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Elvis died 30 years ago today but this ‘vir­ile degen­er­ate’ refuses to let us rest in peace

by Mark Simp­son, (Inde­pen­dent on Sun­day, April 2000)

Elvis didn’t want to be black, he wanted to be Tony Curtis.

A nat­ural blond, Mem­phis’ belle boy dyed his hair in imi­ta­tion of his 50s idol’s shiny black pom­padour and con­tin­ued tint­ing it that unnatural-supernatural blue-black colour until the very end (though later it was prob­a­bly merely to hide the grey). Even those vir­ile side­burns, which by the early Sev­en­ties seemed to be brack­et­ing the world, were deceiv­ingly dyed too.

I know this is a shock­ing, inde­cent thing to bring up, and not just because of the way Tony Cur­tis’ ‘hair’ looks now. We like to think of Elvis as rock’s Unmoved Mover, The King, the orig­i­nal, the alpha and omega — the fount of all pop cul­tural sov­er­eignty. ‘Before Elvis there was noth­ing,’ as John Lennon famously put it. In a world where pop­ness has become the mea­sure of every­thing, we’re all Elvis imper­son­ators now — and we don’t want to think that we might be inad­ver­tently ‘doing’ Tony Curtis.

As the parade of celebs who lined up for the pre­miere of the re-released, re-edited, re-mastered 1970 Vegas gig movie ‘Elvis: That’s the Way It is’ bears tes­ti­mony, all the new pre­tenders want to be seen in His pres­ence, even if it’s only a cel­lu­loid one. Maybe it’s just the Pop­Stars in Your Eyes, but Elvis seems to keep on get­ting big­ger while those that came after him keep get­ting smaller. Elvis was the first truly giant pop star cre­ated by post-war con­sumerism and it’s atten­dant media. Since then, shop­ping and look­ing have become every­thing, and Elvis has become the per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of the looking-glass world we inhabit now, a latter-day Nar­cis­sus who drowned in his own reflec­tion (on his bath­room floor) — but granted immor­tal­ity in a uni­verse of sur­faces and per­ma­nent (shal­low) mem­ory. ‘Elvis’ is Fame’s first name in an age when ‘fame’ is some­thing we’re increas­ingly over-familiar with.

Per­haps this is why in Elvis’ face we can see an angelic/demonic pre­mo­ni­tion of the needy faces of so many of those stars that have come after: Tom Cruise, Mick Jag­ger, Michael Jack­son, Jim Car­rey, Madonna, Bill Clin­ton, Diana, Jef­frey Dah­mer. Elvis’ mas­cu­line androg­yny and ani­mal smart­ness seem even more mod­ern today than when he launched his career. In footage of The King in action, all the male faces in the crowd — and many of the women — seem strangely frozen and meatish next to his, even when he is clearly half-paralysed by down­ers, the eyes all hooded and sleepy. As the les­bian Elvis Imper­son­ator k.d. Laing observed: ‘He had total love in his eyes when he per­formed…’. It only makes his ‘total love’ all the more potent that when he sang, he didn’t mean it, or didn’t know what he meant, we are left to sort it out, like the swoon­ing vic­tims of a pas­sion­ate but exquis­itely, totally care­less lover (which is the con­di­tion of human sub­jec­tiv­ity in a medi­ated world).

Elvis the Lover is also how­ever the arche­type of the post-war male ‘Per­vert’. Radi­antly nar­cis­sis­tic and dra­mat­i­cally unable to nego­ti­ate his Oedi­pus Com­plex, he is the prime idol­a­trous icon of a deca­dent, post-patriarchal age. Again, he may not have invented vir­ile degen­er­acy (Clift, Brando and Dean, whom he also imi­tated, have a prior claim) but he patented it. True, it may have been campy Lib­er­ace who was accused of being the ‘quiv­er­ing dis­til­la­tion of mother-love’, but it was good ol’ boy Elvis-the-pelvis (and Lib­er­ace fan) who got away with it and in fact made it cool. Elvis, the beau­ti­ful boy who loved his mammy and almost for­got he had a daddy (as we did too: we always call him by his first name), the boy who desired to be desired so much he per­suaded the whole world to eat him up, is the patron saint of the New Matriarchy.

Even today, twenty four years after his death, as we stum­ble into a cen­tury he never actu­ally swung his hips in, Elvis the rock star, pop star, stand-up come­dian and self-medicating Vegas show­girl remains the acme of the medi­ated male, and also of male desir­abil­ity. Male love-me-tender pas­siv­ity and vul­ner­a­bil­ity was endorsed and legit­imised and trans­mit­ted by Elvis, help­fully prepar­ing men for the (prone) role that con­sumerism had in store for them.

Tony Cur­tis fix­a­tion notwith­stand­ing, Elvis really is ‘the orig­i­nal’, the tem­plate from which every­thing else is stamped, because he has become the ego-ideal of a medi­ated, ‘per­verted’, dyed-sideburns cul­ture. Since his death, through a process of global mourn­ing and melan­cho­lia and con­stant re-runs and revivals, the lost lurve-object has been intro­jected into our col­lec­tive Uncon­scious so com­pletely that we don’t have to be lone­some tonight or tomor­row or in fact ever again. His absence has become an over­whelm­ing presence.

Elvis really is alive. It’s just the rest of us that I’m not so sure about.

Copy­right Mark Simp­son 2007