Caught in a trap: Baz Luhrmann renders Elvis generic

Elvis (directed by Baz Luhrmann)

Several years ago, I decided to begin a unit on the state of rock in the late 1970s by showing students footage from Elvis’s last televised concert. Recorded in Nebraska in early 1977 months before his death this is historically significant video. My students, however, were not moved by the King.  As the students entered into class, sat down, and peered at the corpulent man in the tight white jumpsuit they squinted and asked me who was performing. When I told them it was Elvis they were sunned in disbelief.

Baz Luhrmann’s effort to capture Elvis Presley’s life and career is bombastic and redundant.

I don’t blame them for the disconnection. The Elvis usually pictured in rock history textbooks is the young stylish Elvis swaggering onstage in the mid-1950s. Depicting Elvis’s physical and emotional devolution into a paranoid, drug addicted, isolated, self-parody would debunk much of the mythology of rock ‘n’ roll such books tend to celebrate.

Elvis is mostly myth at this point anyway. After 65 years of analysis what is there left to illuminate? Despite academic efforts by fine critics like Greil Marcus and Peter Guralnick to unpack the myth and get the “facts” straight, respectively, Presley remains an enigma. He was a white Southern kid enamored of black music forms, alongside crooner pop and country, who got lucky. Lucky to live in a predominantly white nation both scared of and compelled by blackness culturally but most willing to accept it in filtered from through white bodies. Presley listened widely, reverently and was a good sponge. But as much as critics credit Presley with synthesis he is not a pure enough singer of gospel, country, R&B, or blues to count as a master of any of these forms. He tends to shave down the edges of rawer music forms like blues and gospel; he stiffens up their rhythms, strips down their vernacular inflections, and renders them as objects for appreciation.

While certainly not bloodless in the vein of Pat Boone and a generation of late 1950s teen idols, his musicality is less than it seems. Musically Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, Fats Domino and Charlie Rich had more to say than he ever did and were far more original. There’s a reason being an Elvis impersonator is far more of a thing than imitating Berry or Holly.  No matter how they looked or moved their music is the thing; the visual evocation of Elvis is powerful enough to not need music. Perhaps if Presley had concentrated more on songwriting or had the flexibility to duck out of the barrage of B-movies he could have matured musically an innovated. Alas, he never grew beyond his influences.

Director and screenwriter Baz Luhrmann’s (Moulin Rouge, The Great Gatsby) new biopic Elvis is a mess. With little left to illuminate the director’s transparent fetishes is the film’s center rather than Elvis. His penchant for, flashing lights, dizzying camera work, layers of sound, collages of imagery, and quilts of music make the first part of the film an exhausting parade. This unruly hybrid of montage and newsreel style presentation is so overheated it threatens to burn through the screen. His narrative choice to structure the story through the perspective of his corrupt manager “Colonel” Tom Parker (a one note performance by a sweaty Tom Hanks in a grotesque fat suit) is equally off-putting. Lurhrmann’s breathless directorial style disallows Presley, played by the capable Austin Butler, from having any interiority or subjectivity beyond reacting to things. Butler smolders and emotes effectively when he needs to but it’s all action and no heart. Parker is easier to capture and vilify so no effort is made to imagine Presley beyond hagiographic reactions.

Despite a weak screenplay and hackneyed direction Austin Butler gives a fine performance in Elvis.

The movie attempts to draw us closer to Presley’s artistic, commercial, and managerial tensions by giving us a more evenly paced understanding of his experience filming the 1968 comeback special on NBC. Arguably the film’s peak, we get to imagine Presley as an impassioned musician with a vision for his music. A deep dive into this slice of his career would have made for a fine film. Alas, the film leaps from the special to his five year stay in Vegas. Because the film has mostly failed to let us into who Elvis was and what he wanted I found myself wanting him, and the film, to end the moment the Vegas part began. It’s a long melodramatic slog too generically formulaic in detail and filming to tell us anything new about Presley or similar iconic subjects of these types of films.

Mistakenly, the director chooses to weave in footage of Presley at film’s end which threatens to reduce Butler’s able efforts to skillful imitation and convincing makeup but also reiterates what we already know. In 1978 music critic Stephen Holden was reviewing Barbra Streisand’s newly released Greatest Hits collection for the New York Times and compared her to Presley and Sinatra by noting how their personae are so iconic they overwhelm and transcend virtually anything they sing. Ironically in Luhrmann’s overbearing hands Presley shrinks into yet another fallen star flattened out by a generic biopic.

Despite its historic status the footage I showed my students, which is available for viewing on YouTube, was not supposed to air. Apparently, when CBS saw the footage of the sweaty, corpulent “King” originally, they blanched and decided to shelve it. The myth of the swaggering rebel was long over. Only after he died was it repackaged and suddenly deemed worth showing. They even added an addendum of his grieving father sitting in a room in Graceland speaking into the camera to thank fans for their cards and letter. Shameless. By then the capitalization of the myth was emerging as a profitable entity. Luhrmann is just the latest to feast on the scraps from this poisoned plate.

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