I literally just got home from watching Elvis, the 2022 biopic starring Austin Butler as Elvis Presley and Tom Hanks as Colonel Tom Parker.
I’d say it was a damn-good movie, if a little sanitized for a rock ‘n roll icon who died 45 years ago and certainly had his demons.
I thought Butler knocked it out of the park–best acting portrayal of Elvis I think I’ve ever seen–and Hanks, well, he’s Hanks.
Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to write about. No, what I wanted to talk about was Presley’s aforementioned death; he passed away unexpectedly on August 16, 1977.
I was five years old at the time and had no idea who Elvis was. I did watch television, however, and remembered seeing the news coverage of Presley’s death. Like news coverage often does when a singer passes away, this particular segment featured Presley at one of his famous Vegas shows, complete with the white jumpsuit.
I believe he was blowing kisses to the crowd in attendance and may have even had a Hawaiian leis placed around his neck (come to think of it, maybe this show was from Hawaii). Anyway, I remember watching this footage with my tiny little brain and thinking, “I guess this is what happens when you die and go to Heaven.”
I kid you not, this is exactly what I thought (well, maybe not those exact words, but the sentiment was there).
It wasn’t long after that that I, and every other little kid who was too young to know Elvis in 1977, began to find out all that there was to know about this musical icon. There were countless movies made immediately upon his death; biographies were produced; mythology surrounding his death–that he was still alive or that he died on the toilet while eating a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich–began to grow legs. Speaking of the former, Bill Bixby, one of my acting heroes, hosted a 1992 special about the King possibly still being alive. For. Some. Reason.
And, of course, Presley’s image, the one of a stumbling and bumbling overweight jumpsuit-wearing alcohol and drug addict that he involuntarily helped to curate over the last years of his life, was branded forever onto the public’s consciousness.
But anytime I think of Elvis Presley, I remember the first time I saw him and thought he was being sent off to Heaven by a crowd in Las Vegas (or it could have been Hawaii).
tondef 