Written: May 16, 2023
I watched the movie Elvis last weekend, and I must say it was pretty good. I first saw the trailer and thought, Man, this looks incredible. And I am a huge fan of the Academy Awards, and saw that this movie got nominated for several awards, including Best Picture. To be honest, I haven’t watched too many films directed by Baz Luhrmann, and I only watched a few minutes of his remake of The Great Gatsby. But I gotta tell you, it’s definitely a unique style of filmmaking because there are just so many stunning visuals in the film and Baz really incorporates a lot of modern-day music into this film. Honestly, I usually take notes when I am watching a movie but I realized that the bright colors and the flashy montages are a huge element of the film, so I felt I missed a lot by trying to dissect or intellectualize it during the first viewing.
This movie has a lot in common with movies I have watched about the music industry, and one common theme these biographical dramas about music show is the pitfalls of fame. There is a concept in Buddhism called the eight winds, and it basically says that people shouldn’t be swayed by neither favorable circumstances nor unfavorable circumstances. The four favorable winds are prosperity, honor, praise and pleasure, and the four adverse winds are decline, disgrace, censure, and suffering. Buddhist reformer Nichiren Daishonin wrote to his disciple, Shijo Kingo, who was a samurai with a hot temper, to keep practicing Buddhism and not let his anger influence his behavior, especially because Kingo was ordered to leave his estate because of his strong conviction in the Daishonin’s teaching. I had this idea that actors and musicians were happy because they became successful, but as I studied the concept of the eight winds, it taught me that a lot of successful people are unhappy and being successful doesn’t mean you don’t struggle or go through things. In the movie, it’s like the eight winds was so applicable because Elvis wins all this praise and fame but he ends up unhappy, and he has a toxic relationship with his manager, who wants nothing more than to make money from Elvis. Tom tells Elvis that he wants him to go on an international tour, but it ends up being a scam. Tom can’t leave the country since he doesn’t have immigration papers, so the international tour ends up being a tour in the U.S. Elvis’s doctor also prescribes him a lot of medications, and his health deteriorates as the film continues. His wife, Priscila, tells him she is worried about his health and that he is taking so many pills, and he tells her he is going to take care of it, but honestly, it’s hard. It made me think of the movie A Star is Born with Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper because Bradley’s character, Jack, is depressed and struggles with addiction, and his wife, Ally, who he inspired to make a career of music, feels he is wasting his life away and feeling sorry for himself. But as someone who has struggled with their mental health, it is a day-to-day battle against your inner darkness. It really is, and it’s not easy. I haven’t struggled with addiction, but I have struggled with depression, and it is not as easy as just switching your thinking. It’s an illness, and like anything else I need to manage it. Elvis had to keep going, going, going, and didn’t have time to stop, and I’m sure back then it was tough because there wasn’t a whole lot of space to talk about mental health and there wasn’t any social media where people could feel ok being vulnerable about the challenges they were going through. There was another movie that reminded me of Elvis, and that movie was Judy, a biopic about actress and singer Judy Garland starring Renee Zellweger as Judy. Like Elvis, Judy Garland had a successful career but struggled with addiction and health issues and faced a lot of pressures early on with fame and success.
Something I wanted to address though, and I had read this in some other reviews, was how the film depicts Elvis’s adoption of Black music traditions and his recording of music originally by Black artists. I became more aware of this because I had seen the film Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom a few years ago, and it addresses the exploitation of Black artists by record companies that were run by white executives. The movie is a film adaptation of a play by late playwright August Wilson, and it takes place in a Chicago recording studio and Ma Rainey is going to record her music but demands respect and autonomy over her music. She knows that the white record executives only wanted to make money off of her music, leaving her with no money for herself. She knows that the record company would make millions off of her recordings and leave her nary a cent, so she was going to demand that these white executives treat her with respect. In one scene, it’s a hot day in the studio and Ma tells them to go get her a Coke, and when the executives try to plead with her she tells them she is not recording anything until she gets her Coke. Then, when they finally get it, she takes her long sweet time drinking the Coke and then finally records it. Ma doesn’t just demand respect from the executives, she demands respect from her band as well. She isn’t willing to give up her music and voice to the record company that easily because she knows her worth as a human being and knows she doesn’t deserve that kind of unfair treatment. There is a member of her band named Levee, and he is the exact opposite. He sells his music to the record executives thinking they will make him a star, but my guess is that they end up selling his music and making all the money from it because at the end, an all-white band of musicians records the song and knowing the time period they probably didn’t give him any credit whatsoever or acknowledge he even wrote the music. It was not just sad, it was infuriating to find that the executives took his music and didn’t give him credit for it, but it showed me how music wasn’t free of the discrimination that was prevalent in society and how a lot of Black artists were not given credit for their songs. Ma was also just trying to survive, though, so she had to take ownership of her work because a lot of Black musicians, no matter how successful they were and how many commercial hits they produced, didn’t get the financial compensation they deserved and many of them struggled with poverty even after being successful. I remember watching a movie called Dreamgirls, and there is a scene where the Dreamettes record a song and then later find out that a white band copied their song without permission. It wasn’t until I saw that movie that I found out that Big Mama Thornton was the original singer of “Hound Dog,” not Elvis, but most people know Elvis’s version of “Hound Dog.” It got played on the radio, in stores, in the movie Lilo and Stitch. But it wasn’t until one of the characters mentioned that Big Mama Thornton was the original singer of the song that I started to think more about the issue of cultural appropriation. Elvis’s musical legacy when it came to the Black community is complicated, and there is probably so much research I need to do on this, but I think the film focused more on his relationship to Tom Parker. It touched on his relationship to the Black community and influence of blues and gospel on his music but it was mainly focused on Elvis the performer and his toxic relationship with Tom. Honestly I struggled to write this review without talking about Elvis and his relationship with Black musicians and the Black community because it’s been a huge discussion for so long and Black musicians did have a huge influence on Elvis’s music, and frankly I’m not a historian so I can’t really speak on this topic in length since I haven’t done as much extensive research as the people who have written about this topic in depth, but I was reading more about this aspect of the film in reviews such as this one in USA Today and this one on Slate and it definitely made me aware that I couldn’t just gloss over the topic of race when talking about Elvis or pretend like it wasn’t important to the storyline of the movie.
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