>>371772Elvis, a Disrespected PhenomenonBy Armond White
Baz Luhrmann's shameless comic-book biopicBaz Luhrmann presents Elvis Presley like a comic-book superhero. His gaudy biopic Elvis even includes a sequence of comic-book panels: Baz-Elvis the hero transforms from a mild-mannered Mississippi truck driver who sang and played guitar into a flamboyant Elton John or Liberace-style alter ego. Inspiration from sensual black blues and raucous black gospel makes Baz-Elvis a cultural avatar in the manner of both Martin Luther nailing revolutionary theses to public consciousness and Martin Luther King Jr. upsetting racial segregationists while making women scream hysterically. Naïve Baz-Elvis is seen as a Galatea figure manipulated by a shifty Pygmalion, Colonel Tom Parker, so devious and commanding that Baz-Elvis's final incarnation recalls the pathetic, self-destructive Susan Alexander in Citizen Kane.
This shameless cultural jumble might make some kind of crazy sense for anyone who still thinks Presley the figurehead of pop vulgarity. That position has many successors, and Luhrmann is one of them. His disregard for truth, history, and taste is a mark of contemporary absurdity, and in Elvis it overwhelms his subject.
Luhrmann's latest pastiche follows the deliberate inaccuracies and anachronisms of Moulin Rouge, Romeo + Juliet, and The Great Gatsby. That those lousy films were popular hits seems to fulfill the Y2K prediction of cultural collapse. Audiences who knew nothing about the Belle Époque, Shakespeare, or Fitzgerald didn't care, and Luhrmann uncannily played to their ignorance.
Luhrmann's style jumps from one exaggeration to another, zipping through poor-white class issues, past the European-based Army stint and the legendary acquisitive status (a fuchsia Cadillac rather than a pink one). Knowing anything about Presley's life means you watch Baz-Elvis's rise to fame the way opera fans recollect a libretto during a pretentious restaging. Luhrmann's version, with Elvis played by Austin Butler, who does the alluring eyes, modest snarl, and loose-limbed jitterbug moves, is cartoonish and sentimental, unlike the good 1980 Kurt Russell-John Carpenter TV version. But it resembles parody so much that a kind of tickled bemusement is the only way to respond to its blatant inauthenticity.
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