When I was a kid, my aunt collected Elvis memorabilia.
Imagine shelves filled with vinyls, VHS tapes, novelty license plates, dolls, postcards and a teddy bear who sang “Hound Dog” when you pressed its paw. She even named her cat Elvis, and later adopted a dog named Presley. My aunt was a true fan. If you said “Elvis,” I thought “Aunt Kellye.”
I grew up in Memphis, where I managed to make eye contact with Elvis no matter where I looked. Posters of him lined every wall. I had an Elvis action figure, a Christmas tree ornament and an Elvis-themed stuffed dog from Graceland, the palace of the king himself.
How would I have known that Elvis Presley was a controversial figure in his time?
Growing up in the early 2000s, nothing about Elvis screamed “scandal.” In the 1950s, however, it was a different story. The Warner Bros. movie “Elvis” tells that story.
“Elvis” (2022) stars Austin Butler as the titular singer alongside Tom Hanks as his manager, Colonel Tom Parker. The film, narrated by Hanks, explores Elvis Presley’s rise and fall from stardom in the context of his relationship with Parker. The narrative is told in snapshots of significant moments over a 20-year span.
The film focuses on the controversial sex appeal of Presley’s career. His on-stage and film performances, one of which author Yvonne Tasker described as “an aggressive sexual display,” were heavily criticized for the vulgar way in which Presley held his instruments and moved his body.
In stark contrast, pop artists today are praised for performances similar to the ones for which Presley was rebuked. Artists like Harry Styles and Ed Sheeran are not only utilizing the same performance techniques as Presley, but they are producing material far more explicit than Presley ever did.
Although some conservative individuals might complain about Styles and Sheeran, the mainstream media is accepting. In the 2022 music landscape, overt sexuality is the standard.
How, then, does “Elvis” communicate the scandal of Presley’s time to a generation that has become desensitized to sex? The film communicates this in two ways:
- Character reactions
- Making the viewer uncomfortable
CHARACTER REACTIONS
It would have been easy to communicate Presley’s scandal in basic dialogue.
“I’m gonna do something scandalous,” Elvis (hypothetically) said.
“Wow!” an underpaid film extra (might have) said. “This is a scandal!”
This would have made the jobs of the writers, directors and editors substantially easier. But it would have been lazy and uninteresting communication.
Rather than telling the viewer how scandalously Presley is behaving, the film utilizes other characters to show the viewer the reality of the scandal.
In the audience of Presley’s live performances, the film depicts young women losing control of themselves: screaming, crying, fainting and rushing the stage. The viewer can see the delighted surprise in the young women’s faces, which communicates that these women have not experienced anything like Elvis Presley before.
This is not an unusual response to a concert in today’s terms. But in the 1950s, the film makes its point clear: this is very much not normal.
MAKING THE VIEWER UNCOMFORTABLE
How do you communicate the discomfort of a situation to an audience who is accustomed to feeling comfortable about everything? You introduce them to the discomfort they might have felt as a member of Presley’s audience.
I sat in the back row of the theater in between my boyfriend and my granny (I know, it’s quite a group to see “Elvis” with). During one of the concert scenes, my boyfriend leaned over to whisper, “This is making me uncomfortable.”
He was right. The camera angles and viewer perception were fixed on Presley’s hips throughout the scene. In sharp cuts, the film switches from the character’s hips to his audience’s fawning reaction, and repeats.
If the camera had been angled to focus on something else, such as Presley’s face, the stage or the microphone, the viewer would have been comfortable, albeit bored. This subtle directing tool created discomfort in an audience unfamiliar with discomfort.
Through this directing technique, coupled with an emphasis on character reactions, “Elvis” effectively communicates to the viewer that they are witnessing a scandal without explicitly referring to it. But the scandal, although perhaps unfamiliar to a modern audience, is not unlike the scandals we witness today. In fact, it might be more tame.
Take, for example, popular musicians in 2022: the above-mentioned Harry Styles and Ed Sheeran, as well as Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Charlie Puth, and so on the list could go.
Type any of these artists’ names into the YouTube search bar, and scroll through live performances and music videos. The content you find would mortify the characters in “Elvis.”
Meanwhile, mainstream media deemed Presley scandalous for doing much less controversial things. This poses a question: what changed between 1954 and 2022?
Perhaps social media is to blame. With the endless stream of content that would render a 1950s character dizzy, users are bound to stumble upon scandalous material. Once you view one questionable video, your chosen social app will curate more for you. Before you’re aware of it, and without your explicit consent, your feed is full of scandalous imagery.
Over time, your brain adapts to what it sees. When you step into a dark room after being out in direct sunlight all day, your brain has to adjust your eyes to take in the appropriate amount of light so you can see. The same is true of online content: the more scandal you take in, the more your brain accepts it as normal to help you process it. You become desensitized to the material.
With our current generation displaying such desensitization to unsavory behavior, it has become harder for directors and writers to portray historical stories with both accuracy and intrigue. They want to tell the story right, but they don’t want the viewer to get bored in the process.
“Elvis” does a skillful job at achieving this. Yet, it is important to note that the scandals portrayed in the movie are not any “softer” than the scandals we see today; they are merely framed differently within our cultural mindset.
