Those desiring respite from the grimness dominating the news could do worse than seek refuge in Elvis Presley. The film EPiC (Elvis Presley in Concert) arrived in cinemas recently courtesy of director Baz Luhrmann. It is a very different project than Luhrmann’s sparkly and cartoonish Elvis film of 2022, starring Austin Butler as Elvis and Tom Hanks as his manager, Tom Parker.
EPiC is far superior; Elvis as himself in all his glory, as he prepared for his Las Vegas residency and comeback from 1969-76 at the International Hotel, during which he sometimes delivered three live performances a day. In total, he played 1,126 shows during the eight-year residency. It is no wonder he died so young, aged 42, in 1977; as he tells one interviewer in the film: “I can’t stand still. I’ve tried it, I can’t do it.”
The film was made possible by the unearthing of 59 hours worth of performance and interview material in a Warner Bros film vault, much of it previously unseen. According to the movie’s press notes, the cache had lain in an underground salt mine in Kansas. The film also makes use of Super 8 footage from the Graceland archives. The footage has been expertly restored and offers a satisfying intimacy.
The film reminds us that at one point Elvis was asked at a press conference about his view of the heated controversies then dividing America, including civil rights and the Vietnam War. “I’m just an entertainer,” he replied nervously. But there was always a politics of Elvis, in life and death. He visited the White House in December 1970 and offered president Richard Nixon his services as an honorary “federal agent at large” in the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs to rid America of “drug abuse and communist brainwashing”. He gave Nixon a gift of a Colt .45 pistol.
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Many reviewers over the years have taken issue with Luhrmann’s elision or skewing of delicate questions. The Elvis legacy has long been contested, and multiple Elvises have been constructed since he died. Historian of the American South, Michael T Bertrand, highlights the accusations that Elvis appropriated the work of black artists, the so-called “bleaching of the blues”. Yet the man himself, contends Bertrand, “often seemed downright conflicted as to who or what he was … the culturally schizophrenic Presley routinely erased artistic and societal borders, defying easy categorisation. Was he a genuine rhythm and blues enthusiast appreciative of black talent and equality? Or was he a “racist redneck” who profited at the expense of the authentic African American performers he in fact despised?
“As a subject for historians, Elvis remains intriguing, at least in part because he negotiated the racial boundaries of his era. While his excursions without question were unsystematic, imperfect, and ‘apolitical’, they nevertheless threatened the racial status quo.”
Elvis has also been the subject of analysis in relation to the social, cultural, economic and technological changes of the 1950s, in the climate of the cold war, and was the focus of much ire in relation to debates about youth culture and sexualisation. In her 1999 book Elvis Culture, Erika Doss quotes a Dallas newspaper contributor horrified by his “gyrating pelvic motions … a cross between an Apache war dance and a burlesque queen’s old fashioned bump and grind”. His first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in September 1956 drew an estimated 82 per cent of the American viewing public (54 million people).
What became “Presleymania” resulted in the commodification and relentless marketing of him, rubbish films (he starred in more than 30 movies in the 1950s and 1960s), lavishness, including the mansion, Graceland, he bought in 1957, drug use and loneliness. All combined to generate a sad narrative of decline. But Luhrmann’s new film shifts the scales, bringing back to the centre the idea emphasised by musicologist Richard Middleton; that Elvis “offered an individual body; unique, untranslatable, outside the familiar cultural framework, exciting and dangerous”.
The concert and performance aspects, with the peerless voice, range, dynamism, charisma and embrace of multiple music types, are the jewels in this film. The footage also reveals the hard work underpinning these abilities and the sheer quality of his backing band and singers. It is the vitality and soulfulness of Elvis on stage that lingers, a powerful antidote to the usual preoccupation with his private demons.
In his 1992 book Dead Elvis, American music journalist and critic Greil Marcus observed that “it has been so easy to deflect Elvis’s music away from the realm where the music of Bob Dylan, Billie Holiday, Prince or even Jim Morrison takes on the aura of art and thus invites thought … we need to place ourselves in confrontation with Elvis’s music”.
At a time of increased concern about authenticity and the dark shadows over America, it is a pleasant relief to see the King alive again.
