The King

For a doc­u­men­tary about Elvis, The King is strange­ly absent from this lat­est work by activist-film­mak­er Eugene Jarec­ki. Not so much a straw man as a rhine­stone-wear­ing one, the rock ​’n’ roll icon’s func­tion with­in 107 scat­ter­shot min­utes is to sym­bol­ise all that is wrong with Amer­i­ca today.

Filmed in 2017, 40 years after Elvis’ inglo­ri­ous death aged 42 from a heart attack, Jarec­ki traces his out­line and indeed the out­line of the US using the tem­plate of a road movie. Behind the wheel of Elvis’ own Rolls Royce, Jarec­ki retraces his subject’s tra­jec­to­ry from dirt-poor begin­nings in Tupe­lo, Mis­sis­sip­pi, to being dis­cov­ered by Sam Phillips of Sun Records in Mem­phis, Ten­nessee, to com­mer­cial break­out and megas­tar­dom, to mil­i­tary ser­vice in Ger­many, to a record-break­ing con­tract in Hol­ly­wood, to being chained to night­ly shows in Las Vegas, and final­ly to drug abuse, ill health and death.

The doc is most thor­ough and per­sua­sive in demon­strat­ing the racist val­ues that con­tin­ue to shape Amer­i­can soci­ety. Elvis went nuclear because the black music Sam Phillips adored did not. ​‘Hound Dog’ was writ­ten for Big Mama Thorn­ton, but stayed on the mar­gins until it was hand­ed to a hand­some young white man. ​“Peo­ple talk about cul­tur­al appro­pri­a­tion… lis­ten, the entire Amer­i­can expe­ri­ence is cul­tur­al appro­pri­a­tion,” says one inter­vie­wee, mak­ing a salient point, but also high­light­ing the arbi­trary nature of select­ing Elvis for this type of scrutiny.

The King gal­lops onwards. Jarec­ki would like to take down cap­i­tal­ism in the same breath as racism, mak­ing the point that Elvis had dol­lar bills for eyes, always choos­ing the biggest pay-cheque over qual­i­ty of life. He’s not wrong. And yet…

His fren­zied film­mak­ing leans into a more-is-more approach, try­ing to stun the audi­ence into sub­mis­sion, but often just exhaust­ing us. Con­ver­sa­tions with every­day folk are inter­cut with archive footage and damn­ing con­tem­po­rary images. Jarec­ki crams in inter­views with high-pro­file talk­ing heads who func­tion as a Greek cho­rus com­ment­ing on the Big Issues. Some inclu­sions hit their mark (Chuck D from Pub­lic Ene­my embraces com­plex­i­ty at every turn) and some are arbi­trary as hell (Ash­ton Kutch­er explain­ing the ups and downs of fame).

Jarecki’s Sun­dance-win­ning 2012 film The House I Live In, about the racist agen­da of the War on Drugs and the prison-indus­tri­al com­plex, proved the per­fect vehi­cle for his blunt-force the­sis-mak­ing, inso­far as it has a clear con­tem­po­rary focus and the wham-bam pre­sen­ta­tion of facts stacks up per­sua­sive­ly. In The King, Elvis doesn’t quite belong in the sym­bol­ic role assigned to him. There is a delib­er­ate aver­sion from what made him so beloved – that obscene­ly sexy, trea­cly voice is drained away in favour of an argu­ment whose shape only rough­ly cor­re­sponds to that famil­iar quiffed outline.