The Movie Elvis: Cementing a legacy in place.

 

Elvis the Movie, Colonel Tom Parker, Psychology, Psychoanalysis of film, Tom Hanks, Austin Butle

 

In addition to being a reluctant psychoanalyst, I am a reluctant fan of Elvis Presley.  When I took the reluctant wife to Graceland last Spring, I worried about how few people were coming to see his home, automobiles and airplanes.  I wondered whether his fan base was dying off.  The reluctant wife assured me that those fans are introducing their children and grandchildren to Elvis and he will continue to be a cultural force and his home will be a mecca for a segment of the population for a long time to come.  Wait until the summer, she and the tour guides said; Graceland will be crawling with people again.

The movie Elvis will contribute to maintaining Elvis as a hero to his fans and their children.  It is, at this moment, the second highest grossing music Biopic, so far being exceeded only by Bohemian Rhapsody.  But, it will also maintain the Elvis hagiography in part because it gives an acceptable narrative to the fans that will let them maintain Elvis as a good guy who was done wrong.  This is tricky.  He could have been portrayed as the goat.  He could have been painted as the appropriator of African American music; the guy who would profit from the creativity of others.  And that narrative is very much alive in this film.

But the creators of this film were prepared for this.  The primary defense against the charge is sleight of hand.  They present Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks) as the villain.  As an aside, I think the casting here is problematic.  I think that actors bring themselves to a part – and Hanks is just too much of an average good guy.  He doesn’t have an evil bone in his body.  Ok, I know, as an analyst, we all do, but Tom just doesn’t.  Or he’s not willing to lend his evilness to the parts he plays.  Instead he plays the part as an irascible but likable, if a little oily, uncle.  Fortunately for the Elvis legacy, the part is written for someone to play it as a psychopath.  So this creates a matador’s cape for our rage to be directed against.

The second feint is to is to have Elvis (Austin Butler) come by his blackness honestly.  He is shown being raised among the blacks when his father is jailed, and he is transported by his experience of both types of African American music- the Sunday Morning Church and Revival singing and the Saturday night Rhythm and Blues.  Additionally, he has conversations with Black musicians who give him their blessing to use their music – they know the game is rigged and they’d like their friend to profit from it, and he demurs when others say he is the greatest rock and roller and points towards Fats Domino as the true Rock and Roller.

Despite my mistrust of having Colonel Tom Parker as the villain, I do think that telling the story from his vantage point was wise.  Elvis is many things to many people, and anchoring the story in a particular set of eyes is a smart move.  He is, I think, chimeric.  As depicted here, Colonel Tom views Elvis as a Freak in a side show that fascinates people, and they will be happy to part with their money (money is snow in the Colonel's metaphor with the Colonel as the snow man) to have access to Elvis.  Elvis is a freak who captures something that the world desires.  And what is that?  

Elvis himself believed that he was as popular as he was because his singing conveyed the emotional experiences that we all feel, and his articulating these feelings allowed us to feel themt more deeply, and to feel that we shared those feelings with others, in a transcendental way.  He imagined his true competition to be not another pretty boy, but Roy Orbison, because Orbison, too, was able to articulate the emotional experience that his audience wanted to feel.  This movie emphasizes the complex feelings that are involved in asserting oneself against an oppressive external culture. 

Of course, asserting oneself against the oppressive external culture is central to the experience of the African American community – and Elvis is depicted as joining them in that – and learning from them how to be true to himself and to the feelings that he feels pouring up and out of him.  But he is also dependent on the oppressive culture – and, in particular, on the Colonel.  One of the characteristics of psychopaths is that they are capable of being quite empathically attuned, particularly to their victims.  They are often charming, not in a gee shucks boyish kind of way that Tom Hanks can be, but in a tuned in, you are the only person in the world for me kind of way.

The Colonel is depicted as being quite tuned into Elvis – and he is particularly attuned to his fears.  But he manipulates those from a distance.  Did the Colonel hire someone to leave death threats for Elvis in the Las Vegas International Hotel?  He never copped to it in the film, but it is clear that he used Elvis'  fears about his security to keep Elvis from travelling abroad and he did this not for Elvis’ benefit, but to protect himself from the goons who would have collected on his gambling debts if he could not produce Elvis at the casinos and with that all the snow that came with him.

So Elvis, despite being the single best selling solo vocalist of all time (according the post film credits), was childlike in his dependency on his mother and then, when she died, he transferred that dependency to the Colonel.  Despite his Taking Care of Business mantra and his moniker as the king, through the Colonel’s eyes, he was a needy little boy who needed the Colonel's guidance.  When, at the end of the film, the Colonel blames the fans for Elvis’ death, saying that Elvis died trying to meet the needs of those he truly loved – his fans – we are almost convinced.  But I think the tragedy at the heart of this movie is that the Colonel was able to manipulate Elvis out of the Colonel’s awareness of his own insecurity and lack of certainty about his ability to keep himself afloat in a world that was hostile to him and this allowed him to understand and manipulate Elvis who was also essentially immature and uncertain why he had been gifted in the various ways that he was.

So I guess I am left, at the end of this film, having been entertained and, perhaps, enlightened a bit by the Colonel’s perspective, but also feeling that Elvis continues to be enigmatic to me.  As I put forward in the post about Graceland, I continue to believe that Elvis embodies a certain version of what it means to be white.  I am concerned that this film will help Elvis’ fans continue to believe that they, too, are supportive of African Americans while simultaneously continuing to support exploitative policies and vote for individuals who signal their intent to maintain racist social structures.  I think one way that Elvis embodies a modern version of whiteness is that he is ultimately powerless, too – and if he is, how then can I not be powerless?

Elvis takes a stand against the Colonel, choosing to have rock and roll producers direct his Christmas special and in that special, Elvis, apparently, pens and sings his own protest song, objecting to the violence that kills Martin Luther King, Jr. in his own town of Memphis when he is living in LA, and then later kills Bobby Kennedy.  This song – and his hit “In the Ghetto” – seem to put him in the pantheon not just of performers, but of Rock and Roll crusaders.

I guess I am, ultimately, not enamored of this film.  It seems to appeal too powerfully to our wish to stay culturally asleep and cut off from our responsibility to really change things.  Elvis tries to rehabilitate his image as a true rebel at two points in the film – in the first, he plays a concert at the baseball stadium in Memphis as a Rock and Roller and his penance is to go into the military rather than being sent to jail  (not included in the film are the ways that Colonel works on his behalf while he is in the military to keep his image alive on the radio).  The second time he asserts himself is with the Christmas special, and the Colonel turns that opportunity into an endless gig in Vegas where he most clearly lives out the Colonel’s vision of him as a freak show attraction – loving the adoration of his fans more than the love of his family.

I think this is an interesting aspect of the story, but I think there are many parts of it that were not included.  That said, I think that is true of every post that I have ever written.  I take a particular vantage point – as an analyst working as a cis white male, etc.  But more importantly it is a perspective that I espouse at this particular moment.  Will I still be disappointed by this film (in the same way) if I watch it again in five years?  Probably not.  And how different would this film have been if it were told through the eyes of Priscilla Presley?  Or Elvis' band members?  Or his Dad?  Or from the omniscient third person perspective? Or through the eyes of the black musicians who were his peers and whose music he was able to turn into snow?

Perhaps most importantly, I wonder what Elvis' own version of his life would look like and I wonder if we would find it enthralling?  Would we have found his insecurity and uncertainty about the validity of what he had to offer endearingly humble or would we have found him to be a fun house mirror reflection of the Colonel – both men were robbed of their childhood and spent their adult lives searching for something (maternal and social love and acceptance) that should have come from some other source than the adoration of fans, snow, or the contents of a hypodermic needle.

In closing I would like to talk about something uncanny.  I found Austin Butler’s portrayal of Elvis to be a little bit weird.  It seemed less like he was channeling Elvis than a young (and better looking) John Travolta.  I don’t know what to make of that, just an odd observation from me, at this moment…

 

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