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The musical biopic "Judy" is about a person, "Bohemian Rhapsody" is a show, and "Elvis Presley" is more difficult to characterize. It resembles the life of Elvis Presley, a slideshow: a barefoot white child in Tupero, Mississippi, a youth wandering down Memphis Beale Street, a man who braved Hollywood, was forced into military service, and Priscilla Presley's marriage, financial, health crisis, and death at the Las Vegas International Hotel.
From beginning to end, director/screenwriter Buzz Ruchman reminds the audience that the "life of Elvis Presley" presented in the film is strange. Tom Hanks, with the help of makeup techniques, transforms into the agent "Colonel Tom Parker" with a bloated chin. At the beginning of the film, Colonel Parker is dying of old age. He begins to tell the story of Elvis Presley, the "Elvis Presley," under the gaze of death.
Colonel Parker is the narrator of the film and the second male protagonist. Tom Hanks adds a lot of weight to the characters, hides adultery in fat meat, gambles a lot, and is greedy. He and Elvis met at a time when they were young and worked together until the end of Elvis's life. In his account, Colonel Parker does not care to describe himself as "the villain and gambler who squeezed Elvis to death." He emotionally found a reason for Priceley's painful, economically crisis-ridden 42-year-old life: profligate himself, his family, his relatives and friends; Incompetent "business manager" father; Addicted to the hormone surge brought by the stage, it is numb to ordinary love, obsessed with drugs, and consumes the energy of life.
Parker is partly right, like there's always truth in a lie. His description of the various stages of Elvis' life is generally good, but are these the whole story of Elvis's life?
Dazzling, colorful, hormone-racing, and suffocating, the 159-minute-long film gives such a strong impression that just sitting and watching it makes people feel dejected. Everywhere Elvis went, the female audience screamed like orgasms. The camera close-ups of these women with towering hair, exquisite makeup, and bright color suits in the 1960s and 1970s, shooting them clenched and trembling, and finally they couldn't help screaming. The men in the theater all looked at the woman who was mad at Elvis's loss of control with a gloomy face. Their faces resemble the rice dots used in Chinese landscape paintings to represent trees, black grains, and like sails on the sea of wind and waves, anxious because they perceive wind and waves.
Parker describes the superficial landscape of the story, and there are still many mysteries to be solved: What did it mean that in the 1960s and 70s, a white man who sang black music entered the mainstream and became the biggest singer on the planet? Why did Elvis splurge and promiscuousness, why did he become addicted and die early? He never seems to have integrated into mainstream society, even if he has made Hollywood movies, but he is not a member of Hollywood, why?
The film leaves only a few clues. The most obvious one is hidden in the music, doing its duty as a musical biopic. Elvis grew up in a poor black-and-white settlement. He and his friends spied blacks singing and dancing in a lead-skin house that served as a bar. A passage in which a woman in red dances with a man in "That's All Right Mama" is extremely provocative. Elvis looked mesmerized, his white face like a tiny moon, trembling behind dark clouds. The next shot is of him running furiously to the black church where he was preaching, entering the tent despite the persuasion of his companions, and entering a state of ecstasy and intoxication in a group song and dance. The black priest accepted the white boy and allowed him to stay in the tent.
The ecstatic person trembles involuntarily, and this trembling will later become Elvis Presley's signature dance steps, sweeping the world with his deep and drunken voice. In later films, the black musician is named after B.B. King, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Arthur 'Big Boy' Crudup) and radio singing (Mahalia Jackson singing at Martin Luther King's funeral) continue to take on the form. Elvis's classic song "Hound Dog" returns closer to the source—the black woman singing the song in a second-floor window on Beale Street.
These characters and voices come and go, intertwined with Elvis's childhood ecstasy, and tell us that "Elvis" is not, as Colonel Parker says, he was the product of his own creation. "Elvis Presley" comes from the music and song and dance of the Black Man, from the hero comics and heroic dreams he has been obsessed with since childhood.
What happened in the lead-skin house and the big tent was his musical enlightenment, as well as his sexual enlightenment and life enlightenment. The three came together to teach Elvis to sing like a black man. Singing to unable to help themselves, always sweating, singing to the late stage of fat and puffy, concert piano put two cans of Coke, need to rely on drugs to maintain the physical strength on stage, still singing. In any case, he is loyal to the enlightenment experience of childhood, as long as he starts to sing, he must devote himself to his whole body and mind, and show his soul naked.
The heroic dream given to him by the comics made him rebel against the orders of the police and the mainstream will, thinking that he was really wearing a superhuman cloak, and openly displaying the blackness of black people and the whiteness of souls on stage.
Elvis, who has learned the essence of black song and dance, and even his soul is shaped into that look, has a completely different fate from that of black singers because of a white skin bag. After his death, the president of the United States affirmed his dedication to "integrating black music and revolutionizing the face of popular culture."
But even with elvis' birth, colonel Parker's narrative still has many ruptures. Elvis's profligacy in money and sex, his defeat in Hollywood, and his feud with Colonel Parker all happened suddenly. This is also the most criticized part of this movie.
It does not account for the motivation for the change in the character's behavior. Buzz Ruchmann, who made Moulin Rouge and The Marvelous Gatsby, is not good at showing the motivations of the characters logically. Motivation is the least important link. When a person makes a decision, countless motives flash through. Some are obvious and open, some are gloomy and difficult to discern, and even the person concerned may not understand it.
Back to Elvis Presley. Why he was regarded by posterity as "genius, depraved, unmotivated, and unselfish", the film only used one sentence to bring. The reason is not "black" or "white", but the environment in which it grew up.
Elvis first entered Colonel Parker's vision because the singer, who sang like a black man, turned out to be a pure and beautiful white man. Referring to Elvis's profligacy, Colonel Parker said he had "countless country friends and relatives." Elvis, who grew up in the slums of the American South, belongs to a regional culture that is more like China than the United States.
There is probably also a respect for "rich and noble, do not forget each other", the relationship between people is close, helping each other, promoting, showing off, sympathizing, all glued to a big net. Even if Elvis Jr. becomes the greatest singer on the planet, "Elvis Presley", he still can't escape this net. When he was a child, he read comics and fantasized about himself as a hero, trying to save his father from prison on his own. As an adult, his father and Colonel Parker, who was also his father, had full control of his business. He had gone far, and it seemed as if he had never been far from his childhood in Mississippi.
Elvis, who is white, is very "black" in his bones. In contrast, today's black hero Beyoncé (she is of mixed race), is very "white" inside. The term "white" and "black" here have nothing to do with race or skin color, and refer to an accepted culture (perhaps inappropriately expressed). Beyoncé is super self-disciplined, meticulously planned and done her best at every step of her career, and is a model of advocating individual independence and individual struggle in society. Elvis's super talent corresponds to his impulsiveness, improvisation, passion and severe lack of planning for the future. He cares about the opinions of his friends and family, appointing acquaintances (rather than capable people) to key roles in the team. He lacked the willpower and wanted to tour overseas, but was unable to do so. At that time, Colonel Parker reached a residency agreement with the International Hotel, and the risk was small and the profit was large. Elvis wanted to go on a tour overseas. Parker was confident that the residency plan would beat the tour plan because he knew Elvis: as long as he signed it year after year and let him sing in the desert for a few years, the idea of going on a hard tour overseas was naturally dispelled.
Elvis is worthy of being the originator of rock and roll, the founding father of this faction. Musically he was undoubtedly, because rock music came from black blues and blues. Spiritually he is more. All the rock heroes after Elvis Presley inherit his mantle. Colonel Parker's explanation of Elvis's drug addiction in the film sets the stage for later generations: he is too attached to the stage and needs strong stimulation to feel happy; The marriage with his wife (ordinary people) can no longer satisfy him, and can only look for the stimulation and comfort of drugs.
Although it is a text of the great road goods, it is so easy to use that it is used today to explain any artist who burns life and goes "astray".
The real reason is that everyone is different. But this explanation becomes the best external statement, covering up the reasons why many of the parties themselves are so distressed that they are unwilling to admit it.
What exactly is Elvis's "fall"? Colonel Parker (aka Buzz Ruchmann) said nothing. The mystery remains a mystery.
Elvis Presley, like Gatsby, came into the world and dreamed with all his strength and muddled up. They create scenes of guests full of flowers and flowers, and they seem to be immersed in them. But don't forget that outside Gatsby's mansion is a dark seaside night. Outside Elvis's stage is lonely, like the prosperous Las Vegas, surrounded by deserts.
"Elvis Presley" is filmed like a dream that is extremely brilliant and frequently broken, which makes people very tired, and is probably the director's intention. Because Elvis's own life is like this, just look at Austin Butler's efforts to imitate Elvis Presley. He wore a pink suit that "Mom Recognized", his hips were tight, his hips were trembling (as he had seen black people dancing as a child), and his toes seemed to be stretched at the time of orgasm, making dangerous instinctive expressions. Rock and roll developed later, the voice of the electric guitar, the high-pitched voice of the lead singer, and the desperate posture on the stage were also simulated by this state of fascination when black people sang and danced.
In fact, as long as you grasp two places: black song and dance, sermon and carnival circus, you can skip the logic and motivation to feel the living Elvis. The former traces his artistic origins, while the latter compares Elvis Presley's life to a carnival, to a circus life.
He contributed the most transcendent experience of ecstasy and then raced non-stop to death. In contrast, it doesn't matter if his heart is always a mystery. Elvis Aspire to a hero, and the public, as he wishes, makes him a hero and honors him for a long time. We need self-disciplined, strong heroes, but also fragile, depraved, but beautiful heroes. Only such a world can be energetic.
Editor-in-Charge: Chen Shihuai
Proofreader: Yijia Xu