Elvis Presley and America get lost together in The King

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      A documentary by Eugene Jarecki. Rated PG

      Early in The King, an insanely ambitious overview of Elvis Presley’s role in popular culture, a grizzled tech-crew chief asks writer-director Eugene Jarecki if he knows what the hell he’s doing. The only answer from the filmmaker—who previously tackled metascale politics in docs like Freakonomics and The Trials of Henry Kissinger—is this relentless blast of Americana, with the grotesque battling beauty every Route 66 step of the way.

      The automobile itself is the operating principle here, with various artists, pundits, and Memphis Mafia survivors crammed into Presley’s 1963 Rolls-Royce Phantom V—which, as John Hiatt observes, is an odd choice, since he usually travelled in American-made Cadillacs. Folks like Ethan Hawke, Emmylou Harris, and M. Ward join Jarecki for a cruise from the icon’s birthplace in Tupelo, Mississippi (in a mostly black neighbourhood), through Memphis and on to New York, Hollywood, and, finally, Las Vegas. The passengers—very few of them female—make verbal and musical commentary, although the songs have little direct connection to Elvis, other than repping the many genres he fused on his own truncated journey.

      Where HBO’s recent Elvis Presley: The Searcher took over three hours to explore the man’s life and music, The King uses that trajectory as a pulsating analogue to a nation that grew and grew and now looks ready to die, bloated and confused, on a golden toilet. Like its subject, this is a gloriously scattershot mess, with race, class, gender, drugs, and grand delusions competing for space.

      Commenters found in more fixed locations include The Wire creator David Simon and Public Enemy’s Chuck D, who dissect the nature of living in a country that “excludes people of colour from the profits,” as Van Jones puts it, “but benefits from their soulful cry.” This dialectic is something Elvis himself never quite grasped; he recused himself from social issues in the 1960s, even though his rebellious early moves heavily influenced the Beatles, Dylan, and others who left him behind.

      That era was shaded by his short stint in the army, signalling a submission to the militarism that would gradually replace American ideals with cynical materialism—a complication Mike Myers, looking from the other side of the border, views as “a messianic need” to be loved and feared. (Elvis’s oily Svengali, the pseudonymous Col. Tom Parker, was actually an “illegal” immigrant from the Netherlands. His lack of a valid passport was the main reason Elvis never performed outside of North America.)

      Shot just before the apotheosis of emptiness ascended to his own gilded throne, the new doc includes too many generic shots of aircraft carriers, skyscrapers, and other totems of power, while the end-credit sequence reveals the massive number of artists filmed but not heard in the final cut. It’s a tantalizing glimpse of what might have been. But that’s the story of America, too.

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