Of course, Elvis is one of these American icons who has been infinitely reclaimed, and this is perhaps the key to his celebrity: the ability to be remade by different generations of people who will see themselves differently in sympathy with the mythos that surround the figure.
I wanted to post a couple of old essays I happened upon. For the next few weeks, I’ll try to get some of this interesting (to me at least) old stuff out of the closet of the hard drive.
Myth-Making and Iconoclasm in Bubba Ho-Tep (originally published in 2003)
Aging American icons are more easily ignored than remembered as they presently are. Consider our former presidents, fading off into memory, more dead and historical than alive. Consider our actors of Hollywood, garnering headlines only as long as they stay vital and youthful (“Tony Randall fathers fourth child at age 80,” etc.). Instead, we prefer to remember our icons at the heights of our passions for them, perhaps in order to ease the pain of seeing them as impotent and emasculated, flaky-minded crags. Thus, the main concern as regards our heroes getting older is one of dignity. It is an interesting notion that occurs in a film that just came out last week on DVD: Bubba Ho-Tep. Two of our most beloved and discussed American icons: John F. Kennedy, whose resources of dignity in historical legend are apparently infinite; and Elvis Presley, who neatly dismantled his own dignity by himself on numerous occasions; are the main characters in this film.
On the surface the plot seems bizarre: Jack Kennedy and Elvis Presley (played by Ossie Davis and Bruce Campbell) live in a convalescent home together where a mysterious evil mummy is feeding on the elderly. Both characters acknowledge public misinformation regarding their whereabouts, regretting the same fact. However, in this tale, JFK is black, not to mention alive, and Elvis is just plain, notoriously, alive. Still there is something so charming and unique about the presentation of our protagonist, the aging Elvis, that you find yourself accepting by the end of the movie that this is, in fact, Elvis Presley, which is a tacit acceptance of the switcheroo story he provides, whereby he was replaced at some point by an Elvis impersonator named Sebastian Haff.
As “Elvis” puts it (in quotes, before disbelief is totally suspended and audience members are heard to yell “go, Elvis!”), he discovered a talented, young Elvis impersonator, Haff, at a moment in his career in the late sixties when he was beginning to emerge as the larger-than-life, entourage-enabled Presley. He decides to switch places with this Elvis impersonator Haff (someone “half” the person Elvis was) because, being the simple fella he really is, Elvis just wanted a return to the old simple life before entourages, before Prescilla, before Graceland. Thus, Haff goes on to live out the excesses of the Elvis we carry in our contemporary minds because he cannot handle the pressures of Elvis’s fame, and the Elvis who tells us this story is the one who ends up in the convalescent home, having lived out his simple life amongst simple people, etc. It’s a neat way of cleansing Elvis’s character from the excesses of celebrity we associate him with: drugs, women, solipsism, and fried sandwiches.
The audience is told this story in a flashback, however, so Elvis was happy impersonating Haff (the Elvis impersonator) until his simple life turns him into a forgotten old person, which is where we meet up with him and a new mythology of Elvis is born: bitter old man. The contract he signed with Haff, which would have allowed him to trade his life back, was burned up in a barbecue accident, another indication of the utter simplicity of his simple life. Indeed, in the convalescent home, he pines over the fact that no one knows who he really is, along with all of the personal failures of the body that come with old age (including impotence). Here, the fascinating thing is that you find yourself believing this protagonist to be Elvis by the end of the film, I think, because the fact of his being Elvis is not the central focus of the film. What is the central focus is that there is a mummy haunting this convalescent home, nursing its decayed life force off the souls of almost-dead folks. In fact, the film would have been somewhat lame had the entire focus been trained on whether or not this “Elvis” was truly Elvis, the celebrity around whom a whole mythology of celebrity has been created. Instead, as the audience is presented with it, the convalescent home houses a variety of mythical figures, and the interesting and funny thing is what happens when they are thrown together. Moreover, the troubling question of whether or not Elvis is our main character only becomes troubling when one holds him up to the suspect others in the convalescent home, including his friend Jack Kennedy, who Elvis calls “certifiable,” and who apparently had his brain replaced with a sack of sand. He even at one point makes plain his own disbelief to his friend, saying, “Jack, Kennedy was a white man,” to which Kennedy responds, “That’s how tricky they are; they dyed me this color.” One interesting point is that most of the reviewers have fallen for this trick as well, noting that “Elvis has a friend who believes he’s Jack Kennedy.” Still, Elvis, giving his friend the benefit of the doubt that viewers of the film may not grant, allows for the fact that Kennedy could really be sitting before him, telling him about the hieroglyphic graffiti littering the bathroom stalls of the convalescent home. After all, he seems to shrug mentally, I really am Elvis. He even takes to calling him “Mr. President” as in one memorable scene where he arrives at Kennedy’s room and says, “Uh, Mr. President… You’re on the floor.” To which Kennedy responds, “No shit?”
Remarkably, what this representation of Elvis manages to do is reclaim and reinterpret him, against the food-friendly, drug-craving Elvis the public has come to know since his death. Of course, Elvis is one of these American icons who has been infinitely reclaimed, and this is perhaps the key to his celebrity: the ability to be remade by different generations of people who will see themselves differently in sympathy with the mythos that surround the figure. Still, this reclamation is probably one of the most satisfying things about the movie. By way of an example, one of Elvis’s major conflicts in the film is that his sixties-era films were all poor representations of his latent desire to be a hero. Instead, they were saddled with awful plots, narratively driven as vehicles for stringing together various Elvis songs from the original soundtracks, and their apparent lack of any redeeming virtues tends to be something that everyone, including Elvis himself, can agree on. Thus, as Elvis and JFK take on their mummy adversary, they revise his earlier film career. He even remarks, “I can now be the hero that I never was in my films.”
But now a subtler point comes into being amidst all of this revision, and this is that what is being revised is not the person himself, but rather notions concerned with the celebrity, the mythology of the celebrity. The concept of celebrity requires a blending of fact and fiction, but it also requires the moralizing that is involved in mythologies, where stories are used to dictate lessons to a society. Celebrities are less real people than fictionalized versions of real people invented to dictate to a culture the ideals it values: success, beauty, youth, intelligence, passion, will, etc.
The phrase “mythology of the celebrity” then refers to the systems of meaning involved in this process of moralization and the associations used upon a particular celebrity. One real personality could never hold all of this signification, especially as it turns to the exaggerated and unreal. Take for instance, all of those “Elvis lives” pronouncements after his death that quickly became cliché. These ideas did not revise Elvis the person, after all, Elvis the person is dead and not many credible persons were willing to accept the contrary. What they did revise was the mythology of Elvis, the whole fleet of concepts and themes and lessons (and mania) attached to the name. This can be seen in the ways in which people still sometimes mention what has become an old joke (indeed, the film itself exploits this joke) that Elvis is alive. Because, in a way, “Elvis lives” is part of the mythology and the paranoia of Elvis. It’s part of his cultural character as an American icon, one so widely followed that whole carloads of Graceland visitors would assent to the belief of his being still alive. That Elvis lives is not interesting as a fact, but as a trait of his iconic character, his mythology; it is interesting in that because the mythology of him is capable of being revised the mythology itself continues to live. It is interesting because Elvis as a celebrity is such a celebrity that someone somewhere still perpetuates the belief that he is alive. The reality of him being alive, unproved, will not be as interesting as the myth.
In the film, myth-creation turns out to be something that Bubba Ho-Tep is specifically about, playfully molding the mythology of Elvis, exposing its amorphous qualities. After all, Elvis Presley (an American icon of inarguably mythic proportion) teams up with JFK (about whom the same can be said) to fight off a mummy (in the undead character of whom the metaphor of the “mythical” becomes literally mythical) feeding on the souls of old folks. There is here an implicit comparison between the myth-creation focused around the celebrity-aura of real persons, and the kinds of myths from which we derive our sense of the concept myth, i.e., mythical creatures. Our plucky protagonists are tasked with somewhat decrepitly fighting off a mythical figure made real, a mummy, and this forces a number of comparisons between them as mythical celebrities and the mummy as pure myth. The question of reality that is forced upon this “Elvis” is tossed out the door as soon as he starts engaging creatures who, we are pretty sure, are not real. Could Elvis be living out his life in a convalescent home somewhere? Possibly. Could Elvis be living out his life in a convalescent home somewhere, fighting off an Egyptian mummy? Hmmm.
So, unconcerned with reality, celebrity-creation turns out to be very much like myth-creation, something that an adoring public takes part in, and adored celebrities often themselves succumb to as well. Consider Graceland, the elevation of a home into a kind of myth generator, like Michael Jackson’s Neverland. It appears that the ultra-wealthy and ultra-famous often have no choice but to reinvent themselves as the protagonists of their own mythic narratives, while the rest of us (who also grew up with the strange, late-20th-century notion that we are the main characters in our own television shows) have to outlive this childish fantasy of narcissism. Yet, we support these mythologies in our creation of the famous as celebrities.
Then again, what happens to our mythical celebrities when their bodies get too old to no longer be used as morals for the stories we want to tell with them? The problem actually occurs when the real bodies of these celebrities diverge much too far from the myths that we profit from (out of their capacity to inform us of our own idealizations: youth, beauty, confidence, wisdom, etc.). Well here, Bubba Ho-Tep has a neatly apt answer: we forget about them. The fiction continues on, disjoined from the physical body of the celebrity. The reason we forget about them is that their aging bodies are reminders of their corporeality in that they lack the dignity of the celebrity-aura. They grow old and decrepit. Again, the mythology of the celebrity is not directly interested in reality. No one wants to hear about Katherine Hepburn’s incontinence or Charleton Heston’s impotence. These things are too physical for the ageless mythology of the celebrity. Thus, there is a beneficent dignity that comes with celebrity because celebrities are disallowed from growing old. Antagonistically, as much as the concept of celebrity ignores the physical body of the celebrity, Bubba Ho-Tep wants to throw it in our faces, often in a humorous way, as seen in Elvis’s contemplations of his flaccid penis, as he later remarks: “It’d been two presidential elections since I’d had a hard-on that big.”
Finally, a neat interpretation that Bubba Ho-Tep leaves us with is that this celebrity-creation itself is a kind of mummification, so we might as well have fun with it. Elvis has been revised in a playful way but the truth of this revision is no less real than the corrupted images of the actual (once living) Elvis we hold in our minds. Bubba Ho-Tep is owning up to the fact that we are letting the “real” persons and bodies of celebrities die once they become dead celebrities (once they no longer have the opportunity to influence their own auras and so deceive us into believing in their agency in relation to that aura). It’s all myth, so why not have fun with it. This is not to denigrate the purpose of celebrity, so much as to remind us once again that our stories of the famous are not objective. Although these stories may have at one point been based on reality, they cannot take us back to reality, and these celebrities may as well not be real people for us, because they are pure image. A mummy is a member of the undead, an artificially living corpse that was once alive and is yet no longer. By extending the metaphor, our images of celebrity, once they have died, are mummified versions of them as of former people.
Importantly, what is celebrated about celebrities changes and this is sometimes a change in focus, but mostly it is a change in the mythology itself, as a society comes to idealize different elements of itself. As the mythology of Elvis is revised we celebrate different things in our myths, and ultimately this teaches us what we are currently idealizing. What Bubba Ho-Tep celebrates about Elvis’s celebrity is the revised simplicity of him, that he was a southern everyman, not the commodified and perversely exaggerated terrorizer of televisions and fried sandwiches and his own entourage, who reportedly were forced to entertain his solipsism at every opportunity by helping convince him that his opinions and fantasies were correct. It allows us to sympathize with an Elvis who is someone who shares our opinions (even about his own films) about Elvis the celebrity, and it turns him into the hero he could never be in the current mythology of Elvis, as well as the hero he could never have been in real life. That the film doesn’t force the question of reality but playfully stays within the realm of myth allows us to see the aura of the celebrity we are always working with, and within this context, the revised Elvis emerges. And this is a satisfying thing to see.
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