Parker puts his own case and presents his own defence forcefully: his ambitions for fame and fortune were also Elvis’ – he was charged with delivering the world to Elvis, and he delivered. 

Elvis and Parker – good and evil

In voice and appearance, Parker is dripping with evil, so much so you are inclined to disbelieve his words. The facts seem plain that Parker ruined Elvis’ career and destroyed his life. You can see the mechanics of manipulation at work, showing how corrupt and devious Parker was. But Elvis got to the top of the world all the same. Parker puts the case that he is open about things others would prefer to be quiet about. We see our motives as generous, he sees them as self-serving. Parker is the more nefarious, sneaky self-serving aspects of our nature and the way we live our lives. We may conceal our true motives from others and even from ourselves, but we are self-interested, self-serving beings with tendencies to self-corruption. The scene on the ferris wheel has Elvis opening up for the first time on the scale of his dreams and ambitions. The religious fable would have Parker leading Elvis to the heights to offer him the whole world. The film starts with Elvis expressing his desire for the whole world. Parker is tempting Elvis with his own dreams and desires. By extension, that reasoning applies to all of us. The evil, the devious, and the nefarious of this world are merely being honest in telling a truth that culture and ethics would prefer to deny and repress. Elvis is manacled by his own consent and complicity, hence he couldn’t escape. By seeking the help of Parker he has helped set his own trap. Elvis is seen as essentially the USA, a nation with healthy natural potential but with unhealthy desires and ambitions. He has this creative essence and power but doesn’t know what to do with it or how to use it for good. ‘Man ought not to know more of a thing than he can creatively live up to,’ said Nietzsche. Elvis had a creative power that incited extremes and ambitions. He wanted the world, and Parker claims that he delivered his side of the bargain. The problem is that Parker’s methods of ascending the heights thwarted Elvis’ creativity, crushed his talents, and diverted his artistic ambitions into sterile showbiz as snowbiz channels. Elvis didn’t know how to channel and realize his creative powers, and along comes this nefarious force to twist his talents and ambitions, diverting, distorting, and perverting that power to extraneous ends. The basic theme running throughout the movie is one of inversion, holding that Elvis is being diverted into sterile channels and perverted as the USA was being used up. It’s the central motif of capitalist modernity, with healthy natural potential, essential goodness, and creative labour being predated on and perverted by inorganic alien forces. Elvis was being inverted and perverted like the USA was being inverted and perverted. Denied the tours abroad he sought, made to feel threatened by The British invasion, Elvis was made to fear foreigners the way that the USA was being made to fear foreigners; Elvis became obsessed with guns, police badges, and law and order in the same way that the USA became obsessed with guns, police, and law and order. This is the underlying symbolism running throughout the movie, one that concerns the ability to recognise self-destructive trends and tendencies and the inability to turn them round. Elvis wants to break out like the USA wants to break out, turn the descent around to save the American Dream. But there is a sense that Elvis’ dreams go down with the American Dream itself. Elvis rebels and returns briefly with the ‘68 Special. But the song If I Can Dream is less a moment of defiance than a desperate plea that, the moment of rage over, could cool into resignation and lamentation. Elvis may want to change the world and change himself, but all his desire is channelled into a plea to others to change their ways – ‘please let my dream come true.’ Elvis has lost his creative, reality-changing, life-changing, agency. Such pleas are destined to be unheard, falling on the deaf ears of those to whom they are addressed. The movie presents the performance as an act of rebellion and freedom on Elvis’ part, flying in the face of his manager’s demands. But Parker lost a battle here, not the war. Elvis never worked with Steve Binder, the producer of the ’68 Special, again; in fact, he never even spoke to him again. Parker quickly regained the controlling position. Elvis worked with producer Chips Moman at American Sound a year later in 1969, with Moman having to fight off Parker’s attempts to control publishing. The recordings were superb, among the best of Elvis’ career. But Parker ensured that Elvis would never work with Moman again. If the American Dream was dying on Elvis’ watch, then so too was Elvis’ dream: in fact, Elvis’ dream was being crushed and killed. Elvis knew it and wasn’t strong or knowledgeable enough to arrest and reverse the decline. His dream had been colonised by nefarious forces, forces which held that Elvis couldn’t use his talent to bring people together and change the world for the better, but insisted that the world see Elvis as a certain ‘thing’ which made money, delivered cheap thrills, but left the world unchanged, divided, and miserable. ‘Why can’t my dream come true?’ Elvis asked in If I Can Dream. This was his answer. It took a while for Elvis to be reconciled to the hopelessness of his situation. His work in 1969, 1970, and 1971 was outstanding, his return to live performance triumphant. But then it became clear that Parker had replaced the treadmill of Hollywood with the treadmill of Las Vegas and touring the same places, the same venues, year in, year out. It was money in the bank. The people who came one year would come the next. Elvis had barely escaped Hollywood with his reputation intact; this time he would not escape. The Hawaii concert of 1973 was a global triumph, but Elvis seemed to realize that that show, which went to the entire world via satellite, would be used by Parker as a substitute for a real world tour. There is a definite symbolism throughout the movie, which is immediately apparent. Elvis represents the good and healthy parts of the USA and Parker the self-interested, self-serving parts. That things are more complicated than that becomes clear when Parker encourages Elvis to open up on his dreams. Parker was not the devil and Elvis was not Jesus. When Parker tempted Elvis with the offer of the whole world, he was simply telling him that his own outsized dreams were realizable. And Elvis believed him: he had the will to believe, and Parker incited it. It is the way that ‘the system’ traps all of us, depriving us in the first instance and then giving us back our desires in petrified form, manacling us by our own wants and wishes. Whether we refer to the governmental machine or ‘the economy,’ politicians, the media, advertisers and business, we are in the presence of forces that are trying to manipulate and twist us in ways that are contrary to our interests, perverting our healthy potentials. It is too easy to make Parker - or ‘alien powers’ - the bad guy. Dante’s great insight is to have shown that evil is a production in which we may all be complicit. Evil is a praxis. Marx, too, showed that capital is creative labour in alien form. The upshot is that although we are on the receiving end of evil and alienation, we play a role in their emergence. The challenge is to confess your sins, change your ways, and grasp the redemptive possibilities that are always present. The split focus between Elvis and Colonel Parker plays it simple as a straight split between good and evil. Although there are hints of a more nuanced situation, Elvis is portrayed as passive and benign, more inertly complicit in destructive events than proactive. I’m not sure that this simple theme adequately conveys the full pathos of means and ends that runs through Elvis’ career and life. The movie is essentially a morality play concerning the struggle between good and evil, a mutual apologetics that ends in a mutual self-destruction. The idea of having Parker narrate the story and introduce every new scene is ingenious but soon starts to wear thin. Once we have concluded that Parker really is a devious and manipulative carnival barker, we no longer listen to his apologetics, merely see his words as those of a cheap and devious and manipulative carnival barker. Maybe that was the intention. Parker was a man who had no idea of the talent he had a responsibility to manage. In fact, Parker had no idea of that responsibility, either, simply seeking to exploit Elvis for as long as he could. If Elvis had no idea of money and spent it rather than saved and invested it, Parker, too, was wasteful, of both Elvis’ talent and the money it earned for him. Parker threw away millions gambling, money that could have been paid to songwriters for good songs, not only improving the quality of material coming Elvis’ way, boosting and sustaining Elvis’ artistic reputation, but more than likely making more money. It was not merely artistically destructive, it was bad business. Elvis was starved of good material after the fifties. Parker insisted on 50% of the publishing on songs, meaning that good songwriters lost interest and only the second-raters applied for the job. Elvis lost songs by Kris Kristoffersohn and Dolly Parton and by many others as a result. Elvis turned decent material into gold. We can imagine what he would have done with the best material. Elvis rode his luck. But as the seventies progressed he was essentially recycling overly familiar material, songs that had already been hits for others – And I Love You So, Green Green Grass of Home, I Can Help, Solitaire, I’ll Never Fall in Love Again, Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain. The track listing indicates an artist who had run out of ideas. And hope. Elvis delivers a moving rendition of Danny Boy: ‘If I am dead, as dead I well may be.’ Elvis recorded the song in 1976. The song was sung at Elvis’ funeral a year later, at Elvis’ request. At this distance in time we can appreciate Elvis’ versions of songs we all know. I can remember at the time being disappointed that Elvis was covering second- and third-hand songs. There seemed to be a lack of originality and inspiration. Elvis needed original material, but he was trapped in a setup that wouldn’t pay good writers what they were worth. And Parker just threw the money he screwed out of others by gambling. To this day there are people who insist that Parker was a business genius. He was the precise opposite. He had no idea of the ‘asset’ he was managing, he had no idea how to preserve and enhance value, he had no idea of the importance of the catalogue, no idea of quality control, no idea of the long-term. His basic strategy was to routinely empty the pockets of Elvis fans, to keep hitting a soft market with second rate product. It was a sure-fire way to devalue the ‘asset.’ That he got away with it for as long as he did was down to the loyalty of the customers to the brand. Normally, people who are ripped off once don’t return to be ripped off again. The movie does convey Parker’s character in this respect, but does so almost by way of fantasy and dystopia, with Elvis and Parker the protagonists in a cheap carny circus, with Elvis reduced to a puppet not only in his own mismanaged career but also in the movie. Parker was a shark rather than a genius. With Elvis he saw what everyone else could see. The difference is that he decided to move in and make a killing. When Parker sees Elvis at the Louisiana Hayride, he sees the interest Elvis excites, he sees the people Elvis draws, he sees numbers, he sees quantity, he sees dollar signs. He sees his meal ticket for life and sets out to wrestle Elvis into his control. The movie shows the deal with the devil being concluded on a ferris wheel at the carnival, because that’s Parker’s background, and that’s all he knows. If it wasn’t so tragic it would be comical. Parker tells Elvis that he has a million dollars’ worth of talent, and promises that if he signs with him he will make a million dollars. Elvis dreams of the world and Tom Parker, a carnival barker noted for painting sparrows yellow and selling them as canaries, promises it to him, as if something so grand is in the gift of someone so base, so mean, so cheap, and tawdry. Parker will take 50% of everything, and everything of Elvis’ hopes and dreams. Finally, the deal will cost Elvis his life. 

11. Puppet Show – Elvis’ character buried behind a cartoon legend

The story is a tragedy, but the movie presents it as a puppet show, from the playhouse introduction that opens the morality play to the end. The approach risks reducing the Elvis story to a clown show, effectively making a puppet of Elvis, depriving him of his agency. Elvis might well seem to have been a ‘puppet on a string,’ but there was tension throughout his career and sometimes conflict. This movie plays like a cartoon and caricature at times. You rarely get the sense that what you are seeing is a real place, merely stages and set-pieces in which Elvis plays at being ‘Elvis,’ or the bubble which Elvis’ world did indeed become. There is a basic unreality to the Elvis world as it is portrayed. I didn’t come away with much insight into who Elvis Presley really was. The dominant theme of Elvis’ character in the movie concerns the black influences, which is true enough (but entirely false when considered to be his only influences). But beyond Elvis’ love of black music and culture, what is revealed of Elvis’ character. What is the nature of his transgression? The problem is that people who have seen the film and been encouraged to investigate the image of Elvis the rebel further have expressed disappointment at discovering the facts about the real Elvis. Shock, horror, the real Elvis was somewhat conservative in his views, and certainly not ‘woke.’ The people who insist on everything being political are damning Elvis for not sharing their views. Predictably, such people are bringing up Elvis’ connections with Nixon, such as they were. Elvis only voted once in his lifetime, for Democrat Adlai Stevenson. Other than that, he wasn’t even registered to vote. He was asked to perform at the Whitehouse for Nixon, but his manager Parker demanded payment. Parker was told that no one is paid for performing for the President, to which Parker said that Elvis doesn’t play for free. Johnny Cash, the man who determined to wear black for so long as there was injustice in the world, sang for Nixon at the Whitehouse, voted for and publicly backed Nixon. So did James Brown. The Nixon connection is never brought up, only with Elvis. Because in these cartoon versions of history, Nixon is a bad man. But back in context – which is what history is about – you can see why Nixon attracted support. Vietnam was the liberals’ war, Nixon promised to take the USA out. The US cities were going up in flames. The American Dream was dying on the Democrats’ watch. John F Kennedy would promise different things to different audiences, promising Martin Luther King jr federal troops in support of his campaign for civil rights whilst sending none. The civil rights legislation that the Democrats promised was enacted by Nixon. Democrats good, Republicans bad? I don’t think so. 

Part Three - The Fifties

12. Reconstruction of Events

As to the reconstructions of Elvis’ life, things may be somewhat exaggerated. As a lover of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, I have no objections to wild flights of fantasy, and I would have loved similarly indolent scenes of Elvis exulting in the top arias, in homage to his love of Mario Lanza. But Luhrmann’s reconstruction was very much a partial reimagining based on Elvis’ well-known love of black music and culture. You can’t do it all, you have to select themes and hone in on them. Elvis’ relation to the black community is worth a film in itself. It’s a central theme in this movie. But it leaves us wondering whether and when the whole truth will be presented. Probably only when the truth could come to be accepted and even willed. We are a long way from that happy ending. This is the indolent fantasy version of the hipsters’ old view of Elvis, only this time toning down Elvis’ originality markedly. If the tale told by this movie is true, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Elvis’ importance lies merely in being a white mediator. That might be better than a cultural appropriator but the distinction is so fine as to be non-existent. And once you have access to the real thing, mediation is no longer required. For the record, I don’t believe that Elvis ever danced with black people and then crowd surfed with them in the way portrayed in the film, with the music thereby entering his soul. Elvis knew about the lines of segregation and approached cautiously but keenly. Elvis absorbed and assimilated the things of his background and environment. This scene is just indolent fantasy. But at least it offers the beginning of a rebuttal to the charge that Elvis didn’t acknowledge his black influences and that he was no more than a cultural appropriator. Already I am reading critics claim that this is a ‘movie about a white guy who stole music from black people.’ I have sad news for Luhrmann and the liberals who imagine that a woke Hollywood Elvis might appease such critics – it won’t. It plays right into their hands by setting up a false narrative that is simply ripe for deconstruction. Tell the whole unvarnished truth, and tell it straight. At least then any controversy there may still be will be over realities and not fantasies. I can understand why the movie focuses so much on Elvis’ R&B influences, given the extent to which Elvis in recent times has been damned as a white cultural appropriator. Elvis’ connections to the black community scandalised and worried those in the white establishment as it thrilled many in that community. It says something about the age that Elvis has come to be condemned as an appropriator when he is most certainly a liberator and integrator. The criticism of Elvis as someone who ‘stole’ black music is no more true than the claims that he stole country music. It is worth remembering that in the early days, as country music was badly impacted by the rise of rock’n’roll, many pointing out that Elvis’ first record was the bluegrass classic Blue Moon of Kentucky. Elvis stood accused of ‘appropriating’ country music to commercial ends. My concern is that any concern to rebut charges such as these is a negative way of presenting the case for Elvis: in responding to criticism, we remain within the orbit of that criticism. The result of this focus on Elvis’ relation to black music and culture is that Elvis’ many other – and no less important – influences come to be neglected. And the acknowledgement of debts to black music can be so overdone as to prove the critics’ charges that Elvis was indeed a mere copyist. Even the recognition of Elvis’ importance as a white mediator damns the man with faint praise. A mediator is not the same thing as an originator or innovator. When it is possible to go direct, then people will cut out the middle man. What, then, remains of Elvis? Well, everything, actually, for the reason that his genius lay precisely in the blending of various musical styles and genres in a way transformed and ultimately transcended all the influences to create a new popular music form. To single out one influence above all others and then reduce Elvis to it serves to unravel the creative synthesis that is the whole. The musical style that Elvis fashioned is more than the sum of its many parts. It is this creative blending that constitutes Elvis’ genius. The recognition of Elvis’ connections to black culture as debts will not assuage the criticisms of those who level the charge of cultural appropriation at Elvis, merely confirm them in their prejudice. This charge needs to be uprooted and rebutted firmly and once and for all, losing the apologetics. The fact that the criticism is still being levelled, despite the fact that the film goes out of its way to acknowledge the debt proves simply that you should never ever apologise to race baiters and haters. They are the dividers and segregators that Elvis worked to subvert. It is a huge mistake to try to appease them. They take it as a confession of guilt and double-down on their accusations. Elvis’ black influences are featured heavily throughout the film, from the revivals he attended as a child to the blues singers who formed the foundation of his early hits to artists like Willie Mae Thornton who had the first hit with Hound Dog. Elvis’ friendship with black artists like B.B. King is also heavily featured. I’m surprised that Elvis’ appearance at the WDIA Review isn’t emphasised, when the all-black audience rushed the stage when Elvis appeared. There is a scene with Elvis and B.B. King watching Little Richard perform. Elvis talks about possibly recording Tutti Frutti, which has B.B. King saying that he would make more money doing that than the original artist could make in a lifetime. This is false. This doesn’t rebut the charges of cultural appropriation but effectively concedes them. And it is plain false. Take a look at how many black artists penetrated the pop charts after Elvis and then compare this to the situation that prevailed before Elvis. Take a look at the fate of Little Willie John’s Fever, consigned to the R&B charts, as compared to Peggy Lee’s version, which hit #8 in the pop charts. Elvis broke down this segregation of artists according to different markets for different coloured skin. And the fact is that Elvis did record Tutti Frutti, he didn’t have a bigger hit with it than Little Richard, he didn’t make more money on it than Little Richard, and he didn’t cost Little Richard a career. Little Richard hit US #17 on the Billboard Pop chart in 1955 and #2 on the Billboard R&B chart. Elvis put out Tutti Frutti as the flip side of Blue Suede Shoes a year later, hitting US #20 on the Billboard Pop chart. To put that in context, Elvis had five #1 hit songs that year. Little Richard had three of his biggest hits with songs that Elvis recorded – Rip it Up and Long Tall Sally along with Tutti Frutti. The claim put in the mouth of B.B. King is the kind of thing that people reared on the modern take on Elvis would claim. An entire case is built on one song alone, Hound Dog, and even in respect of that song the claims are false. The claim made with respect to Tutti Frutti in the movie doesn’t rebut the criticisms of Elvis as a white appropriator, it confirms them. And it is based on a false premise. 

13. Black Roots

I would have addressed Elvis’ black connections very differently. The movie merely repeats things that is well known. Less well known is the extent of Elvis’ popularity in the black community. That could have been explored beyond the issue of influences. Also less well known is the flack Elvis took in the country community for his black style. Elvis was a regular performer on the Louisiana Hayride and country packages, where his mixing of country and R&B caused friction. Elvis openly acknowledged his love of black music, praising black artists. This is really a non-issue compared just how shocking it was for Elvis to mix black and white and acknowledge his black influences in the 50's. He is now accused of theft whereas in the fifties he was accused of a race mixing that broke down racial segregation. Elvis once performed on a bill headed by The Louvain Brothers. The Louvain Brothers were a fine country duo, hailed as authentic and folk rather than Elvis who is mere derivative pop. Critics who dismiss Elvis as low culture and who hailed The Louvain Brothers should be made aware that there is far more than pop going on in this division. Ira Louvain abused Elvis backstage with 'vile invective,' accusing Elvis of being a 'white n***er' and asking him why he sang 'n***er trash' (Dawiloff 1997:136 144 185; Brown and Broeske 1998:66). This could all have been covered, just to show how much of a ground-breaker Elvis was and how much the contemporary world, now Elvis’ accuser, stands in his debt. Instead, the emphasis in the film is all on Elvis’ supposed debts to his black influences, with Elvis the white outsider snooping around to see what he can find. This is wrong. Elvis was not a blues artist and not a R&B artist, he was a pop singer who created a new pop music out of a range of styles, blues and R&B among them. Reduce Elvis to blues and R&B, and the truth is that there are others with more to offer. The movie flashes back to Elvis experiencing gospel music and being lifted by the spirit. We also see Elvis watching and meeting with various black musicians, being inspired by them. As if the point hasn’t been made very clearly – as in laid on trowel thick –the movie continually cuts back to black musicians performing the song whenever Elvis is performing, back and forth. If it is right to recognise Elvis’ influences, it is wrong to reduce Elvis’ multiplicity of influences to basically two, gospel and blues, with the heaviest influence being on the blues and the gospel treated most perfunctorily, and stripped entirely of the religious dimension. The movie does a good job of showing the Presley family as living in black neighbourhoods. They have to leave the white neighbourhoods as a result of his father being jailed having passed a bad cheque. This is Elvis’ origins, his background. The film could have shown the Presleys picking cotton, with Gladys dragging a young Elvis behind her on a sack. This background needs to be born in mind when faced with accusations of cultural theft. Elvis was far closer to these ‘authentic blues roots’ than any of his critics. It is the critics who are guilty of appropriation here, appropriating the sufferings of others use them as a stick to beat others with. You cannot steal what is yours. We see Elvis caught up in the rhythm of the gospel music he hears at Church. But you don’t get the sense of Elvis’ own deep commitment to the religion that lay behind the gospel music. It’s more about the blend of music that goes into the making of Elvis. From gospel he hears the blues being played in the shacks by people outside of Church. The combination of the holy and the profane is Elvis Presley. This is true. But the combination of black and white is also Elvis Presley. Where are the white influences? To leave out country, pop and even the ‘popera’ of Mario Lanza (and Roy Hamilton, the black singer Elvis most resembled) is to make a nonsense of Elvis. The mention of Roy Hamilton here is instructive. To refer to ‘black music’ is as meaningless as referring to ‘white music.’ Which music? Music, like people, is not monolithic. Johnny Cash is not Mario Lanza is not Jake Hess. If forced to choose, I would say that Roy Hamilton is the greatest ‘black’ influence on Elvis. You can hear it in the mannerisms on All Shook Up. But Hamilton was more than a Rhythm and Blues singer, he had a grand operatic style, which greatly appealed to Elvis. Hamilton’s You’ll Never Walk Alone is far removed from the R&B of Hound Dog. For all of the sales of Hound Dog, and for all of the controversy incited by Elvis’ cover, there is little doubt that Elvis felt You’ll Never Walk Alone to be by far the better song. When he sang Hound Dog he transformed it. When he sang You’ll Never Walk Alone he stuck close to Hamilton’s version. The former was a huge #1 smash for Elvis, the latter got no further than #90 on US Billboard Pop. You know, it’s just possible that Elvis might just have sung the songs he did the way he did because he liked them … This is all missed by the film. True enough, you can’t cover everything. But the Hamilton influence could easily have been explored in the film, not least because it ends with Elvis’ heartrending performance of Unchained Melody. Mention that song, and most people will think of the Righteous Brothers. Elvis modelled his performance, the final performance of the movie, on Roy Hamilton. Hound Dog, Tutti Frutti, and That’s all Right it is not. In performing the song, Elvis was thinking of Roy Hamilton. Does that make the song ‘black’? Try and make the claim and see how ridiculous you sound. It was Roy Hamilton. It was Elvis. But fair play to the movie for showing the closeness of Elvis and the Presleys to the black community. This whole notion of appropriation is utterly inappropriate for Elvis: you cannot steal what is yours. Elvis drew on things that were in his own background. I have seen one reviewer point to the scene where B.B. King calls him out, saying that he would be the one the authorities would arrest, not him. The conclusion is drawn that Elvis benefited from ‘white privilege.’ This is wholly the wrong approach, underestimating just how difficult it was for Elvis to break out of his ‘dirt poor’ background. He is still trying to do it, his liberal middle class critics determined never to give him a break, condemning him for all things, crediting him with nothing. 

The Lack of Gospel and Religious roots

The lack of the religious roots of Elvis’ love of gospel is a serious omission. Elvis was very devout, but the movie reduces religious conviction to its most ephemeral aspect, that of the sound and feel of the gospel music, paying no attention to the substance of the message that the music conveys. Completely absent, too, is Elvis’ love of white gospel, the Blackwood Brothers, Jake Hess (who sang Known Only to Him at Elvis’ funeral.) That there is nothing overtly white or overtly Christian at the heart of the film, which makes a travesty of Elvis’ gospel roots. That ground is covered only in the most shallow way, with the predictable swaying of the black gospel choir and performative preaching, emphasising the impression of the inspirational stage presence and wild movement upon a mesmerized (but implicitly covetous) white boy. Rather than clear Elvis of the charge of appropriation, this presentation confirms it. 

Cultural Appropriation

The whole question of theft and appropriation is misguided. It is entirely the wrong approach to take to influences. The charge has Elvis stealing music from people who themselves had embellished a folk and classical music brought from Europe. The indigenous tribes had no idea of classical song structure with respect to bridges and choruses nor about stringed or keyed instruments. This all came from European folk music and classical music. It is not the least of the modern world’s most dubious achievements that it has those in its thrall engrossed in debilitating dispute about illusory oppositions and false dichotomies, which can only be unravelled when traced to their roots. The whole question of appropriation and theft is a waste of time and energy. Luhrmann’s movie is basically a very long refutation that serves only to validate the conjecture. It attempts to defend Elvis as the acceptable white face of black music, which is a part of the truth, the most superficial part and very far from the whole. If this is all that Elvis amounts to, then the conclusion to be drawn is that he was indeed a secondary and derivative artist. This is errant nonsense, but is precisely where you end up when you break up Elvis’ synthesis of genres and reduce him to just one influence out of many. I am mindful of the argument that the movie introduces Elvis to a new audience, in ways that they can understand. I think the argument has merit. Not everyone would be as moved by me by Elvis’ love of Mississippi Slim and Old Shep. The thing that impresses me the most, though, is how timid and gutless people are. They always want their tastes mediated by taste-makers. We can only hope that people will have sufficient nous to look beyond the image of Elvis they have been sold and be inspired to find the real man. And development discernment and courage and trust their own judgement. Leaving out Elvis’ lifelong love of gospel is a travesty. Elvis sang gospel more than he sang blues. The only three Grammy awards that he won in his lifetime were for gospel. Elvis would sing gospel to warm up and to relax. He sang gospel in concert at Las Vegas, a place where people needed it the most. Elvis was known for singing gospel into the early hours of the morning. Members of The Sweet Inspirations would joke that they had to creep away after a concert, for fear of being caught by Elvis and made to sing gospel into the early hours. Elvis’ love of gospel comes out on the Million Dollar Quartet of December 1956, too, where he and Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins (and maybe Johnny Cash) sang their favourite music – primarily gospel. To leave all of this out is ridiculous. And I am sure that Elvis would not have appreciated the inclusion of rap/hip hop. It’s an attempt to curry favour with a younger audience. I just have a feeling that Elvis has survived this long – nearly seventy years after his first record and forty five years since his death – by being Elvis. But maybe times have changed and the way music is consumed has changed, meaning there is a need to change the way Elvis is presented. Possibly. 

14. Concert Scenes

There are a number of standout moments in the movie. First up is the Hayride performance, with Elvis in his pink suit first discovering the power he has over the audience. The females go wild, one experiencing ‘something’ she’s never experienced before. The sequence is incendiary and captures something of the impact the early Elvis must have had. It was at this point that I felt the film was going to be fine, with Austin Butler passing the ‘Elvis’ test. The performance captures the electricity of the early Elvis, the reason why he caused a storm in the first place. I just think that the pelvic gyrations are a little ‘stranger’ and a lot more direct than when Elvis did them, which may be a measure of how far the boundaries to transgress have been pushed further since Elvis started the process (yes, folk shook their extremities before Elvis. But did they do it in public?). Elvis incited sexuality naturally, not deliberately, and not in the extreme manner of this portrayal. Elvis even had to ask band members what was going on with the girls screaming. When he was told, he did it all the more. The concert riot is another standout scene, with Elvis defying Tom Parker, the police, the authorities all telling him how to behave. He tears it up on stage and incites a riot. The stage is cleared and Elvis is bundled away. The volume goes up to 11 and you feel the escalation all around you. In the film's imagining, Elvis is a rebel, an outlaw. But was he really? This is the John Lennon view, which leads to ‘Elvis’ dying when he went into the army. There’s only one thing wrong with this view, which is everything. Elvis was not a rebel in this way. He embodied and expressed something the authorities weren’t comfortable with rather than concocted it as rebellion. The last of the Sullivan show performances had Ed Sullivan praising Elvis as a ‘decent, fine boy.’ And Elvis seemed more than happy with that praise. 

50s Performances

But it is true that it is well-nigh impossible to communicate to a contemporary audience how raw and radical Elvis’ performances were in the 1950s. Because we no longer live in the fifties, we live in Elvis’ world, where such performances are the norm, and even boring, for the reason they are no longer transgressive, for the reason there are no more boundaries left to transgress. Back then they were shocking, not to mention thrilling. 

Part Four – Sixties, Seventies, Conclusions

15. The Sixties

The Draft as Control

From here the story cuts to Tom Parker using the draft and a spell of national service as a way of neutering Elvis’ power and controlling the direction of his career. From this moment, it is clear that Elvis is being rigorously controlled. 

60s Hollywood

There follows a perfunctory sprint through the sixties movies, dismissed in a minute. In a life that contains so much, and in a film that had to leave so much out, this is understandable. But it leaves a false impression of the movies. Some of the movies were very good, some good, some amusing, some not so good. At the same time, the movies produced a number of good, and the occasionally great, songs. The movies were the image of Elvis in the sixties and shouldn’t be overlooked. Harry Nilsson loved Frankie and Johnny, which drew on pre-rock showboat tunes, claiming it an influence on his first album Harry. He would argue its merits over against John Lennon. I still claim the movie influenced the costumes on The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper. And argue that Paradise Hawaiian Style and Drums of the Island exerted an influence on the ending to The Beatles Hello Goodbye. The films were popular and can’t be cut out of the Elvis story. It is true, though, that Elvis lost direction with the movies and got stuck in sterile grooves, just as The Beatles et al revolutionised pop music well beyond the form Elvis had handed them. Elvis was ‘lost in Hollywood’ for a relatively short space of time, from 1964, trying to find his way back in 1968 and 1969, but it was the time when the biggest changes in pop music were happening. Elvis lost his relevance and credibility as an artist and, truth be told, never regained it. He just went big in another world. The Luhrmann movie briefly takes on the tacky style of those anodyne Elvis movies of the sixties, speeding through them to make the point that here is the reason why Elvis’ career went ‘down the toilet.’ This sets the movie up for another standout, the ’68 Comeback Special. 

The 60s skipped

But in speeding through the years 1960-1967 in a few minutes, the film effectively reinforces rather than challenges known views and stereotypes. This is as deeply disappointing as it is lazy. It merely presumes the truth of the general view that Elvis’ career went down the pan in the sixties. The ‘comeback’ of 1968 led to the great recording sessions at American Sound early in 1969, but that is basically Elvis in the sixties. That is false, and profoundly so. All you need to do is to select a key song from each year of the sixties to see that Elvis was still recording quality. The problem is that he was competing against quantity, which crowded out the good stuff. The job of a critic, a writer, a film maker is to dig deeper than the surface, rescue the quality, re-assess the record, and establish the truth. Elvis produced some truly great music in the early 60s. His quality output dipped between 1963 and 1965, but came back strongly in 1966, which produced Grammy award winning gospel, a return to R&B (Down in the Alley), sophisticated balladeering (Love Letters) and the greatest cover of a Bob Dylan song ever (Tomorrow is a Long Time). Then came the country rock of the Guitar Man period (1967-1968), then American Sound and Suspicious Minds, In the Ghetto, Any Day Now, Long Black Limousine, and Kentucky Rain in 1969. The film lazily assumes the decline rather than shows it as it was - a struggle, with Elvis delivering pop perfection alongside the slide into routine movies. Elvis’ voice was also at its peak in the early sixties, with Elvis perfecting his ballad style. This cannot be dismissed. He also won his first Grammy in 1966. Material from this period all found its way into the ’68 Special: Where Could I Go But to the Lord, Guitar Man, Big Boss Man, It Hurts Me, and Let Yourself Go, a lost classic from the movies. The inclusion of these songs makes it clear that the decade was not a washout, challenging the Comeback narrative directly. If the sixties songs were so bad, then why were they used in the 68 Special? There was much more to the ’68 Special than the boxing ring concert. True, the boxing ring was an inspired idea, the origins of Unplugged, a stripped down sound that showcased the essential Elvis. I think this is a serious misjudgement that confirms the familiar view of Elvis as a washed up artist in the sixties. The real story here is Elvis’ constant struggle for artistic control and credibility against his own management. We know that Elvis’ ability was effectively subordinated to his manager’s formulaic approach to churning out movies and soundtrack albums. But you have to look below the surface and see the extent of Elvis’ fight from the inside. Rather than recover the quality, the movie accepts the Parker produced reduction of Elvis to irrelevance. This conforms to the conventional view rather than challenges it. Certainly, Elvis himself was embarrassed by a lot of the movies and songs he was made to do. He fought for better material and more serious, non-soundtrack, studio work. He won a few little victories, recording a number of excellent songs which were buried at the time and which need to be recovered now. Even the movies produced good songs that deserve to be better known – Clean Up Your Own Backyard, Edge of Reality, Almost in Love, Change of Habit, So Close Yet So Far from Paradise, Let’s Forget about the Stars, All I Needed was the Rain. I have always argued this point, and was somewhat vindicated when A Little Less Conversation, dismissed as a movie song in Elvis books, was recovered in 2001 to become a global #1 smash. Which makes the point that the key to introducing Elvis to a new generation is the real Elvis. The real problem in the sixties was that serious studio work was drastically reduced and then cut to make room for the conveyor belt of the movies. That there was no album of original studio work from Elvis from 1962’s Pot Luck to 1969’s From Elvis in Memphis is a scandal that damns his manager. Likewise the fact that there were no live performances from Elvis from 1961 to 1969, the period when his voice was at its purest. Elvis was effectively retired at the moment that pop was being revolutionised by the people he had inspired. This should have been Elvis’ decade. Instead, Elvis was sent into a cul-de-sac. His manager had no idea as to Elvis’ talent and importance and no idea about pop music. And the truth is that he didn’t care. The tragedy is that a pioneering artist with immense talent was managed by someone who was concerned only with immediacy and ephemera to keep on turning a buck the same old way. 

Elvis’ thwarted film ambitions missed – straight to assumption of poor movies

Elvis was a big movie buff and would screen movies in private. I have read a story of how he watched Lawrence of Arabia in tears, knowing that he would never be given the opportunity to act in a serious film. He entered Hollywood with a desire to be a serious actor, but his ambitions were denied from the first. Shelley Winters claims to have seen an early Elvis screen test, putting in a great performance and expecting praise, only to hear Tom Parker shout from the back ‘he’s not going to be that kind of actor!’ Elvis was crestfallen but accepted that verdict. He allowed others to make the decisions for him, and they were more often than not the wrong decisions. It would have been good to have had such scenes in the Luhrmann movie, to restore agency and ambition to Elvis and depict his struggle for his career in and against his own organisation. The problem with the black and white, good and bad, narrative is that it makes the problem so clear and the enemy so obvious as to demand a rebellion and beg the question as to why it never came. Could Elvis really have been such a dummy? Such a coward? It’s easy to make decisions at a safe distance in time and space. Elvis was the highest paid star in Hollywood and Las Vegas, earning upwards of $1million a movie. His serious acting roles, as in Flaming Star and Wild in the Country, didn’t gross as much at the box office as his other movies. The fans wanted fun and escapism. Couldn’t the more frivolous, more popular movies have financed the more serious movies? Instead of addressing any of these issues, Elvis’ movie career is dismissed as an ephemeral waste of time and talent. That confirms rather than challenges the dominant consensus and, as such, is a wasted opportunity. 

60s personal crisis

It would also have been interesting to have explored the existential crisis that Elvis seemed to have gone through in the mid 60s. It may sound somewhat eccentric, but Elvis talking the meaning of life with his hairdresser Larry Geller is very .. Elvis. Elvis would read books on spirituality and reality, seeking meaning and purpose. He also went through a personal crisis where he began thinking deeply about his purpose. To have covered this would have given a very different view of Elvis to the image the public in general has of him. It would have been worth covering Elvis’ circle of friends, the Memphis Mafia, who would poke fun at Larry Geller and generally prefer to lark around with Elvis. Elvis the seeker was surrounded by what is now called toxic masculinity, effectively thwarting any soul searching on his part. Luhrmann’s movie confirms the general view that Elvis’ 60s movies were poor and that Elvis himself was unhappy with their quality. But this sketch is just too general to be true, and too dismissive. Elvis was gradually worn down by too many of the same kind of movies. But the movies are not all of a piece. There are different kinds of Elvis movies of varying quality. By dismissing Elvis’ movies in this way, you are effectively confirming the view that Elvis was a non-artist in the sixties. Parker had retired Elvis from live performance so that people who wanted to see Elvis would have to go to the movies. It was artistic suicide. But the result is that the movies are the public image of Elvis in the ‘60s. Dismiss them and Elvis disappears. There has to be a way of recovering the better aspects of the movie years without engaging in apologetics. There were good movies, good scenes, and good movie songs among the not so good. And there was Jocelyn Lane, batgirl, and Ann-Margret, too. 

16. The Selection of Music

It seems most strange that there are so few of Elvis’ own songs in the movie. This is all the more strange since Elvis sings songs that cover the full range of human emotions. It would have been easy to have had Elvis singing the soundtrack to his life and career. Luhrmann instead decided to include lots of contemporary artists and musical styles. That may seem to make the movie more about the present day than about Elvis, but I would see the real point being that we live in Elvis’ world, all these music forms connecting up over time and space. Many critics are claiming that it was a mistake, an ‘anachronism,’ to have rapping in the middle of a ‘50s montage. It depends on what the point is. I rather like the idea of Elvis blending into the musical landscape, rather than being frozen in time and place. At the same time, I would also have loved a film that played to the soundtrack of Elvis’ own songs, pushing the story of Elvis’ life to the sound of Elvis’ voice. The danger of using contemporary music and artists is that the movie ceases to be about the real Elvis, and becomes instead the reimagining of Elvis to fit a modern myth. This is the eclipse of Elvis and the erasure of his cultural and historical importance. There are countless Elvis songs that could have been used in the movie. I rediscovered Elvis after a decade or so away when hearing Anne Nightingale play Long Black Limousine on the radio, then Johnny Walker playing Stand by Me. These are lesser known tracks, and the effect was revelatory. It would easily have been possible to go through the Elvis catalogue and found countless lesser known songs which have the ability to his with emotional power. Above and beyond issues of the narrative, this really would have been the best way to introduce Elvis to a new audience – through Elvis’ songs themselves. That, in the end, is the best way to sell Elvis – through his voice and through his genuine multiplicity in music. Elvis’ songs of innocence and experience chart his rise and fall, the dissolution of the Dream. And the grounds for continued hope. There are so many Elvis songs that are both so profoundly joyous and sad, so deep and meaningful, or just so happy. Elvis can make you glad to be alive and remind you why you are alive. I speak with people born after Elvis’ death and it strikes me that they only know Elvis second hand, if they know him at all. For the movie not to have used Elvis’ own songs to have advanced the plot was a missed opportunity. That’s if you are actually interested in recovering the real Elvis, rather than just dissolving the man into a modern mythology. Elvis as a plaything is a job for life. But the selection and use of music is more tolerable than I had imagined it to be, organically in keeping with the idea of Elvis as part of a stream connecting past, present, and future. This avoids the danger of portraying Elvis as a monolithic musical block fixed in stone for all eternity. I would still argue that this would have been better done with Elvis’ own voice and songbook, mind, giving audience members new to Elvis a better idea of the man and his music, and maybe allowing old fans to see old songs in new light. 

17. The ‘68 Special

With the ‘68 Special we are shown an Elvis still in command of his own world whilst having lost control of his musical world. Elvis is told by producer Steve Binder that his career is ‘in the toilet,’ and he knows this to be true. He knows that he needs to make an artistic re-statement of who he is and knows that he is battling his own manager on this. The showdown between Elvis and Colonel Tom Parker became very annoying, for the reason that the clash it portrayed between the contrary visions of the two was layered on trowel thick. A simple presentation of the facts, set against a much less perfunctory treatment of Elvis in the sixties, would have been sufficient to have made the point that Elvis and Parker were on artistic collision course. The movie takes a small truth – Tom Parker wanted the TV show to be a Christmas Special – and blows it out of all proportion so as to be unbelievable. Scenes and dialogue constantly return to the Christmas sweater that Elvis is to wear as he sings Christmas songs, setting up the shock of Elvis’ appearance in a black leather jump suit singing rock and blues. Only at the last moment, as the show is being recorded, does Parker realise there will be no Christmas show. This is a completely false account and entirely unnecessary. There was enough tension and conflict in the actual events, with Parker threatening and bullying Elvis and Steve Binder constantly, that exaggeration and invention was not needed here. Parker may have been greedy, cynical, and tasteless but he was no fool and had long since twigged that the special that Elvis and Binder were planning was not the one that he had planned. He called them both into his office, issued his orders for Christmas songs. ‘If Elvis wants Christmas songs,’ Binder said, ‘then we’ll do Christmas songs.’ Elvis muttered his compliance in front of Parker and then said ‘f*** him’ to Binder as soon as they had both left the office. Elvis won this battle with Parker, but Parker continued his machinations. It was Parker’s responsibility to hand out tickets for the filmed shows. The tickets were undistributed, meaning that with barely an hour to spare the producers were having to raise an audience from somewhere. There is enough conflict between Elvis and Parker in the actual facts to have made for a more dramatic presentation of the ’68 Special Showdown. Instead, we are given a wholly unbelievable scenario which has Parker duped at the last minute, as if that getting one over on Parker was the real shock and surprise of the Special. And Parker did get his Christmas song, Elvis singing Blue Christmas in black leather in the middle of summer, saying ‘play it dirty’ as he grinds out the blues. The track was included on the album, at the expense of the red-hot and raucous Tiger Man. Whilst there is such a thing as artistic licence, the movie takes totally unwarranted liberties with the facts, effectively making-up a story that is too ludicrous to be taken seriously. The dramatic impact of the event is undercut as a result. The movie has Parker sat in the control box with others, seeing Elvis in black leather, and asking those around him where is the snow and when is he going to do Here Comes Santa Claus. Parker had twigged long before this that the Christmas Special he had planned was off and set about nobbling proceedings in other ways. He also set about ensuring that producer Steve Binder would never work with Elvis again. Binder recalls that Elvis gave him a piece of paper with a telephone number to call him on. Elvis, Binder claims, knew that he was being monitored from within his own camp. Binder called the number the next day and the line was dead. 

If I Can Dream

The movie does a good job with If I Can Dream but, frankly, couldn’t miss. It was a show-stopping performance in the ’68 Special and a huge statement on Elvis’ part. Elvis’ performance is inimitable, frankly. The power is not in the song – which has a familiar spiritual quality – nor in the lyrics – which are a general appeal to universal peace and brotherhood – but in Elvis’ emotionally charged vocal. Great credit is due to Austin Butler for delivering a performance of great emotional force. The point is made that Elvis is reaching out to his fellow men from this deep place, pleading for people to come together in the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King jr. Gospel singer Mahalia Jackson is shown telling him he should sing something or come up with something meaningful, something that is true to him and his beliefs. Mahalia Jackson was one of Elvis’ favourite singers. She came to visit him on the set of Change of Habit. The movie thus continued to emphasise Elvis’ ties to the black community, showing how Elvis retained and revisited that connection, effectively countering the claims of those who persist in pointing to the music from which Elvis got his start, just to allege cultural appropriation. That simple line is fine for activists with an axe to grind but reveals nothing other than there are people in the world who prefer to divide and feed off that division. They have selected the right target with Elvis, who was a liberator and integrator. Instead of engaging in a futile attempt to appease the dividers, the movie would have served Elvis better by taking them head on, challenging the false narratives they present for purely political reasons, and presenting Elvis as the originator and innovator in the cultural change that followed in his wake. But, fine, the movie at least starts the process of restoring Elvis’ legitimate and organic cultural links to the black community. The activists won’t like it, but being activists they are more interested in politics than truth. 

18. Las Vegas - Caught in a Trap

We come next to Elvis’ return to live performance at Las Vegas. This is initially a huge triumph, and the film does a good job of portraying the vitality of the first couple of years. But we soon start to hear the line from Suspicious Minds repeated over and again, ‘we’re caught in a trap, I can’t walk out.’ Parker effectively reduces Elvis to a dancing chicken being worked to death in order to pay off his gambling debts. Parker locks Elvis into this residency in Las Vegas in weeks end up as endless years. Parker traps Elvis to a treadmill and works tirelessly to keep him confined, closing off all other options, such as world tours. All the time, Parker is shown working to prevent Elvis from breaking free of his clutches; he is trapped in a gilded cage from which he is destined never to escape. 

Parker and bankruptcy

Elvis’ greatest tragedy is to have fallen into the clutches of the carny colonel Parker. The fact that Parker swindled Elvis of half of his earnings, leeched off Elvis his entire life, is far from the greatest tragedy. Parker diverted and perverted Elvis’ talents, wasted his abilities, destroyed his dreams, sapped his hope and energy, destroyed his life by removing a creative artists’ reasons for living. It was soul-destroying. Elvis didn’t need Parker to ‘discover’ him, he had already done the hardest part in discovering himself. He had broken through, the rest was a matter of time. Parker, being a shark, got in first and tied Elvis in knots. We come to the 1972 divorce from Priscilla. The scene of Elvis and his private jet is shown. It clearly builds on the scene in Elvis on Tour, but is much less effective in lacking the accompaniment of Elvis’ Separate Ways. The scene becomes more about Priscilla, with her leaving clearly identified as lying at the root of Elvis’ subsequent demise. This is too pat. But it does suggest how Elvis’ ‘songs of experience’ could have been used to better tell the story of Elvis’ unravelling as the seventies unfolded with a relentless logic. Songs of loss and separation are a common theme in Elvis seventies catalogue. There are far too many of them, critics of the day would say: I Miss You, Fool, Separate Ways, Always on My Mind, Until it’s Time for you to go. It’s interesting to hear Elvis tackling Paul Williams’ Where do I Go from here? If I knew the way I'd go back home / The countryside has changed so much I'd surely end up lost / Half-remembered names and faces so far in the past / On the other side of the bridges that were burned once they were crossed / Tell me where, where does a fool go when there's no-one left to listen / To a story without meaning that nobody wants to hear / Tell me where, where does a fool go when he knows there's something missing / Tell me where, where will I go from here / Where will I go from here / Get back home where my childhood dreams and wishes still are none of my regrets / Go back to a place where I can figure all the odds / Have a fighting chance to lose the blues and win my share of bets / Tell me where, where does a fool go when there's no-one left to listen / To a story without meaning that nobody wants to hear / Tell me where, where does a fool go when he knows there's something missing / Tell me where, where will I go from here? These songs were from 1971 and 1972. In the Aloha from Hawaii by Satellite concert he sang ‘the saddest song I’ve ever heard,’ I’m so Lonesome I could cry. And It’s Over. He would continue in this mood at Stax later in 1973 with Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues, ‘everybody’s gone away.’ Then there are the song titles from the Graceland sessions: Bitter They Are, Harder They Fall; She Thinks I Still Care; The Last Farewell; Solitaire; I'll Never Fall in Love Again; Hurt; Danny Boy; Never Again; Love Coming Down; Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain. We don’t need the services of a psychiatrist to detect an underlying theme here. The end of the film focuses on Elvis losing Priscilla and her taking their daughter Lisa Marie with her, and the devastating effect this has on him. This would be Priscilla’s view of events, certainly. 

Firing Parker – the story of Elvis trying and failing to break free

We then see Elvis’ last desperate attempts to break free from Parker, culminating in him finally telling his manager what he thinks of him, firing him, only to be confronted by the inescapability of his position. Elvis’ father Vernon was made business manager in Elvis Presley Enterprises to get all the family on board with Parker’s deal with the devil, but was clearly out of his depth. The scene shows a desperate Vernon wishing he had been a better business manager, confronted with a bill of $8million from Parker. Parker showed his exploitative hand and there was nothing that either Elvis or Vernon could do – save put it in the hands of a showbusiness lawyer, cut the leech Parker out, appoint a better manager, and finally take his career into his own hands. That’s how it’s done. That’s how others do it. It could have been done. It can be ugly and it can be costly, but it is nowhere near as ugly and as expensive as doing nothing. My favourite rock band Queen did precisely this, and went on to huge success, the four members becoming the highest paid company directors in the UK. Elvis needed to have taken care of business. Elvis needed advice from people who knew what they were doing. Had Elvis had more contact with other stars, sooner or later one of them would have wised Elvis up. Parker knew this and so kept Elvis isolated. Elvis backed down and took Parker back, and that decision sealed his fate. Parker had broken Elvis financially, now he broke him in spirit. We see the absolute inner desolation as Elvis’ final act of act of rebellion fails and his finds his future irredeemably tied to his parasitic manager Tom Parker, his life going over the cliff with his career. The direct link between the chains that bound Elvis to Parker with the addiction to pills is shown clearly. Elvis’ drug addiction is not laboured but is clearly explained as a function of his personal and artistic thwarting at the hands of management and ‘business.’ We see the slide into addiction as a result of being irrevocably beholden to Tom Parker. Continuing with the theme of Elvis’ loss of agency, Elvis’ pill addiction is not shown as proactive, more as passive compensation. I wonder about the ending. It was sad, of course. But the sadness hit me more in the aftermath, as I paused to contemplate the meaning of the fable of the bird that could never land in a home. I have seen documentaries on Elvis whose endings were far more tear-inducing than the one in the movie. I wonder how many people would be moved at the end, particular those who know little about Elvis. I’m glad that the movie might introduce Elvis to a new generation, but I am left wondering how many would be inspired to inquire further and how many of those who do will be disappointed to see that the real Elvis is much less the rebel in real life than is portrayed in the film. The real tragedy is that Elvis is still glimpsed, barely, through filters, hidden behind mythologies that say more about the myth-makers than they do about Elvis. That the movie is overhyped makes me suspicious. I’ve learned to be sceptical of peer-review in almost all things, because it tends to be people who know each other promoting one other, ensuring they all stay on the gravy train. I don’t pay any attention to the fact that the reviews are mixed, either. My review is mixed. Good film as a film, it grabs and keeps the attention, and contains great acting performances, job done; it’s just not true to the subject matter, job undone. 

19. Unchained Melody - The End

Elvis’ death comes quickly, directly after Priscilla’s departure, drawing a direct connection. The next scene has Elvis narrating the fable of a bird which, in having no legs, can land on nothing; it lives on the wing until, tired, it dies. Elvis could never find a place to rest. His death is sad and isolating. And mythologized. I think the movie took a certain view of Elvis’ death but missed so much out that it seems more like an inevitable, scripted, conclusion than the actual shock and tragedy it was. Elvis’ death seems inevitable in hindsight, with the signs of approaching demise many and visible. People didn’t see it at the time. The Luhrmann movie cuts to one of Elvis’ last performances of 1977, singing Unchained Melody. Elvis is a wreck, a bloated shell of his once glorious self. But his performance is immense. The movie gets it badly wrong by having Austin Butler’s face interspaced with Elvis’. Instead of focusing on the moment, I was left looking scrutinising the image. It looks like an attempt to restore Elvis to a movie he had effectively been cut from. This is the only time we get to see the real Elvis, as befuddled, sweaty, and bloated, just a few weeks before his death. That just doesn’t seem right. It’s possible that, in being an Elvis fanatic who is old enough to remember Elvis when he was alive and King of the whole wide world, I know too much to find the movie’s end moving. Those who are younger and know less are saying that they found the ending so sad as to move them to tears. To that extent the movie has done its job of taking us to journey’s end. I’ve seen documentaries and films that hit harder, because we have been on the journey with Elvis, the whole journey. The problem with a story of decline is that the end loses its sting on account of having the air of inevitability. Those who shared in Elvis’ many triumphs and joys, his many great records at every stage of his career, were hit harder by his demise, because the fall came from such a great height. This movie portrays Elvis as so continually thwarted as an artist as to be permanently defeated, with death as the next inevitable step. We’ve seen the tragedy of Elvis being tied to his parasitic manager, the tragedy of thwarted artistic and career ambitions, the tragedy of being trapped on a treadmill, first Hollywood, then Las Vegas, and the tragedy of Elvis, who had the talent to be anything he wanted, has been brought to this by his short-sighted, mean-minded, and thoroughly mediocre manager. The Elvis film ends with Elvis’ immense, but harrowing, version of Unchained Melody. The choice of the song is inspired. Apart from the fact that it is a remarkable vocal performance from Elvis, the song expresses death’s unchaining of Elvis, his return to song. Given the fable of the bird with which the film ends, Any Day Now also comes to mind, except that that song calls upon the ‘wild, beautiful bird’ to stay. The snippet of Dylan’s I Shall be Released that Elvis sang in rehearsal would have worked perfectly, too. But Unchained Melody is an immense performance that carries the huge weight of the ending. Although this is missed by the movie, the song is also a return to roots on Elvis’ part, a return to one of the greatest influences on his vocal style, Roy Hamilton. I just find it sad that a film that is big on tracing Elvis’ musical influences misses out arguably the biggest influence of all – Roy Hamilton. I can only speculate as to why that is. I would suggest that it is because Hamilton has this self-classical ballad style that doesn’t fit categories of R&B easily. In other words, he has a multiplicity in music, as did Elvis. 

These Men with Broken Hearts

As the end plays out, we get a few lines from Hank Williams’ These Men with Broken Hearts. So help your brother along the way No matter where he starts For the God that made you made them, too These men with broken hearts And then we move into In the Ghetto. These statements, I take it, are attempts to draw out Elvis’ implicit social philosophy. A movie about Elvis deserves a great ending, and this was a great ending. 

20. Omissions – The Real Elvis

At this point, however, listening to In the Ghetto, I got the distinct impression that the movie was a lot more interested in giving Elvis a political dimension, something that is seemingly obligatory these days, when people are so stupid as to require messages to be spelled out, than it was in exploring Elvis as a person and as an artist. Much that inspired him and drove him was left out. Elvis had a lifelong passion for big-voiced ballads. His message songs were few and far between. There are many aspects of Elvis’ character which the movie misses. For most of the film Elvis is down, moody, and brooding. We know, however, that Elvis was a fun guy. We could be critical here and say that Elvis goofed around too much rather than take care of business. He would play pranks, hire movie theatres and fair grounds, and mess around with members of his Mafia. Elvis was a very ‘silly’ person with a love of Peter Sellers, Monty Python and The Holy Grail. Elvis is completely stripped of the fun side of his character and turned into a serious and reflective person always on the brink of anger. Elvis did have anger issues and did have depressive tendencies. It was always with him, Priscilla said, and always would have been, with or without his career struggles. But Elvis also goofed around plenty, and this did not come out in the film. That aspect of his character was possibly dismissed as ephemeral, like his sixties movies. But it means that the movie doesn’t explore the whole truth to give you an insight into Elvis as he actually was. If you present a partial truth as the whole truth you are telling an untruth. When Elvis died it was like a myth had died, not a real person. The film's end was nowhere near as moving as documentaries which have developed Elvis’ character as it progressed through life. It may just have been the audience I shared the theatre with, but people seemed more concerned to make their ways to the exit than actually recover and reflect. The reviews have been mixed, some saying that it was merely a shadow of Elvis that was presented, others claiming it was a fully defined character. The truth lies between those extremes. There is much more to Elvis as a person and as an artist than was shown in this film. That said, the ‘Elvis’ portrayed by Austin Butler was a real character you could take an interest in and be moved by. But so much is missing. There’s not enough sex’n’drugs’n’rock’n’roll. There’s not enough fun. There’s no karate, Memphis mafia, Elvis’ hairdresser-come-guru, there are no guns, no visions of Stalin in the clouds, and no Scatter. Elvis was … eccentric but good humoured with it. There’s no Linda Thompson, either, former Miss Tennessee, and Elvis’ girlfriend after his divorce. She does something approaching the final word: I can only reiterate the positive, and that would be that he was an incredibly generous human being, very loyal friend, very loving man, very funny, he loved to laugh, loved living, loved people and there was a downside too. There was the self-destructive side, the bad temper, self-absorbed, and all the things that come with an ego of that magnitude, but there were so many wonderful things about Elvis that life with him was never dull. (Rose Clayton and Dick Heard, Elvis: By Those Who Knew Him Best, 2003). Oh, and there’s none of Elvis’ girlfriends. The great Elvis movie, the one that treats him as a man and not a myth, has yet to be made. And maybe it will never be made, so long as people prefer legends, both good and bad, to truths, both good and bad. 

Elvis and Priscilla

One issue that is skirted is Elvis’ relationship with his wife Priscilla. Elvis met Priscilla during his national service in Germany, when he was 24 and she was 14. They would marry eight years later, which raises all manner of questions as to the nature of the long courtship. The movie just describes Priscilla as the teenage daughter of an army officer and then moves quickly on. That’s probably wise. Only Priscilla can tell the truth here. The issue of the age gap is approached indirectly only later in the film, when Elvis claims they will get together again when he is 50 and she is 40. Projecting so far into the future is designed to diminish the difference in ages. But it’s not clear how the movie could have addressed the issue. Where is Priscilla’s protest at being groomed? Critics will claim that she can’t protest without pulling the rug from under Elvis Presley Enterprises. Cynics will claim that she has nothing to gain and everything to lose from accusations of anything untoward about Elvis’ actions. The criticism of Elvis ‘grooming’ a 14 year old just shows how fake and phoney pop and rock fandom is. Which is a lesson that ought to have been learned long, long ago. The people who celebrated the wildness of rock’n’roll were the same ones who turned as puritanical as their parents with respect to Jerry Lee Lewis. ‘All of which goes to show how superficial the rock revolt had really been. On paper, Jerry Lee’s marital junketings were exactly calculated to improve his prestige, make him into an even better symbol of rebellion. In practice, it only took a fast burst of pomposity in the papers and the kids were just as appalled as their parents.’ (Nik Cohn, Awopbop-aloobopalopbam-boom, p.41). The contemporary age is one of Puritanism and pomposity on steroids. When pressured on this as an Elvis fan, I call the moralisers’ bluff and demand a return to Christian ethics. Rock’n’roll becomes a strange world when it ventures into the fantasy world of pop imagination. People prefer their ‘wildness’ to be safe and sanitized, up on screen and nowhere else. People like the sex’n’drugs’n’rock’n’roll rebels and then turn all shocked and scandalised when we get down to the actual sex. I’m not saying that the puritanical and the pompous are wrong. I’m saying they are hypocritical. There’s a price to be paid whenever liberty exceeds the bounds and becomes licence. There is a terrible hypocrisy at the heart of rebels who cite standards and express moral outrage whenever their fantasy is confronted by inconvenient facts. Is it liberation or not? Is it rebellion or not? Are there boundaries after all? That’s the nature of the terrain. Chuck Berry is hailed as the true architect of rock’n’roll, even though his big hits were few and, with one minor exception, his ‘appropriation’ of country tune Ida Red, (Maybelline) came after Elvis had mixed blues and country on That’s All Right. Chuck Berry has a string of misdemeanours to his name. He is far from being alone. The very first song on the very first Beatles album opens with this line, ‘Well she was just seventeen, you know what I mean?’ The meaning was always clear. But it seems that many people are highly selective in their hearing and in their judgement. The movie goes heavy on Elvis’ debt to blues and black artists. I wonder how many of the critics of cultural appropriation actually listen to the old blues and R&B artists. I listen to the blues and have a rather excellent vinyl collection. I have a double album by Sonny Boy Williamson, Chicago Golden Years from 1976. Let me quote from the sleeve notes: ‘Williamson .. sounds like a 12-year old Puerto Rican hooker was giving him head while the whole thing was being cut.’ (Cub Koda). It’s one of those ‘what the …’ moments. I call the bluff of the new puritans who want rock’n’roll rebellion without the sex and drugs. They can have Cliff Richard. And I tell them that the criticisms of the Catholic Church of rock’n’roll at the time were fundamentally correct. You can have it wild or safe, sexual or antiseptic. The central theme of the film is that Elvis was a young rebel with spirit who was soon tamed down and thwarted. Artistically, maybe. But as a person, that suppressed rebellious spirit came out in his tendencies to excess. Clearly, a 24 year old should not be courting a 14 year old. It is no wonder the movie skirted the issue. The more you write on this, the more you will need to write, the more it will sound like apologetics – it was a different time with different norms, the relationship had the blessing of Priscilla’s parents, they married, Priscilla has never once said that she was groomed, and so on. He treated her badly and had numerous affairs. None of the affairs are shown. And why would it be? Priscilla has never presented herself as a victim. Who is to say she is wrong? The movie has been ‘fact checked’ by Priscilla Presley, which is to say that it has her approval. That, of course, doesn’t necessarily make it truthful. It means that it has her approval. There are things that Priscilla would prefer to be left out of the account. Priscilla, we might be inclined to believe, will more likely make the story about Elvis’ life more about her. That criticism might seem a little excessive. But the fact is that Priscilla is Elvis’ sole love interest as soon as she appears. This is ridiculous. Anyone who knows anything about Elvis knows that he had countless girlfriends (fair enough, I can’t count). According to Barbara Pitman, (another) girlfriend, 'Elvis had a libido that would make Jerry Lee Lewis look like a monk.’ No wonder Priscilla found it intolerable, especially when Elvis himself was jealous, possessive, and controlling. Elvis met Priscilla when he was stationed in Germany. He met many girls in Germany. And many more in Paris. One night he took the entire chorus line back home with him. He dated many women. He was a womaniser. The movie has Priscilla watching Elvis perform Love Me Tender whilst kissing all the women queuing for kisses. Priscilla then realises that Elvis is having affairs. This is nonsense, she had always known. There are other, decidedly troubling, aspects of Elvis’ relation with Priscilla. Elvis moulded Priscilla to his liking, changing her appearance to be more like his mother or himself, or as if searching for his dead twin, the part of himself that was missing. I shall leave that for psychiatrists to make up their guesses as they see fit. I’m out of my depth. I’m just a philosopher, what do I know? We know that Priscilla knew that Elvis had affairs. She knew of the huge fling he had with Ann Margret in 1964. To this day there are people who insist that had Elvis not been a southern gentlemen and sent Priscilla back home and married Ann Margret instead he would have been happy and lived longer. Ann Margret knew showbusiness and had contacts. She would have taken Elvis into the big league where he belonged, ditching his small time manager. But Priscilla would not have gone quietly. And then, most possibly, the scandal of the age gap would have exploded, threatening to bring him down as it had Jerry Lee Lewis. There is none of this in the movie and nor would there have been. The approval of the Elvis Presley Estate – Priscilla – means that we get a plausible fiction that is good for the image and good for business. And Ann Margret herself has kept her relationship with Elvis private. But there is such a thing as artistic licence. There was huge scope here to investigate Elvis’ rather complicated relations with Priscilla as well as with his manager and his career. Viva Las Vegas was the last movie to have time and money spent on it. This flew in the face of Parker’s cheap and cheerless approach. Parker wanted to cut corners and keep profit margins high. Scenes and songs were cut, the end forced quickly in order bring production to an end. Strangely, despite having one of the strongest set of songs in all the Elvis movies, in both quality and quantity, Viva Las Vegas was never issued as a soundtrack. It was a good and successful film that proved what could be done if you spent money. Parker hated it and acted to hobble it. He saw Ann Margret as a threat to his control of Elvis. Remarkably, Elvis went along with Parker’s insistence on business and cut her out. More fool him. Cut from the movie, and unreleased in Elvis’ lifetime, was Elvis’ duet with Ann Margret on the great R&B You’re the Boss. The recording and performance of this would have made a fantastic scene in the movie, detailing Elvis’ struggle within in terms of his career and his life. But it all contradicts Priscilla’s narrative. No Priscilla, no movie. We do not get to see Elvis rocking and rolling with Ann-Margret. We don’t get to see Elvis rocking and rolling with any of his many girlfriends. And then Priscilla leaves him and Elvis’ world falls apart and he dies. The truth is that he had a number of girlfriends after Priscilla left him, most notably Linda Thompson, former Miss Tennessee, who has spoken often of Elvis’ slide in the mid-seventies. 

The last thing we see before Elvis dies is him getting on the airplane and whispering to Priscilla ‘I will always love you.’ Then we see the newspaper dead at 42. Of course that view obtained Priscilla’s approval - she could have written it herself. We know what others have written. Elvis’ relations with the many women in his life are omitted. I’ve no idea how the issue could have been addressed. It probably deserves a movie of its own. There has been an entire book written on the subject, Baby Let’s Play House Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him by Alanna Nash. There is no way of knowing as to how much of that book is true and how much is lurid fantasy. 

Elvis and Drugs

The movie has Elvis being introduced to drugs by his bassist Bill Black. Whilst this fits the rock’n’roll mythology, the claim is false and traduces the reputation of a member of the Blue Moon Boys. Whilst filmmakers have creative licence with regard to facts, this is a creative error as well as a factual one. Elvis was introduced to drugs – amphetamines, uppers and downers – during his national service. Apparently this was common given all the unnatural hours the soldiers had to keep, staying up late, getting up early. How ironic that Elvis the rock’n’roll delinquent was introduced to the drug addiction that killed him whilst being domesticated in the army. The film, however, shows Elvis being given a drug whilst on tour. It fits the sex’n’drugs’n’rock’n’roll mythology. But it’s wrong. The film eliminates the sex and invents the origin of Elvis’ drug-taking. 

Elvis and Excess

The film entirely misses the sheer excess of Elvis. It misses his tendencies to excess with respect to food, drugs, sex, material riches. Elvis did everything to extremes. He was submerged in excess. This is a background assumption in the movie and is never foregrounded. There is a lot of obvious symbolism and imagery that could have been used to show Elvis slipping free of the bonds that kept him in touch with health, reality, and sanity. I can understand why it has been left out. Truth be told, there has been far too great an emphasis on Elvis’ excesses with respect to drugs and food, diverting attention from Elvis’ status as an artist. But there is scope for connecting Elvis’ revelling in excess with the way in which his life and career escalated out of his control, the endless accumulation of material quantity trying to compensate for the lack of quality control. Elvis spent money without thought. He lived without a sense of boundaries. He had no one to provide the check he needed, only the artistic straightjacket imposed by Tom Parker which, truth be told, incited the yearning for release which, in never coming, fostered the tendency to excess. We thus have the symbolism and imagery of the bejewelled jump suits and capes, with the belts and chains holding him together on stage as he fell apart in life, just as he needed the stage and the adulation of the audience, even though it was killing him. 

The Glamification that conceals the decline

Elvis never gets ugly and unattractive in the movie. Elvis doesn’t get overweight, either. This glamification is typical of Hollywood, and is utterly fake. Hollywood was the cemetery of Elvis’ hopes and ambitions, and Hollywood has now exhumed the corpse to stake the ghost. Hollywood is still making a nonsense of Elvis. Older Elvis still pretty much looks like the younger Elvis. We don’t see the tragedy of the loss of youth, looks, and health. And we don’t get the full measure of Elvis’ attempts to come to terms with the exhaustion of rock’n’roll liberation. Elvis promised liberation in the fifties and inspired a mass following. Leading the way, he was the first to discover the limitations of the liberation he unleashed. In pointing out the limits in the seventies, with songs that sought a way back home, back to the community of others, he was still leading the way. But no one was following. People were still hooked on the promises of rock’n’roll, still believing that they could be redeemed. We don’t get to either see or hear the older Elvis, the Elvis who, at the age of 35-42, was still a young man, but who looked and sounded much older than his years. People want to hold on to the rock’n’roll mythology and the promises of freedom by way of eternal youth. The world has still to come to terms with the Elvis of seventies. 

Conclusion

That I have spent such a long time discussing this movie shouldn’t be taken to mean I think it a bad film, quite the contrary. It is the fact that it is such a good movie that gives fanatics and obsessives such as me the opportunity to say what kind of film we would have liked to have seen. I can only praise the films’ pacing and editing around a clear narrative, along with the quality of acting. I just have serious problems with the narrative. I’ll put it this way, if someone approached me wanting to know more about Elvis, I wouldn’t give them this film. I would give them my critique. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend the film as entertainment. And if, from there, it encourages people to investigate Elvis further, then all well and good, so long as they know that the real Elvis is very different to the Elvis that is portrayed on screen. Although there is a need to be selective, I disagreed with the narrative and the approach, which effectively reduced Elvis to the puppet that the movie claims Parker, Hollywood and Vegas reduced him to. We didn’t really get to know Elvis the person, merely Elvis the superhero ‘ought to be’ who came a cropper in the confrontation with the less than ideal ‘is.’ I’ve been an Elvis fan for half a century now. He was my favourite singer from the moment I heard him and has remained so. I’ve read the books. The film attracted and retained my interest but had me shaking my head openly constantly. Most of all I objected to the way certain themes were heavily laboured. We don’t need to see the mechanics at work. The intentions were too transparent. My view is critical. But it all depends on what you are looking for. I think the approach the film takes is fine – the time flies. I would just quibble with the narrative. I think Luhrmann’s Elvis offers a good example of how it is possible to overlook a movie’s flaws when it gets plenty in terms of film-making right, when the experience is so thrilling, and when the lead actor delivers an outstanding performance. All of that is more than enough to earn a recommendation from me. Regardless of the quibbles I have with respect to the narrative, I got swept up in the insurgency of it all. I think the test is whether I would want to watch it again and what I would make of it. I would watch the film again given the opportunity but, I suspect, the film is subject to diminishing returns. Once you have got used to the thrills and spills, you start to look for the substance. Is it there? And at the end, Elvis is still singing ‘do you know who I am?’