(You could chortle at a cheese doodle like “Blue Hawaii,” but you couldn’t argue with it, because it was the earliest incarnation of The Blockbuster Mentality.) And as an individual, Elvis, even as he remained a superstar, became the ultimate consumer.
Elvis started as a true artist, but in Hollywood his movies made a spectacle - almost a debased ritual - of commercial compromise. The healthy desire to be successful, and even to stay on top, evolved into an over-the-top lust to break the bank. In a way that no film has before it, “The King” captures how Elvis, while he was blazing new trails as an entertainer, was being eaten alive by forces that were actually a rising series of postwar American addictions. The Elvis saga is old news, but what’s new - and revelatory - about “The King,” apart from the soulful dazzle of Jarecki’s filmmaking, is that it asks, at every turn, a haunting question: When you take a step back and really look at what happened to Elvis Presley… Through all the kitsch and the dross, of course, Elvis never completely stopped making great music. And even that easy-to-ridicule phase - the jewels, the blubber, the karate moves - became so iconic that it spawned a never-ending industry of reverent impersonators. He made a self-parodying joke of himself in Las Vegas, but only because enthralled audiences never stopped lining up to see him. Yes, he churned out mediocre fluff movies like pastel sausages, but only because he signed the most lucrative contract in the history of Hollywood. The movie takes in Elvis’s rise and fall - or, rather, his multiple falls, which were harder to see when they were happening because they were always tied to (and camouflaged by) his success. In “The King,” we watch an inky-haired young rebel, who may have been the most handsome man of the 20th century, bring a vibratory erotic-ecstatic energy into the world (he didn’t invent that energy, but he channeled it, blended with it, and redefined it), and in doing so he changes the world overnight. So what does that say about the rest of us? You watch “Hamlet,” and within three-and-a-half hours a prince has descended into the darkness to become a murderer. Remember how in high school English class, you learned that the heroes of classical tragedy, from the Greeks through Shakespeare, were nearly always royal figures because they had to represent the pinnacle of what a human being could be? That’s what made their downfalls defining and devastating. “ The King,” directed by Eugene Jarecki, is a nonfiction chronicle of the life and career of Elvis Presley, but it’s really a documentary-meditation-essay-rhapsody, one that captures, as almost no film has, what’s happening, right now, to the American spirit.Įlvis, of course, was “the king of rock ‘n’ roll,” but the film’s short and sweet title plays up the way that he was royalty in a grander sense.
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