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Baz Luhrmann’s biopic paints Elvis as a pioneer but not necessarily in a good way.
[Caution, some spoilers about Elvis ahead.]
Baz Luhrmann’s stunning Elvis is technically a biopic, but kind of not. One of the film’s clever tricks is to reframe the story of Elvis Presley, the so-called “King of Rock and Roll,” beginning with who tells the story. In this high-gloss, beautifully rendered yarn, his manager, Colonel Tom Parker (played by an exceptional Tom Hanks), guides the journey, explaining how he turned a country boy from Memphis (by way of Mississippi) into a phenomenon.
It’s less a celebration, more of a tragedy. All of us know that Presley died broke, in poor health, and struggling with prescription-drug addiction; those of us without an intimate knowledge of his story might not have known that, at least from this film’s point of view, Parker turned Presley into a carnival attraction, controlling every aspect of his life until Presley died. Elvis tracks how the talented and naive young man, passionate about music and desperate to improve his family’s financial situation, was molded into a product Parker could market and sell in perpetuity.
The costs were steep, and one of the main points the film makes is that we, the consumers, are to blame for Presley’s implosion. Like many music biopics, Elvis shows its star struggling to keep up with the times as culture changes and new sounds emerge. Likewise, the inevitable descent into self-medicating takes up screen time, as well as his alienation from any semblance of a normal life. Particularly during the stretch covering Presley’s Las Vegas residency, it’s hard not to see parallels; Britney Spears comes to mind the quickest.
Like Presley, also on RCA Records, also born in Mississippi, also someone who performed a grueling years-long residency inside a hotel on the Strip, Spears had also been micromanaged by her manager, with detrimental impact on her mental health. Forty-five years after Presley’s death, so little has changed; Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse, and on and on, and on, have succumbed to this same machine, making clear that we haven’t learned much, a bitter pill that stays in viewers’ throats long after the credits roll.
Then there is, of course, the matter of race and cultural appropriation. Since the earliest days of his popularity, Presley’s detractors held that his popularity was due to his skin color; as a white man performing Black music, he reaped benefits that the Black blues and gospel musicians whose sound he mimicked could not. To be fair, real rock and blues pioneers like B.B. King and Little Richard made peace with Presley’s place in the culture and even befriended him. And while some historians have qualms about the film’s portrayal of Presley and King as buddies, King himself has said that, as we see in the film, Presley frequented Black establishments and hung out with Black folks — an act that “took guts” in the segregated 1950s.
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To its credit, Elvis frames the story around race, racial prejudice, and racial tension. It shows how Presley was shaped by living in a Black neighborhood as a youth, seeing gospel, and was eventually persecuted because of his affinity for and proximity to Black music and culture. Elvis shows him refusing to voluntarily whitewash his style, the conflict he felt in being asked to abandon his roots. That might’ve been true, but the film wobbles with this point, never quite making a definitive pronouncement about how beliefs shaped actions.
We see, for example, how upset he seemed to be over the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahalia Jackson, but not any demonstrable action on his part (other than a song, “If I Can Dream,” featured in the film). The film paints him as a sort of “aw, shucks” hillbilly with little agency, someone so swept up in Parker’s scheming and image-making that he failed to act on his own accord. This characterization sort of grants him a pass: Though it’s never said explicitly, Presley perhaps knew he’d risk everything by making grand statements or marching alongside Black people protesting for civil rights in the ’50s and ’60s. But he wouldn’t have been alone if he had: Plenty of white celebrities and artists, including Jane Fonda, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, and Frank Sinatra to name a few, took active stances on civil rights issues, whether through art, or public statements, or cash, before and after Presley started swinging his hips.
This isn’t to indict Presley per se, or minimize what good he did do, but to illustrate another way the precedent he set lives on. Even now, when pop music and Black music — sound that is initially fringe or considered too “vulgar” for the mainstream — overlap and borrow from each other, Black creators find their inventions and tastes, from twerking to trap to TikTok dances, sanitized and made palatable to global consumers who oftentimes have no clue who the real inventors are.
Not only do the creators get nothing, neither does the culture itself. The theater of 2020 aside, it’s exceedingly rare for, say, the Justin Biebers and Ariana Grandes of the world, beloved and well intentioned as they might be, to make sustained, substantive contributions back to the community whose styles they’ve profited from.
Elvis rightfully gives the iconic figure his flowers, even making us empathize with the young man shot out of a cannon with little understanding of what he got himself into. Yet the film’s most salient lessons are those we still haven’t seemed to remedy: the ways fame can destroy people, and our continued willingness to see what we want to see instead of what’s really there.
Malcolm Venable is a Senior Staff Writer at Shondaland. Follow him on Twitter @malcolmvenable.
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