Good and Bad #5: Baz Luhrmann's Elvis
Adam Rothbarth asks: Whose story are music biopics really trying to tell?
I’m a late-in-life Baz Luhrmann convert. I didn’t really care for Romeo and Juliet when I watched it in high school, I wasn’t one of those Moulin Rouge-obsessed teenagers, and I didn’t even see The Great Gatsby until a few months ago. But as an adult, I find these films brilliant, the way they flatten all modern culture to one plane, the way they use the medium of film to create a phantasmagoric experience where narrative and montage feel mashed together. His films reflect the speed and sound of how we experience art today: big band music, Jay-Z, Verdi’s La Traviata, David Bowie, Jacques Offenbach, Elvis Prelsey. History and art appear to us today not as dialectic but as monolith, and Luhrmann is smart to depict them the way he does.
I recently watched Luhrman’s new film, Elvis, which I thought was incredible. In many ways, I think it’s as much the legend of the culture industry as it is the story of Elvis Presley’s life and music. Since the mid-aughts, all musical biopics have been measured against (or have simply sought to reproduce) Walk the Line and Ray, as if all popular musicians’ careers are simply fill-in-the-blanks stories of youthful success, excess, drug use, downfall, redemption, and, finally, admission into the Museum of Important Music (via, if nothing else, the film we’re watching about them). Maybe they are; or perhaps those are just the stories we need to keep telling ourselves. Refreshing (and quite moving) was the failure of Inside Llewyn Davis’s titular character, bulldozed by the very institution that brings triumph in all the other music films.
Telling Elvis’ story from the standpoint of his deceitful manager, Col. Tom Parker, has been a controversial decision, but I think that’s one of the film’s more ingenious mechanisms. Elvis and Parker represent two sides of a coin—together, they show that creativity/artistic integrity/identity/etc. aren’t mystical gifts, but individual faculties both stoked and deformed by capital. Everything Elvis does is calculated and commodified before he even does it, and his reaction to this continues to create further products and changes. In this way, Elvis is an epic film that attempts to show the dialectic of artistic development over a long period of time—everything he does is a reaction to something else, and it pushes him deeper and deeper into despair. Parker represents the opportunistic component of Elvis’ work, and the film wants to show us that one cannot exist without the other. Later in the film, in their final reckoning, Parker says to Elvis something along the lines of, “You can’t leave this relationship—I am you and you are me.” Regardless of how dramatized this version of the story actually is, Elvis the film penetrates the veil of abstract music biopic themes like “musical genius,” “personal demons,” and “the redemptive power of love and self-acceptance,” opting instead for a very dark and rich examination of the relationship between the culture industry and late capital; like Elvis and Col. Parker, they are symbiotic, and separation would all but signify their mutual demise.
As far as his musical legacy goes, you can’t really mention Elvis today without noting his relationship to Black music, which is probably a good thing. Luhrmann’s film dismisses the argument that Elvis “stole” Black music and shows us that not only was Elvis a very conscious student and supporter of the African-American traditions of rock ‘n roll and gospel, but that (at least in the film) many Black musicians and fans loved Elvis and his music. He was immersed in the culture and accepted by it. Elvis’ musical success wasn’t a matter of creative theft, but, as B.B. King explicitly tells him in the film, the fact that he was simply more marketable because he was white. There’s no doubt that Elvis benefited from the ingenuity of Black performers that never received their due, which is itself an injustice; but he was also an organic product of American poverty and the result of real cultural influence. The conventionality and reproducibility of popular songs—the musical material itself, a song’s form—level most music to the same songbook. Thus, our greatest artists, from Little Richard, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and B.B. King to Elvis Presley, David Bowie, Adele, and Lady Gaga, became who they were (or are) primarily through performance, not authorship. It’s not the sheet music at the shop on the corner but Spotify, MTV, and The Voice that carry the current of music forward and deliver songs and artists to us.
The film has been criticized from many angles, from its cadence and use of montage to setting Parker as the narrator and its “conventional” depiction of celebrity drug use and marriage. Does the film depict Elvis using drugs and his marriage disintegrating, his devastated wife chiding him for his behavior? Yes, it does. But to me, the question isn’t whether this is a conventional biopic with regard to narrative and form, but rather why drug use and broken homes are so ubiquitous in American life that they could seem conventional at all.
Of course Elvis’ story is conventional. How could it not be? Everything is conventional today. Moved by the end of the film, which concludes with concert footage of the real Elvis singing “Unchained Melody” a few weeks before his death, I tried to find a studio version of Elvis’ reading of the song, but I don’t think one exists. I went down the rabbit hole of performances of the 1955 song—which has music by Alex North and lyrics by Hy Zaret, and was coincidentally written for a prison film called Unchained—listening to notable recordings by The Righteous Brothers, U2, Cyndi Lauper, and Sam Cooke. Funnily enough, the following evening, some friends and I listened to about 10 renditions of “That’s Amore,” a song that people should have stopped recording after Dean Martin sang it.
People like to complain—usually in jest, while flipping channels or standing in line at the movie theater—about remakes and reboots (the impulse to revisit the past), as if they’re some kind of modern invention, as if cinema and music collectively ran out of ideas five years ago. But that’s wrong—remakes are an old necessity, built into the popular form since its rise over a century ago. Individuals write songs, indeed, but because of its universality, popular music really belongs to the system—we are not building individual libraries, but wings of one humongous one. Thus, conventionality is virtually unavoidable in cultural production today.