Amerikultcha And Elvis Went Into The Desert...

THREE INCHES is such a wretched height to be: Exactly halfway through the film. ( Elvis: That's the Way It Is. ) At midpoint. That is to say, at the very heart of the matter: Elvis up there singing, singing. Love, love me do. When suddenly he begins to shrink. Say from 18 feet down to about three. The screen shatters into a half-dozen other, simultaneous, images. Up left, an exterior shot of Las Vegas' International Hotel. By day, a pretty dull affair, not to be compared with Caesar's or the Sands. But by night! ELVIS. In mile-high neon. As if the very stars had fallen from the desert sky, the guts wrenched out of the moon; all so that some mad manipulator of electric gases could spell out ELVIS-COMIN AUGUST 10!

Meanwhile, back on the screen of the Center Theatre on the very bottommost bit of Washington Street, Elvis continuing to shrink and sing. While, from the screen's bottom left, shots of the International's mammoth kitchens. Great, grotesque hunks of institutional meat. Barrels of dough. Bread for the circus. And, over on Elvis' right, Brobdingnagian close-ups of the office staff, the maids, bellboys, waitresses, showgirls and hawkers, pr men. Tourists. But no, not tourists. Not in Vegas. And, the center of it all, Elvis, jes keeps on singin'. Surround him, cameras roll up and down through the labyrinthic entrails of the International. Elvis, dwarfed by eight foot high shanks of beef, by linen and glassware and advertising. By MGM celluloid. Elvis. That's the way it is.

A LA RECHERCHE du Elvis perdu: Forgive me, for I am forced to lapse into first person subjective. Not to tell of myself, but because of an incapability of telling of anyone else. Elvis Presley, I had thought, had begun too long ago, over 15 years, close to 20 years ago, for many of us to have really felt his presence. But others tell me no, even as seven or eight year olds we knew who Elvis was, though perhaps not why television refused to film him from waistward down. No? why his sideburns should upset our parents so.

But I'm not convinced. For the temptation is too strong, the temptation to convince ourselves that we possess a past that we might have never known, a past that certainly no longer exists. Pretend to the contrary though we might, the past is the victim of the present, is redefined and reconstituted along the lines of our experience in the now.

I came to know Elvis through parody. For which I don't necessarily feel regret. Admitted, I missed the purity of the early Elvis, but the parody, Broadway's Bye, Bye Birdie, was itself fine and gentle and, in the only way then available, even respectful.

Elvis still existed of course. On the periphery. An occasional single. Another film. (In the most recent of which he would play a big city social worker charming his way into the hearts of the ghetto kids and singing nuns.) But meanwhile, we sought out our past in whatever way we could.

Gotta get back. Recapture the lost. Rediscover our innocence. Whether it be through old clothes or a CRIMSON quiz on children's books. Or Sha-na-na. Or Camp. (For as the past receded more and more quickly, the parody becomes sharper, more brittle.)

We talked of getting back to the land, too. For many of us, a form of nostalgia even more blatantly contrived. For what did we know of the traditions of working the soil? A weekend sunk into the Woodstock mud was about the best we could manage.

The Elvis renaissance seemed to be a reprieve. Television brought us his special. RCA brought out a few retrospective discs. Las Vegas lured him back to live performance. MGM promised, and has just delivered, its instant replay documentary of his last Las Vegas gig.

But what we fail to see is that, while the content may be all nostalgia and would-be innocence, the packaging is relentlessly right up to date. Elvis, along with whatever else remains of the early fifties, along with folk music and rural traditions, along with the simplicities of our childhood, has been absorbed and reprocessed.

You can watch the Elvis documentary or its Woodstock big brother, but don't think you're getting the early Elvis or the simple life. It all comes to you courtesy of MGM or Warner Brothers, and, just as the form is the cold, calculating product of the corporate arm, the content has been twisted and frozen. Elvis is no longer Elvis and Woodstock never really was. Instead, they mock our need for a heroic and honest past.

THE COLUMN of flame: Vegas is the most unbelievable of cities. From the air, the solemn, silent desert appears to have split a wayward seam, spewing forth a hidden cache of tawdry jewels. Bingo, Nevada style.

From within, flattened by the heat and swept by desert winds, Vegas has the air of a city under siege, demonically challenging each godforsaken minute to be its last.

The men all look like cowboys. The women can't hide that they are whores. And beneath the gilt and bravura, the blue hair and mascara green and shiny sharkskin suits, there is the most frightening exhaustion imaginable.

The counter culture is anathema in Vegas. Hang around the blackjack tables and you'll see that the greening of America has very little to do with determined little plants poking their heads through concrete vistas. Vegas was to have a rock festival last July, a bone-dry echo of Woodstock was all set to grit its teeth against the drifting sands while digging into an abandoned airfield on the edge of town. The town fathers moved quickly to see that it never came off.

Las Vegas, to be sure, does indeed have its own tribe of Hair. (After all what are a few more bare breasts?) A permanent attraction of the very International Hotel that Elvis was to play. But while other Hair tribes across the nation spent the summer organizing peace-through-music benefits, proceeds going to an abortive UN youth assembly, the Vegas kids were prohibited from doing anything other than taking up donations after each performance. ( Rolling Stone reports the Hair tribe was a trifle disrespectful toward Elvis during his stay. Consequently, you'll not see a trace of the Aquarians in the documentary film.)

Which is all to say, that Vegas has been pretty much handed over to the damned. Why even bother to toss a stray bomb into its midst, when sooner or later the city will consume itself in flame? Yet, at the same time, we were foolish enough to believe that it was to give us back a part of our past.

I spent the summer in Los Angeles, where few of the people I chose to know admitted to visiting the Vegas scene. There were that few of course Like the married couple in the apartment next door, married in a Vegas marriage factory, no less. He a Lockheed engineer, she a childless housewife who presided over a three room apartment. They visited Las Vegas regularly. They were also quite pleased that four students had been murdered at Kent State. "That's what they wanted," she told me.

But then the Elvis engagement opened. All through August, leading up to a Labor Day crescendo, Angelinos were making the trek through the desert. "The greatest nightclub act ever," they reported back. (None of us stopped to think that in a world

where glossy male performers dressed in tightly cut dinner jackets or casual turtleneck sweaters to sing "Raindrops Keep Falling" and "The Impossible Dream," such reports were faint praise.) "And Elvis has never been better," they said. No quibbling over that. Clearly, whatever was happening out there in the desert, it was something we owed in to ourselves to see.

ELVIS: That's the Way It Is: Jim Aubrey (former CBS executive, purported model for the most recent Jackie Susann novel) was having a bad year of it at MGM. Antonioni's Zabriskie Point had fizzled out. The Strawberry Statement hadn't caught on. Stanley Sweetheart hadn't even been heard from. Somewhere out there were all those youths, many of them paying more money to see Warner Brothers' version of Woodstock than they had paid to attend the actual event. So the MGM executives, never loath to jog after a trend, shoved a camera crew, armed with Metrocolor and Panavision, off to Vegas. Denis Sanders, who had recently won an Oscar for a documentary entitled Czechoslovakia, 1968, was sent along to direct; Lucien Ballard, an old hand at composing stunning Western visuals, was put in charge of cinematography. Assignment: Get Elvis, on film, for a Thanksgiving distribution date.

Who was to say it wouldn't works At very least, one could defer judgment until the end of the three months and one million dollars it would take to complete the task.

Three months later one could say it. It didn't work. Elvis gives us an hour of Elvis in rehearsal, and the International in preparation, and then an other hour of Elvis performing before a tiered dining room of 2000 jeweled and mantanned manikins, a scene worthy of Fellini's Satyricon.

Unwittingly, however, Elvis is also a telling documentary about the packaging of the night club "artist" for cinematic consumption. When Peter Watkins made a film called Privilege, the story of the rise of a British rock idol, a few years ago, he stole directly from an American short called lonely Boy a brilliant little glimpse of the early Paul Apka surrounded by the demands of the night club world. Elvis has the same look of fictionalized reality.

We never see much of what should have gone into the film. Elvis manager, Colonel Parker, never appears. Elvis' rehearsals are staged (There is none of the drama or professionalism ? saw in Pennchaker's recent study of the recording of the Broadway cast album of Company ) and Elvis' actual performance is interrupted for so many secondary investigations that we never get a sense of its tensions and tempos.

Instead, the film offers a selfreflective study of how a performer operates when conscious that his every move is being recorded for the fans. Elvis mugs shamelessly, pathetically. He points to one of his back-up men and laughs. "You can't use those words, man. They'll put an X-rating right across your big mouth." "Don't mind the cameras," he tells his audience, then does exactly the opposite.

Similarly, each supporting character has his turn before the camera's lens. There is one marvelous scene in which the reservations director-the protocol here is as intricate as that of a state funeral-turns toward the camera to announce the name of each arriving celebrity. "Julie Prowse." "Mrs. Xavier Cougart." Exactly like a herald announcing the nobility to the court. Whereupon each celebrity turns, smiles, and mumbles something complimentary about Elvis. For its not enough to be Julie Prowse or Mrs. Xavier Cougart, the fact has to be verified on film and applauded by an audience. The camera itself glories in the terrible tyranny it holds over these people.

Is this then what destroyed Elvis? We suspect so, but all we are certain of is that nowhere do we see the dynamic performer we have been led to suspect. Elvis wears a tight, one piece jumpsuit with an almost Elizabethan collar. It is close to self-parody, except that the costume has no fly, no seam at the croch, and it is too white, too clean and spotless. Not an extension of Elvis personality, it's like a piece of plastic that has been pressed onto his body, like cellophane melted over and onto a couple of thighs of chicken.

Elvis' upper lip still curls upward a bit, and his eyelids tend toward an insolent droop, but there is simply no energy left. It's more than generation gap that places the man closer to Dean Martin and Tom Jo?es than any current rock performer. Was this pathetic old man the fifties' Mick Jagger? Is this then the performer's grand finale?

Near the end of the act. Elvis comes down off the stage. He wades through the rivers of ecstatic thirty-year-olds that stream down the aisles, abandoning their husbands and lovers to drink silently at their tables. Elvis pushes slowly and resolutely through the women, Kissing those that manage to grab hold of his neck, merely touching the outstretched bands of the others. He crosses the entire room, until finally mercifully, one of his aides pulls him back onto the stage. And you understand it all too well. He's simply borrowing from the politician's routine. Abandon the motorcade and dive into the crowd. Its not your competence or ability they're interested in. They just want proof that you're alive. Just want to touch living flesh. Just keep that old blood circulating, brother, and, man, you've got it made!

YOU CAN DO anything you want, baby, but just don't step on my blue suede shoes. Elvis is often an annoying, tedious, mundane film. It uses close-ups when long-shots are demanded. It cuts away from the action before it ever has a chance to begin. Rumor has it that only when the cameramen had folded up their gear and scurried back to their editing rooms, did Elvis begin to put on a show. Which is exactly as it should be. For film here is the villian, Presley its occasionally almost tragic victim.

Disaster strikes so frequently nowadays that films like Elvis and Woodstock alone seem able to withstand the rush of events. A few years ago, Monterey Pop was an equally annoying achievement-full of interminable concentration on the Mamas and the Papas (John Phillips was in on its financing) and packed with a lollipop and roses view of life. But, ironically, due to the deaths of Redding, Hendrix, and Joplin, all of whom appear in the film, it is now, for all its flaws as a film, one of the few permanent memories of their work we have.

Add to it Elvis, the painful record of a past master in decline. The real Preslev long ago evaded our generation; like other hoarded treasures of our culture, he was taken from us and reissued by the corporate entertainment industry. And, eager to catch whatever glimpse we could of the fallen idol, we paid for the transformation. As if time is not enough of a danger, we hasten the process of change, we ensure the disappearance of our actual past. Once again they ask us for our appreciation, our money, and, once again, I suppose we'll be only too happy to give it to them.