In Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis,” there’s a scene based on actual conversations that took place between Elvis Presley and Steve Binder, the director of a 1968 NBC television special that signaled the singer’s return to acting. live.
Binder, an iconoclast not impressed by Presley’s recent work, had pushed Elvis back to his past to revitalize a career halted by years of mediocre movies and soundtrack albums. According to the director, his exchanges left the performer acquitted in a deep search for the soul.
In the trailer for Luhrmann’s biographical film, a version of this back and forth is reproduced: Elvis, played by Austin Butler, says to the camera, “I have to be who I really am again.” Two frames later, Dacre Montgomery, playing Binder, asks, “And who are you, Elvis?”
As a Southern history scholar who has written a book about Elvis, I still find myself wondering the same thing.
Presley never wrote a memoir. Nor did he carry a diary. Once, when a possible biography in works was reported, he expressed the doubt that there was even a story to tell. Over the years, he had appeared in numerous interviews and press conferences, but the quality of these exchanges was erratic, often characterized by superficial answers to even more superficial questions.
His music might have been a window into his inner life, but since he was not a composer, his material depended on the words of others. Even the rare revealing gems — songs like “If I Can Dream,” “Separate Ways,” or “My Way” —didn’t completely penetrate the veil surrounding the man.
Binder’s philosophical research, then, was not merely philosophical. Countless fans and scholars have long wanted to know: who was Elvis, really?
A barometer for the nation
Identifying Presley can depend on when and to whom you ask. Early in his career, fans and critics called him a “Hillbilly Cat.” He later became the “King of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” a musical monarch whom the promoters placed on a mythical throne.
But for many, he was always the “King of the White Garbage Culture”: a story of the southern white working class from rags to riches that never fully convinced the national establishment of its legitimacy.
Elvis Presley during a press conference at Madison Square Garden in New York City in 1972. Art Zelin / Getty Images
These superimposed identities capture the provocative fusion of class, race, gender, region, and commerce that Elvis embodied.
Perhaps the most controversial aspect of his identity was the singer’s relationship to race. As a white artist who benefited greatly from the popularization of a style associated with African Americans, Presley, throughout his career, worked under the shadow and suspicion of racial appropriation.
The connection was tricky and fluid, no doubt.
Quincy Jones met and worked with Presley in early 1956 as the music director of CBS-TV’s “Stage Show.” In his 2002 autobiography, Jones noted that Elvis should feature Frank Sinatra, the Beatles, Stevie Wonder, and Michael Jackson as the greatest innovators in pop music. However, in 2021, amid a changing racial climate, Jones was dismissing Presley as a brazen racist.
Elvis appears to serve as a barometer to measure the different tensions in the United States, with the indicator less on Presley and more on the pulse of the nation at any given time.
You are what you consume
But I think there’s another way of thinking about Elvis, one that could put many of the questions around him in context.
Historian William Leuchtenburg characterized Presley as a “hero of consumer culture,” a manufactured commodity more image than substance.
The assessment was negative; it was also incomplete. He didn’t care how a consumerist disposition might have shaped Elvis before he became an animator.
Presley reached adolescence when a post-World War II consumer economy was taking its toll. A product of unprecedented wealth and accumulated demand caused by depression and wartime sacrifices, it offered almost limitless opportunities for those who wanted to entertain and define themselves.
The Memphis, Tennessee teen took advantage of these opportunities. By eliminating the “you’re what you eat” idiom, Elvis became what he consumed.
During his formative years, he bought from Lansky Brothers, Beale Street clothing that fitted African-American artists and provided him with second-hand pink and black sets.
He tuned in to the WDIA radio station, where he absorbed melodies of gospel and rhythm and blues, along with the vernacular of black disc jockeys. He turned the dial on WHBQ’s “Red, Hot, and Blue,” a show that had Dewey Phillips doing an eclectic mix of R&B, pop, and country. He visited the Poplar Tunes and Home of the Blues record stores, where he bought dancing music in his head. And in the Loew’s State and Suzore # 2 movie theaters, he saw the latest Marlon Brando or Tony Curtis movies, imagining in the dark how to emulate his behavior, sideburns and duck tails.
In short, he removed from the nation’s growing consumer culture the character the world would know. Elvis alluded to this in 1971 when he gave a rare insight into his psyche after receiving a Jaycees Award as one of the country’s ten prominent young people:
“When I was little, ladies and gentlemen, I was a dreamer. I read comics and was the hero of the comic. I watched movies and was the hero of the movie. So every dream I’ve dreamed has come true a hundred times … I’d like to say that I learned very early in life that “without a song, the day would never end”. Without a song, a man has no friend. Without a song, the path would never bend. Without a song. Therefore, I will continue to sing a song ”.
In this acceptance speech, he quoted “Without a Song,” a standard melody performed by artists such as Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Roy Hamilton, perfectly presenting the lyrics as if they were words directly applicable to their own life experiences.
A loaded question
Does that make the recipient of the Jaycees a kind of “weird, lonely boy who comes to eternity,” as Tom Parker, played by Tom Hanks, says to an adult Presley in the new movie “Elvis”?
I do not think so. Instead, I see him as someone who simply dedicated his life to consumption, a not uncommon behavior of the late twentieth century. Scholars have noted that while Americans once defined themselves through their genealogy, work, or faith, they began to identify more and more through their tastes and, instead, their that they consumed. As Elvis created his identity and continued his craft, he did the same.
He was also evident in how he spent most of his downtime. A tireless worker on stage and in the recording studio, those scenarios, however, required relatively little of their time. For most of the 1960s, he made three films a year, each taking no more than a month to complete. This was the scope of his professional obligations.
From 1969 until his death in 1977, only 797 of the 2,936 days were spent performing concerts or recording in the studio. Most of his time was spent on vacation, playing sports, riding a motorcycle, going karting, horseback riding, watching TV, and eating.
When he died, Elvis was a shell of his old self. Overweight, boring and chemically dependent, he seemed exhausted. A few weeks before his disappearance, a Soviet publication described him as a “shattered”: a product dumped “relentlessly” victim of the American consumer system.
Elvis Presley demonstrated that consumerism, when channeled productively, can be creative and liberating. Similarly, he showed that, without restrictions, it could be empty and destructive.
Luhrmann’s film promises to reveal much about one of the most captivating and enigmatic figures of our time. But I have a hunch that it will also tell Americans a lot about themselves.
“Who are you, Elvis?” the trailer probes in a disturbing way.
Maybe the answer is easier than we think. He is all of us.