Techniques tracked:
-three-act structure
-fidelity issues
-character devices
Baz Luhrmann may be a director who’s known more for his style than substance, an approach that’s made a certain kind of sense for the subject matter of his films, but probably none more so than his latest, Elvis, released last month. If style surpasses substance here, that is nothing short of an embodiment of the legacy of Elvis himself, who mainly covered songs not only written but usually previously recorded by others, and yet gained distinction for sounding like no one else. The way Elvis made old(er) material new–and the way Baz’s film emphasizes this aspect of his talent–has a certain resonance with storytelling in general–we are doing nothing at this point but telling the same stories over and over again. Which means that at this point in the generational cycle, when literature and popular culture alike are an intertextual maze of referents, style is substance.
I might be a little biased in favor of this particular subject matter due to having grown up in Memphis, where you can visit the famed Presley estate of Graceland and see many of the settings, props and costumes on display in Baz’s movie. A few films have been made about Elvis, but Baz seems to have taken a somewhat novel approach in framing the film through the perspective of Elvis’s “satanic manager,” to quote one review, Colonel Tom Parker.
Summary (*full spoilers*):
The film opens in a room in which old Colonel Tom Parker collapses as he’s trying to put a box of Christmas cards away; it’s 1997 and he is rushed to a Vegas hospital, from which he has a view of the nearby International Hotel. He claims in voiceover narration that he’s not responsible for Elvis’s death as many have accused him, and we flash back to 1973 with Elvis’s name on the International Hotel’s marquee. Elvis has collapsed and is having his head dunked in ice water to revive him; the Colonel exclaims that “the only thing that matters is that that man gets up on that stage tonight.” With the assistance of some kind of injections, Elvis does.
We then flash back to even earlier, when the Colonel, who explains that as an orphan he ran away to the circus where he learned the art of the “snow job,” is traveling with a group of musical attractions he manages, and one of the younger ones, Jimmie Rodgers Snow, starts playing a record he says the others should listen to because all the kids are–Elvis’s new single “That’s All Right” from Sun Records. The Colonel doesn’t seem interested until he learns the singer on the record is white. Elvis is on the bill to play with some of the Colonel’s performers at the Louisiana Hayride, and the Colonel spies on him before he gets on stage as he’s gathered with his band and family trying to assuage his nerves. The Colonel gives us voiceover backstory about how Elvis’s twin brother died at birth and we get a sequence when Elvis was a child in Tupelo, Mississippi living in a Black neighborhood after his father was imprisoned for passing a bad check, spying on and entranced by a jazz joint where Arthur Crudup is playing a version of “That’s All Right,” and then running over to a nearby revival tent to experience the music there–“I’ll Fly Away”–in which he’s possessed by the “spirit” that he seems to be attempting to channel in the present as he gets on stage, with the Colonel noting the anomaly of his unique appearance (we also see in this sequence how when he moved to Memphis when he was older, he frequented Beale Street and picked up his style there). On stage Elvis is visibly nervous until someone calls him a “fairy,” at which point the Colonel says Elvis transforms into a “superhero” as he performs “Baby, Let’s Play House”; when the girls in the crowd start screaming and Elvis asks his bandmates why, one says “the wiggle” Elvis is doing and to keep doing it, so Elvis starts dancing and shaking his legs even more, driving the crowd into a frenzy until by the end the girls at the front pull his suit jacket off. The Colonel notes that the reaction is exactly what he looks for in a show, an experience that the audience is not sure they should enjoy, but do, with Elvis offering a taste of “forbidden fruit,” and that the girls could have “eaten him alive.” Despite his mother’s reservations, Elvis joins the Colonel’s jamboree acts for a brief tour, during which the Colonel recognizes he needs to go “all or nothing” with Elvis and approaches him in a funhouse on the fairgrounds where they’ve just played a show, then taking him up on a ferris wheel to offer him his future (asking him if he’s “ready to fly”), which Elvis accepts. He records his debut album for a major label, lets the Colonel install his father Vernon as the business manager of “Presley Enterprises,” and buys Graceland. With his increasing fame comes a backlash about the supposed lewdness of his performances, and when the Steve Allen Show is going to cancel his appearance, the Colonel convinces him to go out as the “new Elvis” in a tux with tails; when an actual dog is brought out for him to sing “Hound Dog” to, he feels humiliated. His mother continues to rail against the Colonel and Elvis storms out of Graceland in a huff down to Beale Street, where he’s greeted with a hero’s welcome and visits Club Handy, sees Little Richard “sing the hell out of” “Tutti Frutti,” and complains to B.B. King about his problems, with B.B. noting that “if you don’t do the business, the business will do you.” When a picture is taken of Elvis with B.B., an unknown entity a Senator confronts the Colonel about Elvis breaking segregation laws and says they’ve been looking into the Colonel’s background and there’s no record of his existence before his time in the Army. At a major concert at a Memphis baseball stadium, Elvis is escorted in by the authorities who warn him not to wiggle so much as his little finger, with the Colonel encouraging Elvis to play as the “new” version of himself as he ascends the stage. But when Elvis gets on he wiggles his little finger and declares nobody’s going to change him and launches into raucous rendition of “Trouble”; at one point police filter into the dancing crowd and start beating people and then Elvis is pulled off the stage and dragged into the back of a cop car, with the Colonel’s voiceover plaintively declaring he didn’t understand why Elvis hadn’t listened to him, that Elvis had no idea what he had done to both of them, and that he had made his choice–“you, the fans.” The Colonel tells Elvis and his parents that the only way out is for Elvis to enter military service, that he’ll clean up his image by doing so and the Colonel will have work ready for him when he gets out. While Elvis is still in the States for his basic training, his mother dies of cirrhosis from alcoholism apparently exacerbated by worrying about her beloved only son. The Colonel encourages Elvis to carry on or his mother’s sacrifices will be for nothing, and Elvis goes overseas to serve in Germany, where he meets his future wife Priscilla.
Upon his return, the Colonel turns Elvis’s life into “one big Hollywood movie,” in which he’s accompanied by Priscilla, their new baby Lisa Marie, and his entourage while making three Hollywood films a year. When Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated in Memphis in ’68, Elvis stops to reflect on “the music that makes [him] happy,” and recruits a pair of producers (whom he meets with at the Hollywood sign) to help him tailor his performance for an upcoming “Christmas special” the Colonel has set up sponsored by the appliance company Singer, whose representatives are not happy with what Elvis and the new producers are doing. When Robert Kennedy is assassinated while they’re filming the special, one of the producers calls on Elvis to make a statement because the country is “lost” and needs a voice to help it heal, which the Colonel insists Elvis does not do and the two have a confrontation in which the Colonel threatens that if Elvis doesn’t do what he’s supposed to for Singer, the Colonel will leave him; Elvis seems okay with this proposition and goes on to sing a triumphant and moving new “protest song,” and his performance in the special puts him “back on top.” Elvis talks to Priscilla about telling the Colonel he’s done with him, and she warns him to be careful because the Colonel will “have you under ten feet of snow before you know what’s happened” and not to let the Colonel “clip your wings,” and Elvis insists he won’t. He goes to visit the Colonel in Las Vegas where he’s in the hospital after an apparent heart attack. When Elvis says they need to go their separate ways, the Colonel warns him about the financial liabilities of the international tour he wants to do, then suggests there’s a way he can do it without it costing him anything, and shows Elvis through the hospital-room window the new International Hotel that’s being built; they visit it for the Colonel to show him how big its stage is and how they will pay for anything Elvis wants to put in his show, then afterward Elvis can go on his international tour without worrying about financing it. Elvis declares that “the snowman strikes again” and accepts, putting together a major show with a ton of musicians. On opening night, the show is wildly successful, and the Colonel is watching it with the hotel’s owner, whom he convinces to book Elvis for the foreseeable future; when the owner notes he thought Elvis wanted to tour internationally, the Colonel says Elvis can be “persuaded to make the International his home” if the price is right, and after the high price for Elvis himself is established for a five-year residency (as onstage Elvis sings that “we’re caught in a trap” for “Suspicious Minds”), the Colonel takes as payment for himself the forgiveness of his own exorbitant gambling debts and an unlimited line of credit at the casino. The Colonel then follows Elvis around the room as he triumphantly French-kisses female fans, and observes Priscilla observing the scene and notes her realizing she can never compete with the love from his fans. After the show when Elvis says he can’t wait for the world to see his show, the Colonel continues to act as if this is a possibility. But when the first Vegas stint is concluding, the Colonel starts insisting that the security situation is too dangerous for them to go overseas, and arranges a domestic tour where he claims he can control the security. They continue the Vegas-residency/domestic-tour circuit for four years, pumping Elvis full of drugs to keep him going, which seems to exacerbate his paranoid delusions.
One morning Priscilla wakes Elvis up at Graceland with the news she’s leaving him and taking Lisa, and when he asks if it’s because of “what happens on the road” she says no, that it’s all the pills the people around him keep pouring down his throat, and that he’s only happy when he’s on stage and between performances he’s a “ghost.” We’re back to 1973, the point of the initial flashback from the Colonel’s hospital room, and we see that right before Elvis collapsed, one of his entourage had found out and told him that the Colonel is an illegal immigrant without a passport and this is the real reason he keeps insisting they can’t tour overseas. When Elvis is revived by the drugs of “Dr. Nick” and goes on stage that night, he tells the audience that the Colonel is an “alien” who has abducted him and imprisoned him in this “golden cage,” and that it’s his last night performing there, then screams at the Colonel that he’s fired. The Colonel then draws up an itemized list of everything Presley Enterprises owes him, totaling over $8 million, and when his father Vernon shows Elvis and tells him they’re broke and will lose Graceland unless he takes the Colonel back, Elvis is enraged and still intends to leave Vegas, but then encounters the Colonel by the parking garage, who, evading questions about his identity, tells him that they’re the same and that everyone around him has been living off of him (Elvis), and that while the Colonel has been as well, the difference is Elvis has also lived off him. Back up in his penthouse, Elvis tells his father to tell the Colonel he wants things to go back to the way they were and to “send up Dr. Nick.”
We cut to a year later, when Elvis’s plane the Lisa Marie is on a runway and Priscilla has come to pick up the actual Lisa Marie from him before he leaves. Priscilla gets in his car with him and tells him she set up a stint at a clinic for him that he can go to to rest and heal after his next show; he seems to ignore this, noting that he’ll be forty soon and that he never got to do that great classic film he wanted to and that no one will remember him (“I’ve never done anything lasting”). He boards the plane and flies away, noting that there’s a type of bird without legs that can only fly and if it lands even for a little bit, “it sort of dies.” We’re then shown newspaper clippings of his death at 42, the Colonel again claiming he’s not responsible for it, but rather that the fans are. He says when he saw Elvis perform for the last time, he could barely stand up but he still sang with all his heart, and we see Elvis sitting at a piano clearly out of it but beautifully singing “Unchained Melody”–and then there’s a cut where it switches to footage of the real Elvis’s performance of this song and a clip of the real Elvis explaining why he sings. The imagery of popping flashbulbs gives way to a single point of light going out, apparently signifying both Elvis’s and the Colonel’s death simultaneously. On-screen text informs us that Elvis is the most successful solo recording artist of all time and that after Elvis’s death, there were lawsuits about the Colonel’s “financial abuse” of Elvis that ended with him settling out of court, and that the Colonel then spent the rest of his life “pouring his fortune” into Vegas slot machines. The End.
The bane of the biopic is usually a sense of a cohesive plot, since it can be difficult to whittle a concise narrative arc from the material of a person’s entire life. Baz’s point-of-view choice of the Colonel offers a way to streamline the material–it in fact dictates the entire plot structure. But it does so through the exploration of a central question: who is responsible for Elvis’s death, or more specifically is the Colonel responsible for it. The Colonel in his narration consistently attempts to blame-shift responsibility for Elvis’s death onto the fans–which are the object of address in his narration; the Colonel addresses the viewer–“you”–with the presumption they’re a fan (or why would you be watching the movie?). Other aspects of the film reinforce the exploration of this question, such as when after the Louisiana Hayride performance with the debut of “the wiggle,” Elvis’s mother goes up to one of the girls who pulled his jacket off and yells at her “Why are you trying to kill my son?”
The plot is neatly divided into three acts that correspond with the major movements of Elvis’s career:
Like Gaul, the career is divided into three parts: Memphis Elvis (the singer), Hollywood Elvis (the movie star), and Vegas Elvis (the sacred monster).
Mark Feeney, “Elvis Movies,” American Scholar 70.1 (2001).
The acts pivot on the most critical turning points–Elvis’s going into the army in ’58, the ’68 Comeback special, and what might be more disputed, his ’73 discovery of the Colonel’s machinations. (The character of Elvis himself sums up the plot so far at the ’68 turning point when he tells the producers that back when he was starting out, some people wanted to put him in jail for the way he moved and they ended up putting him in uniform for the army, and that killed his mother, and ever since then, he’s been lost.)
With Moulin Rouge! in 2001, Luhrmann was, according to Wikipedia, credited with “having re-invented the modern musical, blending decades of popular music in remixes and mash-ups.” Elvis offers something of an intriguing mix of genres–it is a “musical” but not in the traditional sense, and, as with Spencer (2021), it is also a sort of horror movie. The music creates the horrific atmosphere in the opening with the track “Cotton Candy Land” both in the tone of the music itself and the lyrics evoking being pursued by a creepy entity, which turn out to be adjusted from the version of this song Elvis recorded in 1963:
Sandman’s comin’, yes he’s comin’
Elvis Presley, “Cotton Candy Land” (1963).
To sprinkle you with sand
He’ll say one, two, three
And you’ll be, in cotton candy land
becomes:
The snowman’s comin’
Chris Isaak and Stevie Nicks, “Cotton Candy Land” (2022).
Yes, he’s comin’
He’ll take you by the hand
He’ll say one, two, three
And you will be
In cotton candy land
The sense of horror is perhaps most strongly evoked in the flashback to 1973 for which Baz deploys another major motif in the movie: signs. In this case, flashing huge on the screen the “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign, then sweeping shots over the city with a musical score that seems to emphasize the city as nothing short of a hellscape. Vegas is the Colonel’s territory, and of course, the Colonel is the villainous “snowman.” Which may explain his and the movie’s obsession with Christmas. One of the first images we see, of a Christmas card that’s scattered in the Colonel’s opening collapse, has visual renditions of both Elvis and the Colonel on the front of it, but the one of Elvis is a caricature that patently does not resemble Elvis as he’s played in the film by Austin Butler–but when it pans over to the image of the Colonel on this card, it looks exactly like the Colonel as played by Tom Hanks in the film, in the very shot in which the Colonel is introducing himself in voiceover to the viewer. This strikes me as a kind of key for how to “read” the film, specifically in its over-the-top portrayal not of the Colonel per se but of the grotesqueness of the Colonel. Some will interpret his villainy as exaggerated, others on point, and either way, some (myself included) might say that the prosthetics–namely the fat suit and the nose–are distracting. And I still cannot fathom what in God’s name Tom Hanks thinks he’s doing with the character’s accent; it seems like it’s supposed to be going for Dutch at points (the Colonel is really from Holland, as the film fleetingly reveals when the Colonel is interrogated by the Senator) but the actual Colonel would have covered up any trace of a Dutch accent since he was very actively concealing this aspect of his identity (and recordings of his voice in the 2018 documentary The Searcher confirm this). For me, Tom Hanks is by far the weakest link in this film.
I’ll digress to note that Tom Hanks’ being cast in this role is interesting in relation to his title role in Forrest Gump (1994), in which a major conceit is the multiple ways this figure unwittingly played a critical role at historical turning points. An early one, when Forrest is still a child, is when a boarder (whose face is never shown but the viewer will realize is supposed to be Elvis) comes to stay at his mother’s house, and Forrest starts dancing in his leg braces to the boarder’s guitar-playing in a way that catches the boarder’s attention so he asks Forrest to do it again; then in the next shot we see Elvis in one of his early television appearances doing the dance. (The voice of this faceless Elvis is apparently an uncredited Kurt Russell, who played Elvis in John Carpenter’s 1979 Elvis biopic.) This portrayal irks me to no end because it completely obscures Elvis’s influences from Black music and credits his signature moves to a little white boy–one named for the original leader of the KKK, no less.
Baz takes pains to emphasize the influence of Black music and artists on Elvis, but this is also one of the film’s more problematic elements: B.B. King becomes the magical Black bestie. But it is admittedly interesting to highlight the idea that B.B. King, a Black performer who explicitly points out he’s under much more direct threat of arrest than Elvis, ends up with more freedom than Elvis. This is in line with the Colonel being his “satanic” manager, and Vegas being rendered a hellscape: the movie basically depicts Elvis as having sold his soul to the devil. It may be true that Elvis as we know him, a “cultural force,” would not have existed without the Colonel’s brokering, but that same creation of him as a cultural entity sealed his doom.
The film reveals a cycle of imprisonment of sorts: the army is a version of prison for Elvis (part and parcel of the Colonel’s larger imprisonment of him and foreshadowing the “golden cage” of the Vegas residency), and it’s where Elvis meets Priscilla, whom he then essentially imprisons at Graceland, though this aspect is a lot more emphasized in Carpenter’s 1979 film than Baz’s. Like B.B., in Baz’s version Priscilla is more device than character. She serves to emphasize the dream theme, telling Elvis at their first meeting (re his future acting career) that if he can dream it, he can do it, and thus she’s positioned as integral in the second act’s climactic singing of the “If I Can Dream” protest song, and in their coda scene in his car when she tries to convince him to go to the clinic, she again repeats that if he can dream it he’ll do it, to which he (tragically) responds “I’m all out of dreams.” The dream theme of course invokes MLK, whose assassination is positioned as pivotal to Elvis’s reconsideration of his career and his larger civic responsibility.
Thus the three-act film pivots around three kings…
The sequence that I think is the most successful in emphasizing the influence of Black music on Elvis is the one setting up the Louisiana Hayride performance in which we see him as a child in Tupelo, spying through a hole in the wall on Arthur Crudup in the jazz joint and then running over to the revival tent with the gospel music:
Young Elvis, for instance, peering through a crack in a shack, spies a couple of dancers, writhing and perspiring to the lusty wail of the blues; he then runs to a nearby tent, sneaks inside, and enters a Black revivalist meeting, which gives him the Pentecostal shakes. The proximity of the two locations is frankly ludicrous, but it allows Luhrmann to hammer home his point: the Presley sound was forged in a double ardor, sacred and profane. You don’t say.
Anthony Lane, “How ‘Elvis’ Plays the King” (June 24, 2022).
So snarky…it’s almost laughable that this critic wants to berate Baz for a lack of subtlety when, again, the subject matter he’s working with begs for the opposite treatment. The “frankly ludicrous” juxtapositions of the jazz joint and revival tent are meant to be symbolic. Baz is a mashup artist, and in this sequence he shows Elvis to be one as well, mashing up the blues he hears in one place and the gospel he hears in another. Part of the innovation of the musical form that occurs in this sequence and others as “set pieces” are how they constitute visual mashups of different things happening simultaneously, as in Elvis’s prep for the Louisiana Hayride performance intercut with his childhood experience of the jazz shack next to the revival. (It’s a flash of a shot of child Elvis running between these at the end that separates the shot of Butler-as-Elvis singing “Unchained Melody” with the cut to footage of the “real” Elvis singing it.)
The Colonel’s point of view does introduce some potential problems; such as, despite the film being framed as the Colonel’s deathbed reflections, he’s only reflecting on Elvis’s life, a fact that’s potentially the most prominent when the interrogating Senator reveals there’s no record of him and then asks “Why did you leave Holland, Andreas van Kuijk?” This question is never answered or even significantly reflected on despite what would very much seem to be a defining aspect of the Colonel’s life, but seems only present to reveal the fact that he fled from Holland, hence the Colonel too is a plot/narrative device and not a developed character. Then there’s also the fact that we see scenes from Elvis’s life that the Colonel would not have been privy to, like the conversation Elvis has with Priscilla about cutting the Colonel loose. You could argue that these scenes could be interpolated from things the Colonel does know–if Elvis did voice his desire to part ways with the Colonel as we see him do, the Colonel could interpolate that he had discussed the matter with Priscilla. Baz seems to think this is also elided in the way the “frankly ludicrous” positioning of the jazz joint and revival tent can be written off: this is not a matter of real-life fidelity. You can identify major embellishments from “real life” at the film’s critical turning points, the Memphis baseball-stadium concert and the ’68 Comeback Special, but the embellishments more concisely encapsulate the spirit of what happened over longer periods of time.
But this becomes interesting in light of what Baz does reproduce faithfully; having been to Graceland in the past year, I recognized that most of Elvis’s outfits and the Lisa Marie plane were reproduced identically to their real-life counterparts.
But there was one thing that was changed from its real-life counterpart that especially caught my attention: the stained-glass peacocks Elvis has in the front room of the Graceland house. The feathers on the ones that appear in the film are embellished, a notable change due to the bird motif in the film that emphasizes Elvis symbolically “flying,” which is itself ironic because peacocks are birds that can’t fly rather than being, as Elvis figures himself at the end, a bird that can only fly…
It’s also worth noting the film’s structure is predicated on something I was once advised by a writing teacher to never do: putting a flashback within a flashback. We start in 1997 with the Colonel on his deathbed, then flash back to 1973 which will be the critical turning point in his relationship with Elvis (and for Elvis in general) when Elvis discovers his manipulations, then flash even further back to the point “That’s All Right” was released in 1954, when the Colonel first heard him. Yet this somehow appropriately replicates Elvis’s indelibly inscribed influence on our culture, which Baz underscores in text at the very end: “His influence on music and culture lives on.”
Long live the King.
-SCR
the pva creative writing review 