July 30, 2018
I only knew that the film was about Elvis Presley, had read no reviews. it turned out to an ambitious, churning, probing, deep dive into Americana that gathers steam then rolls you over in the final minutes. I woke up at 3 AM the morning after seeing the film… still all shook up, headed for my computer. I needed to process what I’d just experienced, an enormous portrait of a man, a myth, a country.
From impossibly beautiful man to one impossibly bloated, the story of Elvis Presley is an allegory about the cultural history of America from the 1950s to today. “The King” has all the subtlety of car crash. It poses questions, it offers answers. Some are not pretty. It puts a serious hurt on the notion that if you work hard you can achieve what you want….aka The American Dream.
It’s poignant. It’s revelatory. It’s complicated. It digs into the taproot of the divide in America: race. At times, I squirmed in my seat as the dots were connected between race, music, commerce, and the myths and platitudes we tell ourselves to this day.
Twenty minutes into the film, I realize this is a documentary whose ambition is to connect the zeitgeist between the 1950s and America of 2017, forty years after Elvis dies at 42 of a heart attack caused by abuse of painkillers. This is no gauzy portrait encased in amber. As one reviewer comments, “We go from Graceland to Trumpland.”
How did Elvis happen? How did he become The King? Whose King? Why did we love him? Who were his people? What made him tick? How did he become packaged and merchandised to within an inch of his life? Why did he never take the reins and become himself? Did he ever comprehend his power and the possibility of using it for social or racial betterment? Was he simply the most successful cultural appropriator in history? (David Simon’s comment about that is probably as close as you can get to an answer).
Somewhere under the popular image was a country boy whose ambition, noted in archival footage, was to sing the music he loved. It all started in 1954 while 19 year-old Elvis was trying to make an impression on Sam Phillips at Sun Records in Memphis.
After he sang some unimpressive country-ish popular songs, the demo tapes stop rolling. Elvis loosens up, probably to decompress, and begins singing with the unbuckled energy and style of the blues, gospel, and rhythm ‘n blues he’d been listening to on black music stations and in his neighborhood churches since he was a kid.
With irrepressible abandon, he begins to sing his version of Big Mama Thornton’s “You Ain’t Nothing But A Hound Dog”, a white boy covering a decidedly black influenced song with all the unbound juice it called for. Philips runs in from his office and tells Elvis to keep singing. He had finally found what he’d been looking for. A white kid whose sound could bring the music of black America to a wider audience. The legend was born.
The film’s brilliant conceit is Elvis’s 1963 Rolls Royce. Director and co-writer Jarecki gathers a collection of celebrities, including Chuck D, Emmylou Harris, Alec Baldwin, Ethan Hawke, Van Jones, James Carville, Mike Myers to sit in that car and paint a multi dimensional, occasionally contrarian portrait of The King, much like the country he ruled (and that ruled him).
Jerecki tricks out that dream car with state of the art audio and video equipment and takes it on a road trip from Memphis to New York to Las Vegas and down the rural lanes of Tupelo, Mississippi. The real time segments shot in the Rolls Royce are quilted with archived black and white and color footage that contrasts reality with myth. That car is a rolling sound stage. It feels like part of the cast. Its occasional breakdowns may be the exotic car’s commentary on its owner’s life.
Rapper Chuck D and Van Jones speak the truths about race and culture I reckon were true. They sting. The most jarring observations about America are made by a truck driver and several residents of Tupelo, Mississippi, the King’s sleepy hometown.
One minute, people like me who grew up when Elvis turned the country upside down, relive the liberating youthful moments he changed our worlds. The next moment, in news clips of the time, we feel extraordinary pain to confront an America that, like Camelot, was never what we believed it was.
A giant qualifier: That “we” is a huge chunk of white men and women of a certain age. The larger lens includes comments from today’s black community and a younger generation that never saw the arc of popular American music change with the comet named Elvis. The conversation about cultural appropriation? Relevant then, relevant now.
The film is brutally honest and complex. Director Jarecki shines light on history found not in books but in newspaper accounts around the country. Black and white photos of lynched black men with a bunch of white people standing around are a bone chilling collision between race, music, history and culture.
The 1 hour 47 minute film’s clips weave Elvis's early career, first recordings 1953-1956, his commercial breakout 1956 –1958, his mother’s death and military service 1958-1960, film career 1960-1967, his comeback to the stage 1968-1973, with archival footage and hit you upside the head contemporary comments by those passengers rolling along in that Rolls Royce.
“There are three kings, BB King, Elvis, and Martin Luther King, Jr.,” says one commentator connecting the dots as we see vintage footage of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis and hear the voice of Martin Luther King, Jr. delivering the “I’ve Been To The Mountaintop” speech in April 1968.
Jarecki exposes the self-promoting role Colonel Parker took in commanding Elvis’s career choices before Presley’s ignominious self-destruction in Las Vegas. Elvis doesn’t get off the hook, choosing the most lucrative next step for his career, no matter what the cost to his soul or his art.
How is Jarecki going to end this, I wonder as the film hits 140 minutes. The footage of Elvis five minutes before the film ends (spoiler alert here) will keep you transfixed in your seat long after the credits roll. Jarecki lets you draw your own conclusions.
This film is a reality check. Jarecki takes us on a trip showing us how we got here. The question we're left with...where do we go from here.
Elvis Presley (January 8, 1935 – August 16, 1977)
http://www.theking.film/thekingscountry
Saint Martin's Day: Lafayette, LA Style
November 11, 2017
Lafayette, LA
The Feast of Saint Martin
My generous host, Bernard Ussher, a Dublin lad now ensconced with his wife in Lafayette, Louisiana, is Irish to the core. Storyteller, merrymaker, prankster, bon vivant, chef sans portfolio, the gregarious fellow is always on the lookout to host some craic (a term for news, gossip, fun, entertainment, and enjoyable conversation, particularly prominent in Ireland.)
The November 11 Feast of Saint Martin (if I hadn’t googled it I would have sworn he was making it up) was all he needed to call together a crew of pals for a Men’s Feast. The fact that none of us had ever heard of the good saint? Never mind. He’d tell us while we sat down to devour a table creaking, craicing?, with enough food to feed a band of starving crusaders.
The morning of the feast every surface in the kitchen is piled with fixings that depleted at least one market’s vegetable section. Yours truly is relegated to slice, peel, or dice heaps of red and yellow peppers, green and yellow zucchini, sweet potatoes, Yukon gold potatoes, asparagus, onions, tomatoes, mushrooms, and corn.
The chef is busy trussing up a chicken to be fried upside down in a propane fired gizmo that people around here use for that purpose and to anyone north of the Mason Dixon line looks like a fryialater invention gone awry. Fry chickens? Upside down? Really?
Oh, and slabs of steaks and large links of Andouille sausage, all bound for the gas grill. Alongside one whole pineapple and a handful of peaches.
Without apparent forethought, the man empties cupboards and assembles a prodigious array of spices, seasonings and marinades. With the inspiration of Julia Child after her third glass of Chateauneuf de Pap, he begins to dust, dab and drench. Not a measuring device in sight.
“How much do you add?” says I.
The chef chortles and glug-glug-glugs or shake-shake-shakes bottles, jars, and containers, seemingly upon a whim, fearlessly, with a master plan known only to himself.
”About this much ought to do,” says he.
Combinations unknown to the faint of heart are thrown together. Through the eyes of this Yankee, the spirited scene feels somewhere between a Monte Python's Flying Circus skit and the madcap glee of a Johnny Carson skit of Carnac the Magnificent - high culinary theater in the kitchen!
Men arrive, ready to do justice to the memory of the good saint. Aromas of fried chicken, steaks, simmering vegetables marinated and seasoned liberally, tease our now fully engaged appetites. Spirits are quaffed. Stories are told.
Every platter and bowl in the kitchen is liberated and piled onto tables on the patio. Men on a mission, we heap our plates with aromatic, exotically spiced food. Julia would have been impressed. Our plates empty, we dig into the grilled peaches and pineapple. Temporary torpor sets in. Then more stories and huzzahs for the host.
Saint Martin, a patron saint of France, got around. His day is celebrated around the world. One researcher claims he was the uncle of Saint Patrick. More gist for stories. Today he was, in absentia, the beatific host of Bernard Ussher’s Saint Martin’s Day Men's Feast, a day to be remembered and put on the calendar for 2019.
Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.
July 26, 2018 in Commentaries | Permalink | Comments (4)