The Elvis Restoration

Baz Luhrmann Returns the King to His Rightful Throne

Sexy!

Sunday night, I finally got around to watching Baz Luhrmann’s new Elvis movie and it’s a real humdinger. I’ve been a giant Baz Luhrmann fan ever since I saw Moulin Rouge in 2001, and laughed out loud at Jim Broadbent singing “Like a Virgin”. And I still think Romeo+Juliet is the best version of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet ever put on film.

Having said that, I consider Elvis to be Luhrmann’s masterpiece, the best movie he’s ever made. It’s both a movie worthy of adulation and a work of peculiar genius.

Like all of Baz’s movies, especially Moulin Rouge, Elvis is a brilliant glittering plaything of a film, completely captivating and chaotic; ridiculous, charming and aggravating at the same time. To fully enjoy this movie you have to let yourself go and bathe in the imagery and music, because if you stop to think about it, if only for a second, you’ll realize how silly it really is. Although, silliness is not a stinging criticism, since Baz cultivates silliness in his movies. (Jim Broadbent singing “Like a Virgin” and Tom Hanks in a fat suit as Colonel Tom Parker.)

Most of the reviews I’ve read of Elvis are dumb. They misunderstand what Baz is about as an artist. For example, this is not a movie about the “real” Elvis Presley, whoever that might have been. Luhrmann is absolutely unconcerned with psychological or emotional depth. He’s obsessed, instead, with entertaining his audience, and Elvis Presley is the mythic vehicle of that entertainment, turned up to the maximum volume.

Like Moulin Rouge, Elvis is a movie about sex appeal and sex-as-entertainment, and Elvis Presley is the pinnacle of 20th century sex-as-entertainment. No one else comes close in terms of raw sexiness, and because of the fracturing of mass media, no one will ever again be as universally sexy as the 20-year-old Elvis. The only serious competitors to young Elvis are 30-year-old Elvis in leather pants, and 40-year-old, Elvis in a sequined white jumpsuit.

And this is even before we acknowledge that he was also a singular musical genius.

You may not like it, but this is what peak male sexiness looks like.

Unfortunately, the complete, triumphant sexiness of young Elvis gets lost in the mockery heaped on the tragic fat Elvis. We forget just how sexy Elvis was, because he destroyed himself in the worst way possible, by getting fat and pathetic. James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, who were both roughly half as sexy as Elvis, and one tenth as important, avoided that fate by dying young and beautiful.

It’s obvious to me, as it should be to any decent critic, that Baz is doing everything possible to give us back the sexy Elvis. That’s his objective, to make us understand again how charismatic Elvis was, while entertaining us maximally.

The first thirty minutes of this movie are brilliant, one of the best and most entertaining half-hours ever, and it focuses entirely on the unexpected, God-given sexiness of Elvis. (Elvis’s mother Gladys even says it’s a gift from God.) Elvis doesn’t cultivate it, he doesn’t even intend it, he just has it, like a Greek hero. Like Achilles or Hercules, he’s a demigod, blessed with a gift revealed to him in young adulthood. Or, maybe, not just a demigod, but a real god: primordial Eros, the son of Chaos, who wields a terrifying generative power.

Austin Butler, the best movie Elvis ever, is astonishingly good looking. In repose, better looking than the real Elvis. But, Austin Butler has to be almost super-naturally good looking to convey the almost super-natural charisma of the young Elvis, to give the audience some sense of that mysterious force that, literally—not figuratively— changed America. I’m not joking. American cultural history can be divided into B.E. and A.E., Before Elvis and After Elvis. No American has ever been as culturally important as Elvis. If you don’t believe me, name someone who’s more influential.

So, Baz Luhrmann is giving us back Elvis, the real Elvis. Not the psychologically complex, actual human being Elvis Presley, but the real Elvis Presley of pop culture, as he existed in the 1950’s and 60’s, stripped of the post-death cultural baggage and mockery. Baz is inviting us to see Elvis as he was in his prime, from the viewpoint of a naive viewer encountering him for the first time. And, Baz does it.

I saw the movie on Sunday night with my daughters, age 16 and 18, and both loved it and couldn’t stop talking about it. (Nor could I.) It was the third theater viewing for my sixteen year old. This level of devotion to the movie is apparently not unusual among teenagers. My daughters tell me that dozens of their friends are now obsessed with both the movie and Elvis Presley. One friend of theirs, a sharp young woman of 18, has seen the movie 10 times, and a 19-year-old cousin is now watching all of Elvis’s movies and reading everything ever written about him, starting with the masterful Last Train to Memphis.

Do you get that? Teenage girls (teenagers!) now think Elvis Presley is cool.

Thanks to Baz Luhrmann and his brilliant movie, teenagers understand Elvis Presley better than most American cultural critics do. Sneering at Elvis is the mark of the uncool, Okay Boomer midwit. Understanding Elvis is peak sexiness is the new hotness.

To which I say, thank you, Baz, for putting the King back on his throne.

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