On one level, The King, a new documentary by the
Peabody Award winning filmmaker Eugene Jarecky [Why We Fight (2006), The
House I Live In (2012)], is a fresh and interesting biopic about Elvis
Presley; but also, and more importantly, it is a timely, thought provoking
examination of the American Dream, as mirrored and refracted by the trajectory
of Elvis’s life. Then again, it’s a travelogue of sorts, a journey in Elvis’
1963 Rolls Royce, literally and figuratively crisscrossing America and American
social and cultural history, from sea to shining sea, from the mountains to the
prairies, from farm towns to the metropolis; likewise, a musical montage – reflecting
not just Elvis tunes but all sorts of indigenous American music; plus
commentary by historians, journalists, celebrities, ordinary folks and
musicians, some who knew Elvis and many who didn’t.
The interviews and commentaries are just fascinating,
offered in an almost kaleidoscopic style, loosely organized via the chronology of
Elvis’s life and the topics thus raised. The photography by award-winning cinematographer
Tom Bergmann is outstanding. The music includes excerpts from the Elvis
catalogue, including some great footage of the very dynamic and compelling young
Elvis, and a surprisingly (for me, anyway) goosebumps-raising moment
from his final Las Vegas performance. There’s
also a variety of terrific, topically relevant, tonally appropriate music
interspersed throughout – American roots tunes, country music, blues, hip hop –
much of which filmed with the performers riding in the backseat of the Rolls. My
favorite has to be EmiSunshine, an amazing young Tennessean with a talent and
sound beyond her years. Born in 2004, she must have been just 11 or 12 at the
time.
It is an ambitious, complicated, fascinating, sad, yet
hopeful and ultimately exhilarating picture. You don’t need to know or care much
about Elvis Presley; it’s just a damned great movie - essential viewing for
anyone who cares and is concerned about the state of America and our trajectory
as a society and as a nation.
We’ve all heard about the American dream, and many of us
think we believe in it (in one version or another). But what is (or was) that dream? A belief that by working hard, applying yourself, anyone can to be
successful? If so, what do we mean by success? Is the American dream simply the
pursuit of wealth? Or does the idea connote something different, like the goal
of a fairer, more egalitarian society or, alternatively, a more democratic one?
If there ever was an American dream, has it died? Or was the whole thing just a
lie? The
King is Jarecky's search for answers.
Rock Historian Greil Marcus suggests that the American dream
is rooted in the American Declaration of Independence, which proclaims it ”self-evident”
that people are endowed with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness. “Happiness? No one ever talked about happiness [before] as an actual
component of life that is our right! So Elvis Presley acts out those lines in
our own time, and points the way.”
Young Elvis: “I suppose the most important thing in a
person’s life is happiness; not worldly things, I mean gee whiz, you could have
cars, you could have money, you could have a fabulous home, but if you’re not
happy what have you got?”
Ethan Hawke: “When my grandfather was a kid, America’s
greatest export was agriculture. And when my grandfather died, America’s
greatest export was entertainment. He used to say that when he was a young man,
our identity was the great democratic experiment. Whenever you mentioned
America, you mentioned democracy. But somehow, by the end of his life, when you
mentioned America, people talked about us like we’re capitalists - that was our
fundamental identity.”
James Carville: if you look at what the promise of America
was 40 years ago and what America has delivered today – it’s a pretty stunning
disparity. If you look at that demographic that Elvis was a part of – a guy
could come out of high school, get a job at the plant, stay there for 30 – 40
years, send the kids to college; that was the American dream. It doesn’t exist
anymore. It’s gone.
Artist Patricia Gaines: I think somehow we lost our way, and
Elvis lost his, and I don’t know how you ever get that back.
Jarecki: “I set out in Elvis’s car
because he’s the poster child of what we’re taught to think of as the American
dream, right? The poor country boy who rises like a rocket and ends up a king.
But from there, it gets more complicated, for Elvis and America. For Elvis’s
dream ended in a tragedy of lost authenticity, addiction and self-destruction.
And at this point, I don’t think I need to tell anyone what a tangled mess
America has become. But how did this happen?
I grew up with Elvis Presley’s music in the 1950s and
1960’s. In his rock’n’roll heyday, I was only a kid: starting kindergarten when
his first hit single That’s All Right
came out in 1954, and rounding my seventh birthday by the of his really big splash in 1956, the year of Heartbreak Hotel, Blue Suede Shoes, Don’t Be
Cruel and Hound Dog. But even
then, a kid like me knew something was happening: Elvis was everywhere – on TV, in the news,
literally in the air. By the time I started paying more attention to the music
scene in high school in the mid 1960s and especially in college in the late
sixties, Elvis was a has-been, a very unhip and largely irrelevant celebrity
singer-actor who’d been making cheesy movies and lame, inauthentic records far
removed from rock’n’roll for a long time. In 1967, the year I entered college, Elvis
turned 32. To me and my friends, He might as well have been 62.
But for most Americans, the so-called silent majority - less
concerned with cool, unaligned with the civil rights movement, the anti-war
movement or the counterculture – the once upon a time “King of rock and roll” remained
an icon. His movies made money. His marriage and alleged romantic liaisons made headlines. He was an
international star, despite the fact that he never, ever gave a concert outside
the USA. Indeed, he hadn’t performed live anywhere since 1961. Then, in
December 1968, a TV special, simply called “Elvis”, aired on NBC, and it was
the network’s highest rated program of the year. An intimate concert before a
studio audience – Presley’s first live performance since 1961 – the show
featured Elvis dressed in a black leather outfit, performing all his great 50s
hits, including several with his original band members. He was great. Critics
gushed that he still had it; and soon he had a couple hit records again
(Suspicious Minds, In The Ghetto). People thought Elvis was back. So did Elvis;
and he wanted to go on tour. Instead, his manager, “Colonel” Tom Parker, got
him a lucrative gig in Las Vegas, which soon tilted to a middle-of-the-road playlist;
and his slide into mediocrity resumed. By 42, he was dead.
Still, Elvis was and remains to this day a great American
idol, somehow emblematic of the country. His former home, Graceland, is the
second most visited home in the US (after the White House), with an average of over 650,000 visitors
annually.
But he was not everyone’s hero. Although he grew up in the deep South, lived in or close to Black neighborhoods as a child, listened to and clearly dug Black music and created his crossover rock and roll sound by adopting the rhythm and blues style of Black contemporaries.
Van Jones [President, Rebuild the Dream]: “There’s no
American dream under segregation. … My father was born in Memphis in 1944, and
as a kid there was probably nobody he hated more than Elvis Presley. He was a
clear racial appropriator.”
Chuck D, rap artist and founder of the group Public Enemy,
sang “Elvis was a hero to most, but he
never meant shit to me …” Was Presley a racial appropriator? “No, I don’t think
so. I think culture is culture. Culture is to be shared.”
David Simon, creator of The
Wire: “There’s a lot of talk nowadays about the cultural appropriation. Listen, the entire American experience is cultural appropriation.”
So, in his tumultuous era what did Elvis stand for?
Chuck D: “You did not see Elvis in the midst of no civil
rights marches. Didn’t march with Harry Belafonte, did he?”
Van Jones: “He had peers and contemporaries who made braver
choices … I don’t give Elvis a pass, because I know how much power he had, and
I know what he could have done with that power.” Take Muhammed Ali, for example, a
contemporary of Elvis, revered by as many people (though not necessarily the
same people), and as internationally famous and emblematic of the times as
Elvis."
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (U.S Army [ret.]): “Ali becomes the
poster child for the other side of the coin. ‘I believe in this country, but I
do not believe this country is perfect by any means. And I’m going to stay here
and suffer for that and do my jail time.’ And one now has to ask,
retrospectively of course, who was the wiser individual? Who more understood
what was happening to the republic?”
Dan Rather: “It’s the money. It’s all about the money.”
Ethan Hawke: “Elvis at every turn picks money. Should I stay
at Sun records or go to RCA; well, there’s more money at RCA. Should I take
this big giant movie contract even though I don’t have any creative control;
well, it’s the biggest movie contract ever, let’s take it. Should I go on tour
like I want to, or should I take the biggest contract ever offered to a live
performer, which is what he got in Vegas. Every chance, he prioritized money.
And where did it put him? Dead and fat on the toilet at 42.”
Musician John Hiatt gets into the backseat of Elvis’ Rolls,
soaks it up for a minute and, overcome by emotion, starts to cry. “Sitting in
this car and getting a sense, you get a sense of just how trapped he was,
y’know, just so trapped.”
“He was just a poor mama’s boy from Mississippi, and he gets
involved with this carnival guy [Col Tom Parker]. He promises Elvis the world.
If you turn your life over to me, I’ll make you a star. This is the temptation
of Christ by the devil. Elvis makes that Faustian bargain, and the Colonel did
all that.”
Country singer Emmylou Harris: “The way I see Elvis …
there’s never been someone who became so popular so fast at such an early age.
He didn’t have anyone to talk to about what was going on. He didn’t have
anything to compare it to. He missed that whole period of time during which you
grow and experience things with people your own age. To me, he’s like that
Greek tragic figure, alone in that experience. Maybe he was the King, but he
was doomed.”
As presented in The King, Elvis Presley’s life goes from youthful talent and creative exuberance to epic tragedy. Is this what’s happening to the USA? “The politics of today are politics of grief, of nostalgia and lament for something that seems to be slipping away. This is an empire in decline” says one interviewee. A couple of older, poor white women now live in the little shotgun shack in Tupelo Mississippi that three-year-old Elvis lived in with his mother for a few months after his daddy was jailed for kiting a bad check. Jarecki asks them about how the American dream is going for them. “Like shit!” one replies, “Because it’s going to hell. Tupelo’s gone to hell.”
The last word goes to Jarecky, the director: “After Trump’s inauguration,
I guess for a moment I thought that the country had indeed perhaps died on the
toilet, choked by our addiction to power, money, and excess. But in the months
since, I’ve seen a significant resurgence in public engagement. … This is
heartening and made me think that maybe all is not lost. It also made me think
that perhaps my premise was a bit naïve. The idea that we – and Elvis– were young
once and beautiful but then lost our way is dangerously idealistic. It might be
more accurate to say that America and Elvis were always imperfect – works in
progress, full of greatness and shortcomings. While Elvis was ultimately
consumed by his, we seem to be very much at work on ours, and there is clearly
much work left to wake up tomorrow and do.”
Like I said, it’s a great movie. Check it out and see if you
agree.
109 minutes. Rated R (for language)
Grade: A
The King opened on June
22, 2018 in NY and LA. Opening Friday
July 6 in select theaters in the SF Bay Area (SF, Berkeley, San Rafael) and
Seattle; July 13 in some other CA cities, plus Boston, Philadelphia, DC,
Minneapolis, and elsewhere; and a rolling release throughout the country weekly
over the rest of the summer. Check HERE
for a city/theater near you.
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