Should have gone by way of Memphis. "Threepenny Review"
Elvis Again
Greil Marcus
It was in late July that a representative from a public radio talk show asked me to take part in a program on ?all the insanity about the twenty-fifth anniversary.? He didn?t have to say the twenty-fifth anniversary of what, but I still didn?t know what he was getting at. It seemed to me that in 2002, twenty-five years after Elvis Presley?s death, and more than two years after the last interesting Elvis impersonator, Bill Clinton, had left his stage, the real story was the evaporation of Elvis Presley in American life.
What was striking, given the staggering ubiquity of Elvis Presley after his death, was his disappearance from ordinary talk, paintings, movies, t-shirts, other people?s songs?from the cultural conversation through which a society explains itself to itself. The commemoration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of August 16, 1977 seemed more than anything a media mirage churned up by Graceland smoke machines. A Graceland spokesman had recently discussed the problem facing the operation: if Elvis Presley was indeed immortal, his fans were not. Many of Elvis?s original fans were dying off; if the enormously successful marketing of Elvis Presley over the last twenty-five years were to continue, they would have to be replaced by people who were not even born when Elvis Presley died.
?What insanity?? I said to my caller.
?What about the remix of ?A Little Less Conversation? putting Elvis over the Beatles for the most number-one singles in England?? The original of ?A Little Less Conversation,? a forgettable track from the 1968 Elvis movie Live a Little, Love a Little, had been featured in the 2001 remake of Ocean?s Eleven , which made sense: in those rare moments when George Clooney couldn?t keep a straight Elvis face, Brad Pitt picked up the slack. This year a Dutch DJ, one Junkie XL, pumped up the beat and the vocal for a World Cup Nike commercial, and then put the new version on the market: instant gold.
?What about the fact that any novelty song can top the British charts at any time?? I said.
?What about all the Elvis songs in Lilo & Stitch?? the caller said.
Priscilla Presley, ex-wife, media widow, and guiding intelligence behind Elvis Presley Enterprises, Inc., daughter Lisa Marie Presley?s corporate parent, had yet to announce that she had sold the theatrical rights to her 1985 autobiography, Elvis and Me?and that, in partnership with a company called ?Immortal Entertainment,? she was planning a ?nationwide contest?to cast the parts of Elvis and Priscilla.? Priscilla, a news story said, would judge the contest herself, ?with input from audience members. Immoral Entertain-ment??that?s how it read in the version I saw?president David Codikow said the casting process might be pitched as a reality television series along the lines of Fox?s American Idol: The Search for a Superstar. The idea, Codikow said, was ??Priscilla finding the next Elvis.??
But why stop there? Why not have Priscilla give birth to the next Elvis, and pitch that as a reality TV show? Priscilla?s not even sixty: if ?A Little Less Conversation? can make number one in the U.K., Priscilla can carry an in vitro Elvis to term. Lisa Marie controls the body; she and Priscilla ought to be able to clone it. Or, what with the recent marriage of Lisa Marie and Nicolas Cage, who from Wild at Heart to Red Rock West to Honeymoon in Vegas to Leaving Las Vegas has been the most passionate and imaginative cinematic Elvis of the last decade, why not just put him in the role, with Lisa Marie as her own mother?
There?s no way to stop once you start down this road?and this road leads nowhere. |
