Elvis Presley and the Cultural Imagination, or: I Watched (Almost) Every Elvis Movie, and I Have Some Thoughts

Baz Luhrman’s ELVIS and Sophia Coppola’s Priscilla are the heralds — or perhaps the bookends — of a little Elvis Renaissance. What has struck me about Elvis Presley this year as I’ve worked my way through a truly shocking amount of media produced by and about this man is the degree of influence that he had and continues to have on our culture.

Of course, Elvis is known mainly for his music, but I was shocked to learn that he starred in no fewer than thirty-one feature films over ten years. This is both surprising and impressive for a man whose bread and butter was live musical performance.

But the films themselves are, for lack of a better word, strange. Some might say they’re simply bad. I had too much of a good time watching them to come down on them so hard. But the plots are indeed baffling; the scripts more so. They range from off-the-wall, fever-dream comedies to melodramas, and I would dare to say that some of them are actually good.

At first glance, it is absolutely shocking that more than thirty of these films were made — and that they made money. In the 1960s, Elvis films were competing against the likes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Psycho, Planet of the Apes, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, and West Side Story. It was a decade of truly incredible cinema that was shaping the cultural landscape surrounding it, and it is almost laughable to see alongside these great works the interchangeably titled Loving You, Love Me Tender, Girls Girls Girls, Girl Happy, and Clambake.

Often titled for a single song off the soundtrack, these movies were essentially vehicles for Elvis to sing and perform. And because of his filming schedule, his availability for live performance was limited. This is why, I think, his films did well despite themselves. People wanted to see Elvis perform, and the most accessible way to do that was to go to the cinema. Elvis — due to his talent; his sometimes controversial music, dancing, and lifestyle; and the discourse surrounding him — was a central part of American culture in the 1960s.

The centrality of this fact became clear to me recently. While making conversation with a new friend, I asked one of the stock small-talk questions: “What kind of music do you like?” I hadn’t heard of the artist she mentioned, and we moved on. This was a small interaction, but it’s a common one, and it is emblematic of our age. It would also have been far less likely to happen in decades past, as the vast majority of people had highly similar experiences with the dominant art forms, be it music, movies, books, etc.

Art is a universal language that unites people to each other. Indeed, there are few things more thrilling than finding in a new friend a shared love of a book or a film. We instinctively ask questions like, “What movies do you enjoy?” and, “What books have you read recently?” because of our own experiences with art. We are deeply moved and formed by the art that we consume, and another person’s take on shared artistic experiences tells us a lot about them. They become, by virtue of shared experiences, more accessible to us. But today, we are often instead casting about for an artistic touchpoint.

In our geographically sprawling nation, our artistic landscape was once something that we shared. In the 1960s, with only three broadcast television stations and the same films playing in every movie theatre in America, a universal experience of art formed a cultural imagination, creating common ground and forming strangers into potential friends. Everyone in 1962 would have had a response to the question “What do you think of Elvis Presley?”

And in the past, the experience of art was a communal one. We went out to the movies, to the theater, to concerts together, and while it isn’t as though these activities are gone, we live in an age that prizes convenience over togetherness. It is easier to stay home and watch Netflix than to go to the movies or the theater; it is easier to stream music on Spotify than to go to a concert.

With the location of the experience of the art moved from the community to the home, there has been a splintering of the broader artistic sphere into niches. I won’t for a moment claim that this is a universal negative; there is something beautiful about the ease of media production and the number of minds in the artistic sphere, and entertainment in this modern space is an intensely personal experience.

I also won’t claim that we have incurred an inherent loss in our inability to universally reference Jailhouse Rock or Tickle Me. These films are not high art, no matter how entertaining I personally find them. What I will say is that it is a major cultural loss for us to no longer experience art together — indeed, we no longer experience life together. There is a lot of discussion about Elvis as a political figure in this little renaissance that we’re having, but I might suggest that the importance of artists for our culture is, at least in part, their ability to provide us a place to have discourse, to find common ground on which to stand through a shared experience.

By setting aside togetherness in favor of individualism, we have lost something of integral importance to society. I see the current Elvis fascination as a casting back toward a perceptibly vanishing past. We have lost hold of something in the years since Elvis Presley’s death; we no longer have a common artistic language. We no longer speak about the same things or have a shared vocabulary. We are formed in a way radically different from our neighbors, and there is a sneaking implication that we are alone in our experience of the world because of this.

Yet our capacity to be moved by art — and our impulse to share it — should gently remind us that we are not, in fact, alone. When we experience beauty, it is a little bit painful, and this in part because it calls us outside of ourselves. It asks us to consider something bigger than ourselves and to admit to something common and human that links us to our neighbor.