Boy Movies #13
Getting canceled, or: the Elvis issue
You’re reading Boy Movies, a weekly newsletter for intellectuals and other scholarly types. Today’s issue is one several trusted board members assured me I could still publish despite recent events. If you don’t like it, I’ll give you their contact information so you can blame them directly. On the other hand, if you admire how raw and real I’m willing to get for my art, consider subscribing and telling a friend about this canceled publication.
Since the inception of this newsletter, I have gone on record saying how much I would love to be canceled — I cannot imagine better publicity, and so many of my heroes have been canceled (Lydia Tár). Now that I’m living on the other side of it, all I can say is this: Be careful what you wish for.
For some, the holiday season is a time for togetherness and serenity. For me, it will always be a reminder of the time I got canceled by a reader. Needless to say, I was absolutely stunned by the shockwaves issue #11 sent through not just the “industry” but the world at large. Who could’ve imagined that an innocent comment I made in the spirit of doubling down on an opinion I’ve been very open about holding since stepping out of a New Jersey AMC Theater in June 2022 — that Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is a girl movie — could be so divisive? And for this detractor to be someone I consider a friend, someone who has even visited my home a number of times… I was flummoxed.
In true “gotta hear both sides” fashion and in honor of Austin Butler’s recent Golden Globe win (next up: the Oscar!!!!!!), it seemed as good of a time as any to address the first ever Boy Movies scandal.
First, I mostly think everyone is being too dramatic about Everything Everywhere All at Once — its fans and its critics in equal measure — so I have nothing to say about that. Truly whatever. I can only speak as someone who has logged Elvis five times on Letterboxd and has been dead sober throughout each viewing. When I call Elvis a girl movie, I’m talking about so many things at the same time: There are the obvious factors, most importantly being the Baz of it all; much in the way that I don’t think it would ever occur to Michael Bay to make a girl movie, I’m not sure Baz, in all of his unsubtle extravagance, has a boy movie bone in his body. There’s the soundtrack, which, sure, includes a genuinely bizarre original song by Eminem and CeeLo Green, but also features Doja Cat and Stevie Nicks, plus the galaxy-brained mash-up of “Toxic” and “Viva Las Vegas.” There’s the fact that Austin Butler spends about 90% of the film wearing a tasteful smokey eye. Though what makes Elvis a girl movie is more straightforward than any of that. What makes Elvis a girl movie is the fact that it’s simply about Elvis Presley.
Men mythologize Elvis, certainly. You can find examples of it just about anywhere and everywhere — look to Nicolas Cage, or to Luhrmann himself, or to my beloved Austin, to name only a few. That Eminem-CeeLo song I mentioned, literally called “The King and I,” is about the strong connection Eminem apparently feels to Elvis. (Please Google the lyrics if you haven’t, they are so cuckoo.) I would never take him away from men, honest. But if Elvis reminds us of anything, it’s that from the beginning, women were the ones who made Presley’s career flourish.
In the film’s first dizzying performance sequence, set in an Arkansas dance hall filled with teens, a man in the audience shouts a homophobic slur as a zoot suited Elvis surveys the crowd from stage. Moments later, his date, and the rest of the girls in the room, are absolutely melting down, so violently overcome by the horny image of Elvis’ swiveling hips that all they can do is scream. (“What are they hollerin’ at?” “The wiggle! Them girls wanna see you wiggle!”) A choice I believe to be more genius each time I revisit the film is the way Butler plays Presley as almost separated from the sexual reckoning he’s caused. He’s hot, duh, possessing what scientists typically refer to as “babygirl eyes” and speaking in that silky Southern purr (which you all need to leave him alone about!!!!!!), and feeding off the energy he receives from women, but he only obliquely acknowledges the feelings he inspires in them. Those feelings are irrelevant to the pain he experiences as a person growing more at war with himself (and his insane manager) the higher his star rises.
The erotic frenzy Presley stirred in the ‘50s is one of the things Elvis gets very right — watching it, it’s easy to believe that no one had ever been sexy before him. Honestly, that’s sort of true! I’m no historian, and there are decades of writing from people much smarter than me about the things Elvis did for sexual openness and how that relates to race and gender, but the film flourishes when it shows how he popularized a type of masculinity that hadn’t previously existed in a male celebrity, one that made women think about desire and what it meant to act on that desire in public. I remember my grandma once telling me about when the nuns at her school banned the girls from watching Elvis’ performances, deeming him too provocative. “But,” she added conspiratorially, “We did it anyway.”
There’s a section in Kaitlyn Tiffany’s great book, Everything I Need I Get From You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It, that digs into the origin of the screaming fan. Writing about a girl whose condition was featured in a medical journal after collapsing her lung from screaming too hard at a One Direction concert (this person is, to me, braver than the Marines), Tiffany says, “It’s not that the image of the screaming fan isn’t true — we can all see it ... many of us have embodied it. It’s that the screaming fan doesn’t scream for nothing, and screaming isn’t all the fan is doing.” Screaming fangirls have always been just that — girls — and as such have always been as mocked as they are feared. But Elvis’ success as an artist begins and ends with them. Men capitalized on his godlike status, but the screaming girls are the ones who propped him, and so many male musicians who came after him, up. You can easily draw a line from Elvis to Beatlemania to, lol, sorry, Harry Styles1. It was even a woman, a reporter named Bea Ramirez, who first referred to Presley as “the king” in print.
Every Elvis era is punctuated by legions of female fans. A film like Jailhouse Rock, early in his foray into acting, has but a mere suggestion of a plot, hinging on Presley’s charisma as a performer; a film like Viva Las Vegas, which came much later, relies on his explosive chemistry with Ann-Margret and the expectation that women watching would want to put themselves in her shoes. A section of his 1968 comeback special finds Elvis, clad entirely in leather, on a small stage surrounded by captivated twenty something girls. There are men present, but they’re relegated to the shadows. The women are the ones who perch on the edge of the stage and offer him handkerchiefs and get shamelessly flirted with. The women are the ones the camera keeps cutting to. The women, and their reactions, are as important to the special as Elvis himself: He still had it, he never lost it — an uncanny talent for tapping into that special something that made women go nuts.
Elvis is a biopic, I guess, in the sense that most of the events shown on screen are true. It’s a larger than life film that reanimates one of the most larger than life figures who’s ever existed. It achieves what any movie about an icon should hope to, which is to convince us that the person at its center still holds relevance in today’s culture. But aside from that, Elvis is a movie about being a fan. I don’t know much for certain, but I do know a lot about the experience of being a girl who is a fan of male artists. (As I write this, I’m wearing a One Direction t-shirt I bought at a Hot Topic in 2014.) I bring up Magic Mike XXL a lot just, like, generally, in part because I love it, but also because of how impressive I continue to find its willingness to get at the root of female desire, the ways it’s ridiculed and ignored, and what happens when it’s actually serviced. In a way, I think Elvis sort of does that too.
I often joke about the line in which Tom Hanks, doing that be-accented, utterly bananas, totally gonzo performance, insists we, the fans, killed Elvis “with [our] love,” because it is so easy to joke about. How could I have killed Elvis? Our lifetimes didn’t overlap at all! And then I remember the way Butler speaks about the achingly sad “Unchained Melody” performance that was recreated for the film’s final scene, in which a visibly deteriorating Presley, two months away from dying, still sounds so clear when he sings. “If you watch that video, you’ll see that he gets half a sentence out and has to take a breath,” Butler said. “When he sings he belts it out, and it’s like you wouldn’t even know.” Yeah, this scene was the eventual catalyst for a meme, but it also allowed Luhrmann to make one last brilliant choice in that quick flash of a moment where Butler’s Elvis sings a particularly strong note. It elicits some cheers that echo the ones of yore, and Elvis hears them, smiling out into the crowd. Luhrmann cuts to a pair of elated women with their hands covering their mouths, rocking in their seats over the confirmation that their expression of fanhood was acknowledged.
At the end of his life, Elvis became, to put it kindly, a shell of his former self, but he still had the ability to elicit a scream from a woman. Elvis is a girl movie because of the way it depicts that, and because of the way it depicts a truth so fundamental to understanding a legend who has been revered almost beyond comprehension: Elvis always belonged to girls.
I still lol thinking about those reports that came out about Harry auditioning to play Elvis and Baz being like, “Yeah, he just wasn’t right for it :)” That casting would’ve been poetic and every day I’m so relieved it didn’t happen.
Ok fine I accept that Elvis is a girl movie, but still not accepting that Everything Everywhere All At Once is a boy movie