Who Was Elvis? The Man Behind Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 Film

What do you do when you’ve done it all?

We may all get our 15 minutes of fame, the way Andy Warhol said, but few of us become as famous as Elvis.

A recent film by Baz Lurhman, however, shows a darker side than many of us know about Elvis. And while not everything in the film was accurate, it does beg a powerful question. What do you do when you have it all?

Listening to Elvis’s earliest songs, you hear something different than you do when you listen to his later stuff. This makes sense. The man went from being a nobody to the face of a music movement to eventually the face of an entire culture, overnight.

Yet, the success didn’t make him better. Ultimately, Elvis was never destined to grow old. And it wasn’t the pills that killed him. Nor was it his fans, as Baz’s film suggests. Quite likely, Elvis was always going to die young. But what happened in those early years that really worked, that made everything that came afterwards almost seem to be a pale comparison?

Elvis Career Was Filled with Ups and Downs

It’s easy to idolize someone as larger than life as Elvis was. He’s such a part of Americana that it’s easy to forget that he was also a person before he was an image on a coffee cup or “the merchandise”. Baz’s movie shows this well – everything that Elvis was came from his roots. He may have been a poor boy from the South, but that’s what made his music so rich.

According to a relatively recent documentary on HBO, “Elvis: the Searcher”, many people make the mistake of thinking that Elvis just got lucky. Certainly he came around at the right time. If it hadn’t been Elvis, it’s conceivable that someone else would’ve taken his place – bringing music across racial lines, and touching the pent-up emotions that would soon explode into a sexual revolution.

Indeed, before long, Elvis’s once controversial performance style would become mainstream. He would be overshadowed by artists originally inspired by him – artists like the Rolling Stones and The Beatles. Today, Elvis’s contribution to culture and music lasts.

Elvis Wasn’t a Songwriter

When we think back on the great artists from that era, we often think of those artists who created their own songs as well as performed them. It’s thanks largely to the powerful collaboration between John Lennon and Paul McCartney, for example, that made the Beatles what they were.

Elvis was different. He didn’t write his own songs. Part of this was because of an elaborate publishing deal his infamous manager setup for him. The other part of this was simply because he wasn’t interested in writing songs. He was, at the end of the day, a terrific singer, and the ultimate performer.

Elvis Was a Victim of His Own Fame

No one had ever been famous the way Elvis was famous. At what could be considered the peak of his career (something that occurred almost overnight in his early twenties), he was dominant on television, radio and the movies. He was the ultimate star. But his two year stint in the military set him back.

Not that he wasn’t just as big when he got back. It’s almost that he was too big. And a lot of mismanagement got in the way of him reaching great artistic success. A lot of the kitsch that he became associated with is due to this inability to keep reaching higher from an artistic standpoint. Perhaps, too, Elvis himself has limits as an artist.

The Hollywood years, when Elvis was making roughly three movies a year, greatly hurt his image. And the music he made during that time wasn’t good music. It was soundtrack music that wasn’t destined to help his music career at all.

The 1968 Comeback Wasn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be

Both Baz’s movie and the documentary really lead up to the point where Elvis has his supposed “big comeback”. That occurred during the famous 1968 Elvis special on television. However, the way things play out after that in his life make that “comeback” seem much less like a comeback and more like a death rattle.

Although many great songs came from him after that time, and Bono himself points to the underrated nature of this next phase of his life – the Vegas years – Elvis would never make a meatoric ascent again after that. In fact, the comeback special signified the final point in time before he would eventually lose it all.

Although Elvis had undoubtedly been wasting his talents as a movie star in corny movies that weren’t destined for anything, by the time he showed up for his residency in Vegas, he was over-the-hill. Nobody would even pay to put him in a movie. As he took on tours and had to play 2 shows a night to make ends meet and support the 100-something people he was personally supporting, it took a toll not only on his health, but on his relationships – which in turn took further tool on his health through the loniliness he felt.

Elvis Was Larger Than Life – But He was a Sick Man

Much in the way that F.D.R. hid his maladies to show strength to the nation, Elvis hid his illness well. But as a recent book, Elvis: Destined to Die Young, points out, he was very much a sick man, with illnesses in the majority of his body systems. His drug habit very well could have been a result of attempting to self medicate against these maladies, and enable him to still be Elvis (something the HBO documentary also points out).

Another fact the book points out – Elvis was only a few years younger than his mother had been when she had died, and she also went through a similar physical decline towards the end of her life. Her brothers also died young – suggesting that this young life was likely destined to occur.

Still, Elvis had achieved so much so young that it was hard to ever live up to that again. In many ways, the rest of his life was an echo of those early years when he was pushing the envelope. The best years were perhaps those days in the small, “tunnel-like” Sun Studios, when Elvis’s voice was – like a young Narcissus – pure from not having had heard himself too much.