Saturday, July 20, 2024

July 20-21, 2024: ElvisStudying: Representing the King

[July 19th was a doubly significant day for Elvis Presley: on July 19, 1954, his debut single was released; and on July 19, 1977, what would be his final album dropped. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of layers to the Elvis mythos, leading up to this special post on cultural representations of Presley!]

On quick takeaways from just a handful of the literally countless cultural depictions of Elvis.

1)      Andy Warhol: It can be difficult, from our 2024 vantage point, to really understand the cultural significance of Warhol and his pop art. But in the 1960s no single figure shaped American popular culture—or at the very least its representations of and relationship to celebrity—more than Warhol, and he painted no less than ten “silkscreens” of Elvis, with 1963’s Double Elvis perhaps the most iconic.

2)      The Twilight Zone: “The Once and Future King,” the first episode of the second (1986-87) season of the 1980s revival of The Twilight Zone, tells the story of an Elvis impersonator who travels back in time to meet the real King. By far the most interesting thing about this episode from a 2024 perspective is that it was written by none other than George R.R. Martin! But it also reflects the King’s towering cultural presence a decade after his death.

3)      Bubba Ho-Tep: In this 2002 comic horror film, Bruce Campbell plays a nursing home resident who claims to be Elvis Presley, having in this telling switched places with an Elvis impersonator who was in the one who died in 1977. And that’s about the fifth least-weird thing in this film, which also stars Ossie Davis as a Black man who claims to be John F. Kennedy and which eventually teams the two up to fight an undead Egyptian mummy. By the 21st century, that is, all things Elvis were getting pretty strange.

4)      Fallout: New Vegas: I don’t want to overstate the presence of Elvis in this post-apocalyptic 2010 video game, but on the other hand: the game features a group of roving bandits known as “The Kings” because they found an abandoned Elvis Impersonator school and make its costumes and other materials their own. But apparently Presley’s name has been lost to the ravages of time, so they only know him as “The King,” a striking commentary on how a real figure can become his iconic image.

5)      Recent Biopics: I didn’t see Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 film Elvis, so I can’t say too much about its depiction of Presley, but it’s interesting to note that Austin Butler dedicated himself so fully to his own impersonation of the King that he found himself unable to stop talking like him when filming was complete. But more interesting still, for this not-yet-viewer, is Sofia Coppola’s 2023 film Priscilla, perhaps the first cultural work to focus on Presley’s wife (played by Cailee Spaeny, with Jacob Elordi’s performance as Elvis as a supporting character). If we’re going to keep Elvis present in our pop culture going forward, it’s long past time to broaden who as well as how we think about him.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other takes on Elvis?

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