The New Bullshit Free Driver 8/Spencer R Thread

Except “Cotton Candy Land” on the soundtrack is not sung by Elvis, it’s sung by Stevie Nicks, who sounds like she headed to the recording studio straight after undergoing an emergency tonsillectomy. The vast majority of the songs on the soundtrack are not sung by Elvis, because, as we see in the movie, in 2022, it’s been deemed time for Elvis Presley Enterprises to introduce a “new Elvis,” or, to be more precise, “new ‘Elvis’ music,” stripped of the bothersome, problematic, old-fashioned Elvis Presley himself. As with the upcoming TV series “Agent King,” the real flesh-and-blood Elvis is no longer required. Easier to exploit the “brand” of Elvis to sell new “Elvis” music and “Elvis” TV shows to the rubes … not so different from the ole Colonel’s master plan, really.

Further, the song has been re-written to suit Baz’s agenda: where the original lyrics of the song as recorded by Elvis begin: “Sandman's comin', yes he's comin' / To sprinkle you with sand / He'll say one, two, three / And you'll be, in cotton candy land,” Stevie Nick’s screechy, howling version begins: “Snowman’s comin', yes he's comin' / To sprinkle you with sand / He'll say one, two, three / And you'll be, in cotton candy land.” Yes, what in It Happened at the World’s Fair was merely one of the charming, if admittedly lightweight, ballads of the sort sprinkled throughout nearly all of the Elvis movies, has now been re-written as a morbid dirge illustrating Baz’s central thesis: that the evil Snowman ruined Elvis Presley’s career, and everything Elvis did from the Army to “If I Can Dream” was awful. If Baz is so insistent on making that point, he could have chosen, say, “Big Boss Man,” unaltered, as his text to illustrate it, but no, instead, he chooses to actually rewrite the lyrics of one of Elvis’s songs to push his agenda. How respectful.

Coming from a filmmaker with the openly gay/camp sensibility on display throughout Moulin Rouge and the Great Gatsby, I find it somewhat puzzling that Baz is not 100% down with the mid-60s Elvis beach bikini movies, in which our hero sports a skimpy bathing suit on a surfboard in front of a green screen and artificially “surfs” and sings his way through a series of frothy, featherweight musical films while fending off the advances of two or three different gorgeous women every time out, refusing to settle down with any of them, and, just to drive the point home for anyone who missed it, declaring “I’m Not the Marrying Kind,” apparently Baz is unable to recognize these films as the quietly subversive queer cultural texts of the New Frontier that they arguably are. One could also point to Live a Little, Love a Little, as well as to several of the worst 1965-66 Elvis movies, as inadvertent American parallels to the French New Wave cinema of the period, which like the lowest of the low-budget Elvis movies, broke the fourth wall, and used sloppy or abrupt editing and wooden performances to deconstruct “cinema” and force the viewer to acknowledge the artificiality of the medium they were watching.

Or maybe Baz does recognize all that, but, if the central premise of your film is that Elvis was neutered by his manager circa 1958, and you want to build up to the climax of the triumphant “comeback” of the “real” Elvis in 1968, you have to ignore everything good or interesting about the intervening decade. Even if you’re a Peter Guralnick-like fan of Elvis’s “real” side, you have to concede that Elvis Is Back, His Hand in Mine, “Little Sister,” “It Hurts Me,” “Tomorrow Is a Long Time,” How Great Thou Art, “Guitar Man,” “U.S. Male,” etc. were all pretty great. But, again, acknowledging the existence of all the good things Elvis did from 1958-1968 spoils the power of the “comeback” narrative Baz has chosen to build his film around. So all of that is simply ignored.

But if you do in fact “enjoy them immensely,’ at the end of the day, aren’t they “as advertised”? I enjoyed Christmas at my grandmother’s house immensely when I was a child. That I later learned that my grandmother and mother in fact bought or made my presents themselves, while lying to me all the while that Santa brought them to me by flying to my grandmother’s house on a sled pulled by reindeer before climbing down the chimney to drop off my presents and eating the milk and cookies we left out for him every year doesn’t change my happy memories of that time.
Spencer