In my life of late I’ve felt a missing. It’s a missing of passion. I remember a time when the act of listening to music made me lose my mind. When I would feel a fizz in my stomach at the idea of a new album for a new band. When I would stay up late listening to music and searching for something new in it, and genuinely finding new meaning in every listen. Music felt like Pop Rocks in my ears, it lit me up and made me weep. I remember going to concerts and it not being a matter of feeling comfortable enough to dance, it was that I simply did not care. My body was a carrier, a prism for soundwaves to fuck in. Music felt good.
This is not to say I don’t like music anymore. It’s still my life, I still love it, I still make it, and I still think about it. It’s probably the thinking about it that’s brought me the most trouble here. It’s the overanalyzing, the quantifying, the considering, the forcing into clinical thought. I enjoy music as a note-taking exercise more often than a thing to legitimately feel. I hate this. I miss dancing down the street, knocking my headphones off as I rocked to myself, thinking how embarrassed I would be if I could see myself, but not caring in that moment.
There’s always been a thread in my mind of worrying about listening “right,” though, as if that was anything near something real. As if I could be too passionate, as if that was something you could measure, as if it would be a problem anyways. Or that there was some holy list of bands it was “okay” to listen to, and that it was some form of crime to violate it. This has changed me more than I’d like to admit. In college I had a friend who made fun of me for liking Death Cab For Cutie, and I stopped listening to them. It doesn’t matter if he was right or not.
This is, of course, just taking the idea of “good taste” too seriously. I’ve just always been susceptible to barkers yelling at me to like or dislike things. Internet criticism got huge at a time when I felt things too closely. Things like Pitchfork scores and loud blogs in the ‘aughts made me bitter and hateful as much as it made me excited for whatever new thing I was told to love. Yet still, I felt a buzz from it, I could still get drunk on a new CD, a new .zip file. I could go to a concert and yell and feel so good it was scary.
Then came the new internet. The way Twitter makes one’s brain rot, the way that “the discourse” poisons one into fear of liking things wrong, of supporting something that doesn’t toe the line. Even if you try to be above it, there’s still that background radiation of mobs waiting to eat you for saying you didn’t like the right artist in the right way.
In recent years, as I’ve tried to unglue myself from blindly trusting people I don’t know, the glee of music left. I tied so much of my identity in “being a music fan” in exactly the way you were supposed to in the 2010s that there was nothing underneath it. But as I unglued myself, people glued even harder. Going to concerts is an arduous chore for me now, and not just because I’m older and standing up that long is hard.
Shows feel like a contest of the crowd to take the most or the best pictures with their phones, or to wait until the most pristinely silent moment during a set to yell their well-rehearsed, easily tweetable thing that people will remember. And this is gospel now; just look at the unhinged response to Mitski tweeting at her fans to put their phones down during her shows: “Bestie that’s great & all, but some of us have mental health issues that cause dissociation & i film to remember the moment I’m not looking at my phone the entire time just to press record on :).” That tweet made me stop breathing; a perfect storm of “discourse” mixture, mental health commodification, and parasocial latching-on. It makes music stop being art and become an identity to own. It makes me tired, and it makes me back up slowly into the bushes away from loving music. I don’t want to be like that.
Am I blaming other people for my trailing off in excitement? Am I hanging my depression on “the internet?” I don’t know, probably (certainly). Maybe it’s just the end of the known world crashing down, the constant onslaught of bad news keeping me from opening up to the wonders of a tune, mixed with a disgust at how some people choose to act during this downfall. Or maybe it’s the personal traumas I’ve been through that numbed me in general, and it’s just that I can also trace a trajectory about “music criticism” around it.
In the back of my mind is the remembrance of a love of music. In the back of my memory is a tug towards a return to ecstasy. Imagine my surprise when that tug turned into a jet, blasting its way through my brain on its way out, reminding me that music had power, art had power… because I watched Baz Luhrmann’s ELVIS in a giant, loud as fuck movie theater.
I’d wanted to see it since I saw the trailer, which looked certifiably insane on account of Tom Hanks’ decisions alone. But that kid’s face was the draw, and the promise of a camera whipping into his dick. It looked like it understood Elvis, understood how he gathered his power. So I was probably going to see it eventually, but then the early reviews came in, hating fervently. There was one line in the pan that shook my soul out of my pants: “the most visually incoherent film since the Wachowski’s Speed Racer.”
Speed Racer is one of my favorite movies. I’ve always been a sucker for an underdog. Even through the era in which I was reliant on outside influence to dictate my taste, I kept up a defiance. There’s a certain amount of train wreck that I’m attracted to, in order to defend, and Speed Racer, the first time I watched it, fit that bill, and I loved it for that reason.
It was upon a more recent viewing that it really hit me as a genuine work of art. Speed Racer lives as an attempt to make a live action cartoon. It genuinely wants to see if it can adapt Speed Racer the Cartoon into a Motion Picture and retain the elements of what Speed Racer is. It succeeds at that, whether you wanted it or not, whether you think the experiment mattered or not. There’s nothing else like it, which feels like it cements its necessity. It isn’t about you, it’s about the joy in the making of it.
There’s a little bit of that in ELVIS, which is a movie made out of a love of a myth. It’s disjointed like a creation story, like how the Bible’s filled with gospels and chapters that don’t quite add up, that were clearly written by someone else. If you’re strictly playing the game of apples to oranges, Speed Racer is obviously the better movie. It has a more clear goal and vision — ELVIS’ vision amounts to screaming the word Yes over and over until either Baz or the Audience faints, it isn’t coherent in the least, nor is it meant to be. It’s also just the goal of “can you tell the story of Elvis Presley in Baz Luhrmann’s style,” which I applaud simply because it’s refreshing to see a director’s hand in the current Marvel-Sanitized era of popular filmmaking.
ELVIS’ more rambunctious sequences worked for me. The introduction was so frenetic and fever-dream’d I leaned over to my friend and said “this movie is going to kill me.” I did so with a smile beneath my mask. I wanted to get fucked up by a movie because I wanted to feel something. I don’t want a dry experience anymore. Crimes of the Future (another recent theater-viewing) was probably not a great “movie,” but I loved the time I had watching it because it was so blindingly itself. That’s enough for me, these days. I want to see the hand involved in a making of a thing. It’s like a movie made by a person and not a conglomerate feels rebellious to witness. It’s the internet mob demanding beige losing. It feels good. It feels like something secret being shared.
None of this is to ask or even answer the question of is ELVIS good? I don’t fucking care, man. It’s probably not! But I loved it. It made me drunk. It made me giddy. It made me scream. It did all this because it was nothing but itself like I just explained, sure. But it also reignited something primal in me. That love of love of music.
It’s interesting that it’s a movie about Elvis Presley that does this feat of alighting some forgotten passion for the King. Some of it was probably because I do actually know a lot about Elvis. I had a brief infatuation with him in college. I bought a DVD of Clambake in a rest stop in Indianapolis and I became obsessed with it and him in general. I picked up Clambake because it seemed ridiculous, and it is ridiculous— a Prince and Pauper Story, Oil Baron Heir Edition, with a climax resolving around Elvis inventing a substance called Glyco Oxytonic Phosphate Tonic that beautiful women spread on a speedboats’ hull. It’s bad, and ridiculous, and opened a weird window into a world of Americana I didn’t know I wanted to see through.
For about a year I was obsessed. I stopped only because it was the 2010s and “the discourse” had started to rev up and “loving Elvis” got you “cancelled.” Obviously this is a far more complex idea than that joke allows for. Yet it’s always worth unpacking the knot that Elvis has come to represent. Part of what makes Elvis fascinating now is his proximity to a growing music industry that was hell bent on chewing up people it could take advantage of— Elvis, obviously, but more importantly the Black artists and writers who wrote his greatest hits. I personally don’t think Elvis purposefully stole songwriting credits, but I do think he was too stupid to realize the power of a publishing credit when he first started. Maybe that’s naive of me. At work around 2014 I put on “Aloha From Hawaii” to lighten the mood and my manager didn’t quite tell me to turn it off but they said (and I quote) “wow, cool, I guess it’s just cool to listen to colonizers now” loudly enough to humiliate me.
Still, a part of me loved him. I read Peter Guralnick’s twin biographies and cried at the end. Tiny Elvis factoids still burn unbound in my head, amassed on the slop heap of stuff people usually call “trivia” but that I hold onto with an upsetting fire. ELVIS set fire to that heap, moments in his life were onscreen that I said “ah, yes” or “no, not quite like that” to. It was exhilarating, as seeing a biopic of someone you love can often be on the best of days.
So there’s another level to the mere existence of ELVIS that burns my brain: why Elvis, why now? He’s at the cusp of losing influence— the last few years have finally seen the throat-grip of The Beatles’ influence on rock and roll being assumed; if The Beatles lose their weight, what force could Elvis possibly have?
ELVIS answers a tiny bit of this question, and it winds up being accidentally well-timed for today. We live in a neo-puritan church-state, with the government squeezing the sex out of our lives. Teens on tumblr yell at any queer artist who dares to put sexuality in their work. The arguments of “should there be Kink at Pride” are matched only by “and what about the Cops?” A lot of society is trying to button down, and cinch up the chastity belts.
So it feels monumental to be forcefully reminded that once a skinny little hick made America lose its fucking marbles because he was so audacious to commit the vile sin of “shakin’ his leg” when he performed. But it’s not just in the puritanical reaction to Elvis’ sexuality. It’s the sexuality he awoke, that he opened the doors for. The feral froth of adolescent discovery is essential to a better society, and some people who saw him sing “It’s All Right” built a better life.
ELVIS deifies this moment. Even the fact that Austin Butler is absurdly beautiful sets it up. But it’s really in the movie’s first performance sequence that seals the deal. Elvis’ nervously raw performance of “Baby, Let's Play House” rips the house down in a way I never dreamed I’d see put to celluloid. Sure, it felt like “being there” in a way I didn’t think I needed to see. But it also took me back into that old way of loving something. That way of believing in a song, that way of absolutely leaving your body in reaction to the magic of performance. I’ve literally never seen a movie perfectly nail the feeling before. That feeling of losing yourself, of giving in to ecstasy, of a joy beyond comprehension.
It’s as wise to compare it to church as it is obvious. It’s taking the most rote and tired observations about “rock and roll” and slamming the reminder of the fact that it was true directly into your face, over and over. Remember this, realize this, accept this, as gaudily and with as much sweat as humanly possible, and then a little more. It’s the subconscious made conscious, first come, lust unbridled, and it’s all music. You see it in the pulsing whip zooms up against his shaking dick, framed with love, framed in costuming, implied but present, shaped and clear, and his dick, too, is all music. It’s that moment of performance, when everyone in the room realizes they’re on the same page, sharing the same feeling, giving and receiving. The musician giving the performance and the crowd giving the reaction, taking, pulling, wanting, giving.
It was just incredible. It felt genuinely life-changing. It reminded me of everything I’ve felt I’d lost. I was bouncing in my seat, I was screaming, genuinely yelling in joy. It felt incredible. I felt alive again.
A mid-movie performance of “Suspicious Minds” is just as transcendent, though more centered on the power of Elvis’ performance rather than the crowd’s realized orgasm. It’s wild to watch a man throw his entire body and soul into moving and shaking for a role like this. I’ve seen a couple of performances from this era, and the attention to detail is astounding. Not just the costuming and period looks, but the exact movements Elvis made. It’s copying sure, but the performance is beyond there. It’s exact but triumphant. It’s a tightly controlled out of body experience of a performance.
Performance is what the movie winds up being about, in a sense (in the way that the movie is about anything other than itself), the power of performance. The tension is always derived from Elvis’ burning need to perform, to give himself to a crowd, while the Colonel keeps him back. The Colonel chides the crowd at the end, admonishing us for wanting more of Elvis, as if that’s not exactly what Elvis wanted (one review I read took what the Colonel says at face value, as if the movie genuinely thinks we’re to blame for Elvis’ death, which is such a willful misreading of the movie my eyes fell out of my skull upon reading it— come on man, I know this movie is not subtle, but in no way is it ever asking you to take anything the Colonel says seriously). Elvis wanted more, yes, but he just wanted to sing more, to play more, to give more. There’s no fault in the crowd for giving the man what he wanted. Especially not the crowd as depicted here, who are as changed by Elvis as Elvis is changed by them.
Both ELVIS and Speed Racer are movies about money and corporations and industry threatening to ruin the things you love. Speed Racer’s antagonist, the odious tycoon Royalton, is obviously at least in part influenced by Colonel Tom Parker, or at least the larger than life idea of that the Colonel represents in pop culture, the predatory manager that turns a genuine love of making into a cheap thrill to sell things with. Elvis doesn’t get to escape this, it becomes the tragedy of his life in the film as well as just how it actually happened.
Speed does escape it, finding a way to race that breaks himself free of the cycle of capital. He has a dark night of the soul about it all, though, and his mother comes in to snap him out of it. “What you do behind the wheel of a race car has nothing to do with business,” she starts. Already it’s beautiful, a reminder of the people at the center of these money machines. But she goes on— “when I watch you do some of the things you do, I feel like I’m watching someone paint or make music. I go to the races to watch you make art, and it’s beautiful and inspiring, and everything art should be. Even though there are times when I have to close my eyes. But there are other times you just take my breath away.” It’s the power of art, the power of creating something that people get to share, that’s what’s important. You’ve got to hold onto that, you’ve got to celebrate that. If we all get there together, we get to share that loving feeling, that mutual joy. That’s what art is for, it’s what it has to be for.
ELVIS ends with (and what else could it) that late-career performance of “Unchained Melody,” snarl and all. It changes, in the final moments, to a clip of the real Elvis singing the song, and you barely notice the change. It’s the first time you see the real King in the whole movie, and it’s stunning. Part of it is the magic trick of how incredible Austin Butler’s performance has been, how beyond fully he’s put himself in the role. But part of it is just in the sudden reminder that all of this bombast, all of this power, all this fall, all of this frenetic excess… was real. He was real.
That’s the magic of Elvis, and the danger, too. The danger of mistaking the boy for the man, the man for the God. But the beauty and perfection of picking that exact “Unchained Melody” is to see, for one final second, the humanity beneath the bombast. The man could sing. He was good at it, he was powerful with it. He could command a room, and lose himself in the power of it all. That song shows us what we lost when he died.
The movie ended, and I blinked my stunned tears out. I got outside, and felt the warm muggy night’s air on my clammy skin, and I shook my leg a little, both to get the blood back in and because every song at once was stuck in my head. The next day I spoke like Elvis for an hour and it felt good in my throat. All I wanted to do was sing. It felt like a gift.
July 4th, 2022