Trickster and the Universal Elvis

Robert Philen
Cornell University

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3:12 PM, October 19, 1994

We strolled past the townies -- the hackey-sackers in baggy jeans, flannel shirts, and backward ball-caps, and all the Kurt Cobain clones and Michael Stipe wannabees sprawled across black-painted iron benches and dirty, cigarette-strewn brownish-gray concrete planters -- past dimly lit stores with big black "G"s and "Go Dawgs" painted on their windows, past the beginnings of the not-so-large evening rush on a gray October afternoon in Athens, Georgia, and into the 24-hours-a-day bright-lit confines of `The Grill,' a simulacrum of a 1950s America that never was, with its too-shiny black-and-white checkerboard tile floor, fake-black-leather booths and chairs, simulated 1950s style jukebox complete with Elvis tracks, old photos of the streets and buildings of downtown Athens (which haven't changed since before there was photography), and just the right amount of spilt salt and grease on every linoleum table-top.

We pulled chairs around the lone window table as the waitress arrived. Her black mini and bleached-white T-shirt accentuated a faux-nubile, twentyish form, underscored by flat-dyed India-ink hair piled in tangles around a paper-white oval face. Her whole aspect pushed her from the "plain" category into the realm of the bizarre, a visage established by an absence of makeup or color, except a pouty application of dried-blood maroon lipstick and eyebrow piercings which could only be unobtrusive in the Athens "40-watt" crowd.

"Can I take your order?" she said.

We ordered burgers, fries, and cherry Cokes -- the `real thing' jerked at the fountain over cherry juice extract. The waitress slinked away to call our food orders and Chris enthusiastically surveyed the ambience of the place in the direction of the kitchen.

"Weird," Teresa said quietly.

"Weird how?" we asked together.

"Oh, I just think she's kind of weird for a `50s' place."

"Well, she's just part of Athens. This is the piercing capital of the South. Anyway, we always have strange road trips. You don't know weird."

"Yeah. Last year when we were driving up to Kansas City on I-70, we had an experience nobody ever believes. We hardly even believed it ourselves."

"Let us tell you about The Elvis is Alive Museum and the 50s Cafe...
 
 

What little we encounter of the childhood and adolescence of Elvis Presley comes as projections from the era of his stardom. Of course, we all construct a childhood out of memories, artifacts or even shreds of self-reflection. But the world of the child is fresh and raw; we don't usually stop to think that children cannot possibly be critically experiencing the cooked world of the adult.

Elvis constantly constructed his "missed" childhood by projecting his star persona and coterie back into a false childhood (Esposito and Oumano 1994: 47):

We often ended an evening by renting the Memphian Theater after midnight in order to avoid autograph seekers and fans. . . . Other nights he rented the roller rink or Liberty Land, the local amusement park, and we rode the different amusements -- especially the bumper cars -- for six or seven hours until dawn. He was making up for lost time, two years in Germany and an entire childhood. Whatever Elvis wanted to do, he did. Whatever he wanted to buy, he bought. We were our own crowd, and together we enjoyed movies, the bumper cars at the amusement park, and roller skating at the rink. We returned to Elvis's childhood with him, and as his playmates, we had a great time fulfilling the fantasy of a childhood that should have been.

In short, Elvis's life was "made up" as a construction of what satisfied the moment and a projection of what "should have been". And though the undeveloped `person' -- the ordinary guy Elvis -- continued beneath the perfusion of signs conferring stardom, Elvis remained quite set apart from ordinary human existence.

3:24 PM, October 19, 1994

"This is how it was. And this is the honest to God truth -- we're not making any of this up. We were on our way to the Central States meeting in Kansas City....

"About an hour west of St. Louis on I-70 there was this big sign: `The Elvis is Alive Museum and 50s Cafe, Next Exit.' We started joking about the sign as we ran by the exit, and then our curiosity got the best of us. We had plenty of time to make Kansas City and were a little hungry anyway, so we took the off-ramp at the other side of the town, crossed over the interstate, and drove back through the little town on the first main road paralleling the freeway. It was only about three-quarters of a mile back to the street where the other exit dumped off, and when we approached the light we figured the museum must be off to our right.

 "Sure enough, just after we turned we saw another sign with a left arrow and the words `parking for the Elvis is Alive Museum.' The sign was on top of the low-pitched roof of a fiberglass prefab building with two small curtained windows and no street-side doors. In the searing brightness of a sunny Missouri afternoon, the sidewalk and surrounding businesses didn't offer the touristy qualities we had expected. The uniform decor of dirty corrugated plastic screamed warehouse, garage and mini-locker in that nameless kind of commerciality that doesn't usually rely on signs. This neighborhood was not so much "run-down" as it was undergoing a kind of fallow sub-urban ecological transition.

"Around the corner, we followed another left into an empty unpaved parking lot. We had arrived on the other side of the prefab. A UPS truck took up much of the parking space close to the door, so we parked in the middle of the lot and sat wondering if the place was open. Then a windowless door between the two buildings opened and a man stepped into the lot.

"The UPS man strode over to his brown truck, slipped some small packages behind his seat, and drove away. As the dust of the dirt lot settled, we were alone beside the Elvis is Alive Museum, two double-wide trailers connected end to end, with the only obvious entrance at the middle where the two trailers joined.

"We approached the building, hoping the place would be open. We saw from a small hand-lettered sign announcing the museum's hours of operation that Elvis was at home. `Guess it's open' we said as we tested the latch. The lightweight door grated back and light stabbed into a narrow entry hallway, an incidental foyer walled by the exterior ends of the two prefabs. The door closed behind us, shutting off the blazing exterior radiance and leaving us in a cathedral-like dimness incongruous with the three-by-six space in which we found ourselves.

"Plastered from floor to ceiling on all the walls were photos of Elvis: Young Elvis, `Louisiana Hayride' Elvis, Cowboy Elvis, Army Elvis, Motorcycle Elvis, Convict Elvis, Boxer Elvis, Race-Car-Driver Elvis, Acapulco Elvis, Hawaiian Elvis, Karate Elvis, Vegas-Jumpsuited Elvis, and a black guitar hanging on the wall amongst the King's montage.

"The hall led us into a gift shop running half the width and most of the length of one of the connected double-wides. A door, apparently leading into the museum, was open at the other end of the room. Another hand-lettered sign read, `Do not enter Museum until you have paid the entrance fee.' No one greeted us in the gift shop, so we took a look around, assuming that someone would return shortly.

"Elvis memorabilia, black velvet, and photos of the King shrouded every surface of the dimly lit room. Several shelves were covered with souvenirs for sale, not the slick, glossy kind from Memphis, but mementos of the King that looked to be local, like handmade Elvis buttons, `Elvis is Alive' bumper stickers, mason jars with photos of the King pasted on the side -- pictures peeling -- all covered with a thin layer of dust. Our feet shuffled over inch-thick shag carpet as we moved about the room, unconsciously absorbing that feeling you only feel in a double-wide, a certain trailer-park le je ne sais quoi, perhaps evoked by a facade of fake wood over cheap plywood, or perhaps by the faux-chapel ambience with which, on a much more basic level, everything in the place was perfused. There was still nobody around, so we called out to whoever might be listening, to no avail. Elvis had evidently left the building.

"We waited, every few minutes calling out for somebody, calls which were never answered. As we stood in expectation of we didn't know what, in the omni-presence of the King, the light around us seemed to be sucked into the dingy wall panels, the low ceilings, and the glass-covered frames, and the very quality of the air began to take on an aspect of something more than just the over-enthusiastic adoration of a fan. This was lurid obsession at best, and visions of a crazed axe-wielding, sequin-coated-jumpsuit clad Elvis impersonator rushing at us from the unseen museum area began to fill our heads. Moreover, there was only one very small way out. Still, we waited.

"A few minutes more, and we really began to feel we had pushed our luck. Robert vocalized it: `Let's get the hell out of here.'"

On March 24, 1958, when Elvis Presley was inducted into the army, he began the process which would make him one of the preeminent icons of modern times. Up to that point, although Elvis had received spectacular acclaim, one might have convincingly argued that his `star' would ultimately fade. But service in the army provided a natural transition into Elvis' already- commenced film career. `Elvis-the-recruit', moreover, established the pattern of blank signification Elvis' persona in film would perfect over the ensuing decade. Thus, in spite of Elvis' success at playing `roles' in such films as Love Me Tender and Jailhouse Rock, after 1958 the film industry successfully created a series of roles following an `Elvis-the-?' formula.

Some had expected Elvis' recording career to suffer when he was taken away from his audience at such a critical height of popularity. Yet, in spite of, perhaps even because of his military service, Elvis' career diversified and burgeoned, pressing him to the highest position among the canon ranks of now-dead stars. Marilyn Monroe, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, James Dean, Buddy Holly, John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, John Lennon, perhaps such late-comers as Sid Vicious and Kurt Cobain -- no litany of names produces anyone to equal `the King' on the grounds of sheer recognizability or growing appeal. Whether OD'd, over-extended, assassinated, or self-terminated, the popular icons for the last half of this century pale next to Elvis. And this was true even in life, as Joe Esposito remembered of the 1969 comeback in Las Vegas (quoted in Lomax 1996: 20-21; cf. Esposito and Oumano 1994: 142-3):

Most times when you do a show for invited guests, they pretty well sit there and expect to be entertained, being show business people. But even the big stars were all standing and screaming and applauding. When Elvis walked off that stage, I'm telling you, he had tears in his eyes.

3:31 PM, October 19, 1994

We turned back toward the entrance to I-70, considering ourselves lucky to make an escape from the Elvis is Alive Museum. But instead of taking the ramp onto the freeway, we saw another sign with an arrow pointing along the interstate frontage road: Come to the 50s Cafe -- Antique Automobiles and 49-cent Hamburgers. Hungry and still none the wiser for our experience, we turned toward the cafe, thinking aloud that we could always just drive by and get on I-70 at the next entrance.

The sign outside the cafe read "See Elvis Live . . ." We pulled up onto the dirt shoulder next to three or four vintage cars from the 50s and 60s which were parked in a row in the dirt yard. At the side of the remodeled frame house which was the cafe, a young man and woman, and a balding, middle-aged Elvis in a black jumpsuit reminiscent of the `68 Comeback Special, stood working on a 2 X 4 wall frame for what appeared to be a small out-building. As we approached the cafe, the young man turned toward us; he seemed to look through us without acknowledging our presence, and then returned to his work. Elvis and the young woman never looked our way at all.

A screen door gave us access to an enclosed porch running across the front of the house, from which we looked directly back to a central room filled with cases, souvenir tables, card racks, and a kitchen service counter. To the left of this room was another large space filled with empty tables; a droning voice filtered across the whole place from that direction, its source obviously a speaker mounted high on the wall. As we stepped past the door, we caught a glimpse of a couple. They gazed blankly toward the back of the room; peeking in, we saw a television hanging in a corner rack connected to a VCR on a high shelf. We stepped into the central room.

Behind the service counter, another door gave us a clear view of the kitchen. There, a short, broad woman stood with her back to us, arranging several-dozen hamburger buns in ranks and files across the sheet-metal grill of a wide industrial stovetop. A steady sizzle reached our ears, as though meat were cooking under the buns, but no smell accompanied the other signs of "cooking," even as the woman used a spatula to slide the buns along the grill.

Also in the central room, standing a short way from us in a khaki skirt and matching knit shirt, a woman of about 50 peered fixedly toward the kitchen door. She made no sign of recognizing our presence, even when we walked directly between her and the kitchen. She never moved while we were in the room, not even those involuntary reflexes which should accompany such "proximity" as we offered, such conversations and scrutiny as we carried on in her presence. We looked over the tables, finally directing most of our attention to a glass case set near the entry. Inside it was a 600-page type-draft document concerning Elvis's faked death and secret new life as a Drug Enforcement Agent. The manuscript could be had for only a few hundred dollars; but its tantalizing pages were buried under glass, and under a ponderous title page surrounded with other pamphlets, small memorabilia, and "Elvis is Alive" bumper stickers.

The uninspiring voice of the video continued, ". . . and the evidence all clearly points to the continuing work of Elvis for the DEA under various assumed . . . ." We glanced around again toward the kitchen. The cook still stood with her back to us, sliding buns across the grill, while the khaki-clad lady waited like one of the living dead in the center of the room. We moved to the counter and waited for several minutes. The zombie-woman continued staring through us toward the kitchen. The cook never turned around. We began to feel uneasy, glancing at each other with knowing looks which suggested that if we stayed much longer we might become permanent residents, living mannequins trapped like the other people in the place.

With our eyes, we signaled our common resolution to leave, turning and walking slowly back toward the front of the place. No one inside the cafe noted our departure, even when we stopped again to peer into the television room. We walked half-way from the building to our car, then stopped to watch Elvis and the young couple raising their wall-frame on the small concrete pad. The young man turned toward us again, staring vacantly in our direction -- perhaps beyond us toward our car. As we moved, he turned back to his work, but with the faintest trace of a smile on his lips.

We stepped quickly to the car and made our final escape from the place. As we took the ramp onto I-70, we noticed that the town included many small cottages and plats with carney- style `airstream' campers parked on them, as though the whole community presented a winter `resting place' for seasonal travelling shows. We thought of Roustabout, and how appropriate such a community would be for an Elvis in the 90s, living or dead.

Elvis' career was Resurrected twice. First, he successfully made the jump from R&B musician to actor/musician, based upon the `role playing' which dominated his efforts to live up to his own mythic character. Second, when his later films became, as we shall see, hackneyed imitations of his early formula pictures, Elvis managed the great 1968 comeback and his Las Vegas career. His incorporation of karate jumps, stylized modes of dress, and a song repertoire designed to maintain a long-time and now aging following made him, for all intents and purposes, the `First' Elvis impersonator.

The processes of Elvis' last ten years opened the way for the appropriation of Elvis as a sign. Not only do Elvis impersonators carry on the King's own personae through mimesis of the Elvis- object, but they also pursue the Elvis-interpretant, even through extraordinary alterations of the `original'. The caricatures of Elvis now originate from men and women, young and old, tall and short, anonymous and famous -- indeed, almost everyone has an Elvis impersonation in them. Those less adept at impersonation may also maintain an Elvisian posture which one comic commentary expresses as `inspiritination'. Nicolas Cage presents only the most obvious example of Elvisian appropriation. Cage's work in the film Wild at Heart (1990) offers such an uncanny performance of `Elvis' that one is left wondering if the spirit of the King might not actually reside in the actor. Arguments about possession aside, Wild at Heart's Elvis actually fits well within the actual canon of cinema-Elvis, and clarifies our understanding of Elvis as a kind of trickster'.

Very early in his career, Elvis' first three films (all made before his entry into the army) gave him disempowered or `outsider' roles -- a young Southerner, a menial laborer, a boy from the wrong side of the tracks -- which nonetheless led him to success. After his service, Elvis continued to play out real dimensions in his life, extending such roles into new disempowered categories such as soldier, half-breed, and hillbilly. Overall, Elvis' early films present a mimesis of his own `poor boy makes good' story. With the appearance of Girls, Girls, Girls in 1962, one encounters the first instance of a plot type which would recur periodically throughout Elvis' film career þ the established and desired man being chased by women. While the type mimics Elvis' life, it breaks the limiting pattern which had kept Elvis in his `underclass' persona. Tickle Me (1965) and Double Trouble (1967) provide the most blatant examples of this undercurrent theme of many later Elvis movies.

Beginning with Kid Galahad (1962) Elvis' roles become progressively more exciting and glamorous. Also, Clambake (1967) plays on a `prince and pauper' theme which fits a more- general mythos contrasting the sophisticated and unsophisticated, the rich and the poor, with various connections to good and bad. During this period, Elvis acquired more-positive roles, even when he played the `outsider'. Thus, between 1962 and 1968, his films increasingly offer unbelievably contrived situations and roles þ bodyguard for a mobster's daughter, lifeguard in Acapulco, boxer, race-car-driver, film star, pilot, frog-man treasure hunter for the U.S. Navy. The mimesis was no longer fixed on a `real' Elvis, but rather on the idea of the kind of extraordinary man Elvis ought to be. And it was during this phase of Elvis' career that his actual lifestyle began to mimic the spirit of the unusual `characters' created for him. Elvis not only played Elvis, he evidently felt a need for Elvis to be the important, flamboyant, risk-taking, swashbuckler he believed the fans expected him to be.

Elvis' last film, Change of Habit (1970), a drama co-starring Mary Tyler Moore, cast him as a humanitarian doctor who became involved with a nun. Though the film did not produce raves, it was also not a total failure. By this time Elvis had demonstrated both acting ability and a capacity to bend himself into almost any cinematic situation. But Las Vegas offered an even more spectacular venue for the `real-life' Elvis to swash and buckle. Perhaps he was tired of making films (he made over 20 films in the seven years from 1962 to 1969). The music had also begun to lose its punch, with such throw-aways as Yoga Is as Yoga Does in the improbable Easy Come, Easy Go. Most important, it is apparent that Elvis felt the pressure of constantly recreating himself, in public and private, and that he began to turn himself toward his most serious thoughts, including the mystical ideas he had adopted over the course of his exceedingly insular and protected life.

3:39 PM, 19 October, 1994

"Later on that same trip, we drove down I-35 to San Antonio to visit Bill and Gay Spinks. The first night there, we had thought about going to the Maverick, a famous Chinese-Mexican place where every meal starts with taco chips and ends with a fortune cookie, but instead we went to Los Barrios, a sprawling, pastel-walled, hacienda-style `straight-Mexican' restaurant with roving Mariachis, lots of serapes, sombreros, tin sconces, heavy oaken tables, and a Chihuahuan and Tex-Mex menu augmented with a few Sonoran dishes. The Elvis is Alive Museum was fresh in our minds, and so after we ordered our food we told Bill and Gay about our unusual experience. We began joking about strange Elvis places in general, like the 24-hour Church of Elvis in Seattle and Graceland Too in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Bill knew about an Elvis shrine in a home in Pleasanton, Texas, and, for that matter, we decided Graceland deserved a special place among strange Elvis places.

"Our conversation turned to some serious writing about Elvis' life and mythology, like `Elvis Impersonators at the End of his Public Life', and `The Church of Elvis', and even `Secret Agent Elvis' (Elvis actually did meet with Richard Nixon and was concerned enough about `drug abuse and Communist brain-washing techniques' to conduct what he called `in-depth' research; see Presley qtd. in West 1996, 20; also Esposito and Oumano 1994: 176-82). We had so many ideas we began writing them down on a napkin. `The conversation quickly turned to an episode of America's Funniest People that had run a contest called `Movies Elvis Never Made.' We had been driving for about three-days straight and were pretty slap-happy, so it didn't take long for us to fall off a silly deep end. Bill and Gay sat back and egged us on, and soon our movie titles became the plan for a multi-volume work of short stories. We began to flash on tabloid territory, stories we had either actually seen or `should' have seen, like `The Elvis Tribe', `Elvis and Bigfoot', `Burger-King Elvis' and `Sumo Elvis'. Then we crossed some kind of threshold, stabbing into the heart of the manipulability of the trope of Elvis as a `blank' signifier. There were The Maltese Elvis, Oh-Oh-Elvis, Elvis Five-O, Much Ado about Elvis, Gone with Elvis, The Magnificent Seven Elvises, Citizen Elvis, Full Metal Elvis, and Blue Velvet Elvis. When we got to The Good, the Bad, and Elvis, the titles began to arrange themselves into categories, like `Techno Elvis', which included Close Encounters of Elvis, Elvis AI, Elvis Trek, Japanomelvis, Mondo Elvis, and Invasion of the Elvis Snatcher. `The Terrors of Elvis' included Frankenelvis, Incredible Shrinking Elvis, Elvis Costello Meets Elvis, Elvis Meets Godzilla, and Little Shop of Elvises. This whole category of Kevin Costner films remade the way they `should have been' emerged: No Way Elvis, Field of Elvises, Dances with Elvis, and Elvis Hood: Prince of Kings. Finally `The Chthonic Elvis' included I was a Teenage Elvis, Undead Elvis, The Return of Elvis, American Elvis in London, Son of Elvis, The Revenge of Elvis, and Elvis Really, Really is Alive.

In Semiosis, Marginal Signs and Trickster, C. W. Spinks draws a distinction between Trickster and the Hero. The Hero performs great feats, wins great victories, or perhaps even suffers epic losses, but in any case, the experience of the Hero is far removed from that of the everyday person. Trickster, on the other hand, performs little acts of cleverness, wins little victories through foolery, or perhaps makes little bumblings, though even here, Trickster is able to laugh at his or her own self-trickery. You could say that Trickster acts, in recognizable situations, the way people wish they had or could have acted. Elvis himself was clearly aware of his own role- playing in this regard. In the words of the King (Elvis Presley quoted in Esposito and Oumano 1994:21; also in Lomax 1996:18-19):

 My fans expect me to do the things they wish they could do - if they'd had the breaks I have...A lot of my fans have a rough life. They see me as someone who was lifted from poverty and dropped in a world of glamour and excitement. My job is to share that glamour and excitement with them. When I'm onstage, I want to create excitement. I want each person to feel I'm performing for him or her, and even when I'm offstage, the show goes on. The clothes I wear, the cars I drive, my style of living -- they're all part of what my fans expect from me.

The mythology of Elvis presents Elvis up against the evils of fame and fortune, drugs and booze. Typically, he escapes this by faking his death to live a simple life. This time, the Trickster is tripped up before he can carry out his plan, dying on the toilet before he can fake dying on the toilet. In either case, the plausibility of the plan is not up for debate. We might debate whether or not Elvis died in 1977, but in the mythology the motivation and desire of Elvis to escape an endless recreation of Elvis, complete with all the decadent accoutrements, is not in question.

Implicit in the mythology of Elvis' faked death, whether to move on to a simple life or an undercover agent life, but in any case to a secret life, is the recognition of the public performance of "Elvis," a performance which eventually wore down Elvis the man, both in the mythology and according to the man himself -- "I'm just so tired of playing Elvis Presley," he said (Elvis Presley quoted by Ray Walker, Jordanaire, in Nash 1995). And so it is that, whether we believe that Elvis actually faked his death and is still alive or not, we have a third Resurrection of Elvis where we can envisage an Elvis who no longer has to endlessly impersonate Elvis.

3:43 PM, October 19, 1994

Sharon was already shaking her head, "No way!"

Theresa was less incredulous, but it was clear from her tone that she thought we were embellishing our story. "Whoa, guys, that's really too weird. I might buy the bit about the empty museum, but all those people ignoring you? And they really had a big document about Elvis as an undercover agent?"

"Nah, you guys are shitting us!", Chris bellowed.

"No, we're not shitting you. And yes, they really did have a 600-page manuscript documenting his life as a secret agent."

Just then, the waitress, black mini, white blouse, and inky black hair tangles, balancing a tray of hamburgers and fries -- real hamburgers which leave a puddle of grease on the plate, and fresh-cut fries instead of the typical thawed and heated variety -- bounced up to the table.

"Oh," she said, with a smack of gum, "Are you talking about the Elvis is Alive Museum?"

Everybody's jaws dropped. Sharon's eyes spread across her sockets like two eggs cracked on a broad flat grill. We should have been pleased to be corroborated, but instead we felt shocked that someone else even knew about the place, much less was so familiar with it that they could pick up the thread of our conversation on such a small snippet.

"You've been there too?" we asked excitedly.

"No. But my boyfriend went there. He said it was real strange."

Later that night it got even stranger. When there was no room in any motels in South Carolina, our planned stopping point on a long drive to Philadelphia, we drove on to Durham, North Carolina, and stayed at a motel Terry knew from an earlier trip. We got unloaded into the two rooms by midnight. Though it was late, Chris flipped on the television and began channel surfing. On about his third click, there it was, a 10-minute documentary story on the Elvis is Alive Museum. We quickly knocked on the girls' door so they could share in this additional confirmation of at least part of our story, and the spiritual confirmation that the King, though not first in mind for some, certainly remains in the heart of our culture.

REFERENCES

 ESPOSITO, Joe, and Elena OUMANO.
1994. Good Rockin' Tonight: Twenty Years on the Road and on the Town With Elvis (New York: Avon).

 LOMAX, John.
1996. "Elvis' Days and Nights." Country Weekly, August 13, 18-24. Popular review article; q.v. Esposito and Oumano.

NASH, Alanna.
1995. Elvis Aaron Presley: Revelations From the Memphis Mafia (New York: ....).

 ROSENBAUM, Roy.
1995. "Among the Believers." The New York Times Magazine, September 24., 50-64.

 SPINKS, C. W.
1991. Semiosis, Marginal Signs and Trickster: A Dagger of the Mind (London: MacMillan).