Even a kitsch-drenched pill-popping ultra-parody of America’s pop-culture machine deserve a chance to tell his rhinestone-studded side of the story. That fucking hair, though.
EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert
Charisma and persona are two different things. The first one makes everyone like you; the second one stops you from going insane. The precise ratio you establish between the two determines whether or not you’ll be famous, and for how long. Occasionally a person comes along who is both attractive enough and dumb enough to justify turning the dial all the way to charisma. All of these people die weird.
There’s really no way to tell a story about Elvis that avoids the above statements, because he is their poster child. Cutting to footage of The King from 1955 or 1972 or 1966 is functionally the same thing as cutting to a film reel highlighting the state of the culture during those same years. Just like Warren Buffet can’t actually beat the market because Berkshire Hathaway is the market, Elvis can’t influence the culture because he is the culture.
If that sounds like a snake swallowing its own tail, it’s because it is – the saddest parts of this film are when Elvis tries to provide observations into the schism between the public image and the private self, and in attempting to provide evidence of the latter ends up reflexively clinging to the former. No one wants to see him – they want to see an escapist, idealized version of themselves, and he can’t help but provide it.
And while that snake never stops swallowing its own tail, it does manage to digest individual meals, so God help you if you’re dumb enough to get old. The zeitgeist wants someone limber enough to make for a responsive weathervane, and there’ll always be someone younger coming down the pipe, with fresher knees and thicker hair and a complete lack of any other relevant or defining characteristics – an empty vessel primed to have popular idealizations pour into.
Elvis seems like he might actually grasp this, stressing at one point in the film that he’s just out there for the love of music. But almost immediately after, he admits that he wouldn’t know what to do if he didn’t have fans, if he was no longer recognized in public. This existential crossroads would be a perfect time to have a sense of self to fall back on, but you’re only at that crossroads because you excised your sense of self a long time ago.
The End
This is not a story of moderation – if it was, we wouldn’t be talking about it – but a story of how far you’re willing to go to delay the inevitable. Fading into self-satire wasn’t unique to Elvis, nor is it the sole purvey of celebrities – everybody starts to do an impression of themselves eventually, trying to recover something that defined them once, always vaguely aware that the performance part of this attempted recovery necessarily means it’s all bullshit. But what else are you going to do, die?
We’re all doing impressions of ourselves, baby, and it’s a little less convincing every time. The only difference for celebrities is that the lights are brighter, so the makeup runs faster.