Krull
It’s somehow fitting that “Elvis” was the number one movie in America as we headed into the July 4 holiday weekend.
“Elvis” the film, just like Elvis the man and Elvis the artist, embodies issues and challenges that have confronted, confounded and even bedeviled us Americans since our earliest days as a nation and a people.
The movie is not a perfect vehicle for such explorations. Directed by Australian auteur Baz Luhrmann—whose artistic motto is, “after we’ve thrown in the kitchen sink, let’s add still more household appliances to the mix”—the film is as more spectacle than it is story, a series of kinetic vignettes that never quite come together into a coherent whole.
Still, it has its moments, largely because the saga, even if imperfectly conveyed, is compelling.
The Elvis Presley story is as American as Plymouth Rock and Wounded Knee, a tale of triumph and tragedy that brings both thrills and genuine heartbreak. The saga of unsuspected genius emerging from lowly circumstances, Elvis’s life and career are equal parts hope and dread, encompassing both Horatio Alger’s poor-boy-makes-good fairy tales and Jonathan Edwards’ “sinners in the hands of an angry God” sermon.
Luhrmann rightly identifies the ancient American fault lines and cultural divides that Elvis managed to shake, rattle and roll—race and sexuality.
And, aided by a superb performance by Austin Butler in the title role, he captures the sheer combustible energy of Elvis’ emergence.
Almost 70 years later, it’s difficult for us to grasp the force with which Elvis exploded onto the American landscape. Early commentators and publicists struggled with nicknames—“the Atomic-Powered Singer,” “the Hillbilly Cat,” etc.—before settling simply on “the King of Rock’n’Roll.”
Or just “the King.”
Nice bit of American irony there, elevating a man who made his art and career out of melding the most egalitarian forms of music—the blues, country, folk and gospel—into a royal presence.
Only in America.
What Luhrmann’s movie doesn’t do well is convey the context in which Elvis arrived in such an incendiary fashion. The director alludes to but doesn’t explore the America of the 1950s, a country convulsed by family quarrels over race and individual liberty and dignity.
Those arguments are as old as the Declaration of Independence and as current as the most recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions.
When people first heard Elvis on the radio, many wondered if he was Black. It was such a concern that the disc jockey who first interviewed him over the air, the legendary Dewey Phillips, made a point of mentioning that Elvis had graduated from Humes High School in Memphis, a way to signal to listeners in the still-segregated South the singer was white.
Years later, in concerts, Elvis mused about the furor: “People asked, ‘Is he? Is he? Is he?’ And I asked, ‘Am I? Am I? Am I?’”
The questioning was understandable.
His early records confused as well as excited. The first one had an Arthur Crudup blues number, “That’s All Right,” on the A side and a Bill Monroe bluegrass tune, “Blue Moon of Kentucky, as the B.
Elvis has been charged with cultural appropriation—of taking from Black artists—but the truth is more complicated than that. His version of “That’s All Right” is as different from Crudup’s as an arrow is from an anchor. One takes flight. The other sinks in despair.
The same goes for the last single Elvis released on Sun Records before he headed to RCA and the big time, a cover of Junior Parker’s “Mystery Train.”
Parker’s version is a mournful dirge about a train, an unstoppable force, taking his love away. Elvis’s take is American bard Walt Whitman’s famed “barbaric yawp” come to throaty, lusty life, a galloping rollick. Elvis seems about to chase the train down and win the girl back.
Luhrmann’s “Elvis” would have been better—much better—if it had probed those classic American contradictions more deeply.
That’s because a large part of Elvis’s appeal was that he embodied so many of our myths.
He made us think again about just what it meant to be an American—what was possible in this beloved country.
Even better, he set our struggles to music, so we Americans could shimmy and shake as we wrestled with ageless questions of right and wrong.
Long live the King of Rock’n’Roll.
And God bless America.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The opinions expressed by the author do not reflect the views of Franklin College. Send comment to [email protected].
