ELVIS HAS NOT LEFT THE BUILDING
IN 2022, THERE IS NO ONE ELVIS PRESLEY. The One True Elvis is actually many Elvises, a deity with an infinite number of faces, refracted into an ever shifting pattern of pleasure and frustration, of contradictions and delights. For every Elvis myth, there’s a counter truth, and for every truth, a counter myth. He will never be resolved, or agreed upon. Which means that whether you love or loathe the movies of Baz Luhrmann, a kind of Bedazzler kit in filmmaker form, it’s easy to understand why he’d be attracted to the legend of Elvis Presley. The movie he’s made, Elvis, is both aggravating and fulfilling, a surface of sequined artificiality that reflects stark truths about our American pauper king with a cloth-of-gold voice. In a world where we want to believe we can close every mystery, Elvis, on and off the movie screen, continues to confound.
There was a beginning to Elvis, the survivor of a
