The Hi-Desert Cultural Center is proud to present a special screening of ENO, the first-ever generative documentary film in a one-night-only event featuring an introduction by Orian Williams, one of the revolutionary film’s producers.
The Devil In Disguise: Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis
Elvis, the award-winning 2022 musical spectacle by master showman Baz Luhrmann, remains fresh and vital in 2025. Looking back at the criticism of the film, high praise as well as dim dismissal, everyone seems to have undersold the theme of the artist as chattel in the entertainment industry, which has only become more urgent in the two years since.
Image description: Elvis and the Colonel on a ferris wheel.
Elvis, the award-winning 2022 musical spectacle by master showman Baz Luhrmann, remains fresh and vital in 2025. Looking back at the criticism of the film, high praise as well as dim dismissal, everyone seems to have undersold the theme of the artist as chattel in the entertainment industry, which has only become more urgent in the two years since.
As with Nabakov’s Lolita, the tale is told not by the story’s namesake; perversely, it is the testimony of their abuser, tormentor and jailer. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, who did not like the film, sees Elvis as a tale “told from the perspective of a satanic manager.” I agree, though I think the film is terrific, and has volumes to say about the plight of the artist in the present moment. Elvis has all the markings of a frothy, high-gloss biopic rock opera, but make no mistake: this is a cautionary tale, told by a devil.
Image description: A tarot card, VX The Devil
And now that we’ve brought up the devil, we’re going to get esoteric for a moment. The anonymous author of Meditations on the Tarot, a work of hermetic Christian thought considered through the characters of the tarot’s Major Arcana, describes the devil as a force of counter-inspiration. No better description could be applied to Colonel Tom Parker. Luhrmann’s Elvis is a divinely inspired innocent; the Colonel recognizes this quality, and works to bend this inspiration to his will, or kill it when it works against his interests. Early on, The Colonel makes it a point to tell us two important details about himself. First, he knows what people want from entertainment, which is to feel feelings they aren’t sure they’re supposed to enjoy. Second, he doesn’t know shit about music. That’s not to say that this isn’t a musical movie; it absolutely is! But it is also very much a story about a man who ensnares and exploits an artist, who happens to be a musician. The Colonel’s indifference to music sets him apart from Elvis, along with a hostility toward love. When Priscilla enters the story, the Colonel feels threatened by her influence over his star. “I did not consider the most dangerous thing of all. Love.” The Colonel and the anonymous author of Meditations are in agreement that love is fundamentally at odds with evil, and the devil himself.
Love is the vital element of profound knowledge, intuitive knowledge. Now, one cannot love evil. Evil is therefore unknowable in its essence. One can understand it only at a distance, as an observer of phenomenology.
Cast against type, Parker is portrayed by America’s favorite leading man, Tom Hanks. Not so long ago, Hanks stepped into the roles of such beloved cultural icons as Mr. Rogers and Walt Disney. Cloaked in a bald cap, a fat suit and a series of outfits more befitting a silent film star of the 1920s than a carny-turned-talent manager, Hanks is brilliant and his performance unlike anything he’s done previously. The real Colonel Tom Parker was a little different than the devil manifested here, as evidenced by his appearance This Is Elvis, the touchstone 1981 documentary that Luhrmann draws on to show us the real Elvis Presley near the film’s conclusion. We should not be surprised that creative liberties have been taken. Anyone who has watched this film only to question the veracity of whether every detail was true to life or not is missing the point by miles.
Image description: Mephisto makes a bet with an archangel in the silent film Faust
Hanks’ version of The Colonel seems heavily indebted to the great Swiss-German actor Emil Jannings. Jannings was the first actor to receive an Academy Award in 1928, for his work in Josef von Sternberg’s The Last Command and Victor Fleming’s The Way of All Flesh.
His reputation in Hollywood fell into ruin during World War Two, when Jannings returned to Europe and went to work for the Third Reich, earning distinction as an Artist of the State from chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels. Jannings retired to Austria after the war and died in 1950, but his name is immortalized on the Hollywood Walk of Fame; memory is selected. Today, Jannings is remembered less for the Hollywood work that won him the first ever Oscar, but instead, for his European films of the 1920s that brought him to Hollywood in the first place, in particular von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel, and F.W. Murnau’s Faust. In Faust, Jannings plays the demon Mephisto, who makes a bet with an archangel that a good man’s soul can be corrupted. In a scene from the beginnings of his ascent to fame, Elvis promises his mother Gladys that he will never leave her. Hanks, as Parker, breaks the fourth wall and asks the audience, “Want to bet?”
Like Mephisto, Parker proceeds to corrupt the young Elvis and gradually isolate him from any person or force that threatens his near-absolute control. Betting and gambling are also central to Parker. We first meet him in a Las Vegas casino, The International, where he kept Elvis housed and contractually committed to a residency at the height of his fame, preventing him from travelling the world. In Murnau’s The Blue Angel, the first-ever German sound film, Jannings plays Professor Rath, a respectable academic who becomes obsessed with a cabaret singer, Lola, played by von Sternberg’s muse, Marlene Dietrich. Rath ruins his life and career in pursuit of this ill-fated romance, sinking lower and lower until he is reduced to performing as a clown in Lola’s cabaret. Like Elvis in his Vegas purgatory, Rath is a prisoner on a stage. In appearance and physicality, Hanks seems to have taken something from this version of Jannings, in particular his singular obsession with Elvis, who he seemingly loves while methodically undermining and exploiting him. I have a theory that Luhrmann is a devotee of von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel, and that its influence can be felt across all of his films, his “red curtain trilogy” and Moulin Rouge! in particular. Even with this knowledge, to see a character with a whiff of Professor Rath in a modern studio film is a trip. Though his outfits sometimes lean in a Western direction, Luhrmann’s Colonel Parker favors European coats and collars and canes, reminiscent of Professor Rath if he had been realized in Technicolor by Walt Disney.
Image description: Marlene Dietrich as Lola in The Blue Angel
As for Elvis, Austin Butler is also terrific, though he maintains a complexion that is more boyish than of the historical Elvis. My instinct is that this is a choice meant to reinforce Luhrmann’s image of Presley as a sort of pure and divinely inspired innocent. With his father in prison and unable to guide him, Luhrmann’s contrives an uncanny scene conveying the adolescent Presley’s awakening to Black music, sensuality and spirituality. He is first guided by Captain Marvel into the world, in search of adventure, and from there observes a blues party through a hole in a wall, where he receives “That’s Alright” from an unknown bluesman as pairs of dancers lustily spin and entwine. It’s a scene out of an Archibald Motley painting. Just a short ways down the road, a tent revival is underway, and the young Elvis is swept off his feet in a state of ecstasy. Comic books may have sent him out in the world, but blues and gospel showed him a glimpse of heaven, “the music that made me happy” as he’ll later describe it. He is less a genius than the recipient of a divine message, sent to deliver the gospel of black music to a repressed and racist white society that sorely needs it. Paired with this gospel is a raw sexual energy that inspires a frenzy in women that the Colonel, as an asexual sort of demon, can only describe as “something beyond us”. In spite of this ability to stir powerful feelings in women, sex is not Presley’s objective. Elvis is granted two motivations: first, a devotion to his mother, Gladys, and second, an instinctive defiance against hate and spiritual ugliness. Elvis is initially awkward and slow to start at the Louisiana Hayride performance where Parker first lays eyes on his future star, until a heckler shouts “Get a haircut, fairy!” This jolt of ugliness lights a fire under Elvis, who proceeds to blow the roof off the Hayride, sending all the women and girls in the hall—and a few men as well—into a state of erotic panic.
Image description: A still from Elvis (2022) with Presley performing in a pink suit
From the first, the Colonel recognizes that he can use Elvis to sell the expressive sexuality of the blues to a White audience. It is not until later in the film that we really see Elvis working as an artist in his own right, rather than as a mere conduit for music that apparently needs a White voice to reach a segregated audience.
From the first, the Colonel recognizes that he can use Elvis to sell the expressive sexuality of the blues to a White audience. It is not until later in the film that we really see Elvis working as an artist in his own right, rather than as a mere conduit for music that apparently needs a White voice to reach a segregated audience. Elvis, ever a loyal disciple, aspires to be like B.B. King, who becomes a friend and ally, and is seemingly the closest thing to a concerned adult in Presley’s orbit. The blues musician makes a point to observe Elvis’ privilege as a White man, and to tell him that he has more power than he thinks he does, all but warning him against Parker’s domination.
At this, my mind jumped to Donald Glover’s great television series, Atlanta, which shares many of the same concerns about the relationship between artists and managers. Atlanta follows the rise of a rapper named Al (a.k.a. Paper Boi), and Earn, his manager and cousin, along with Al’s friend Darius who is along for the ride and sometimes functions as a kind of magical realist trickster. Atlanta’s third season is spent largely on tour in Europe, where the main characters isolate and confront their insecurities untethered from their insecurities and free from the grinding poverty of the show’s first season. The eighth episode, “New Jazz” finds Al on a psychedelic misadventure in Amsterdam that leaves him “canceled,” disassociated and incapacitated. Like Elvis, After giving him “space cakes”, Darius points to a passed-out tourist in a Goofy hat, sprawled on the ground. Like Elvis, Al’s demons get the better of him, and in spite of the warning he becomes precisely what he was warned not to. Far away from everything familiar, dealing with anxiety over control of his career and missing his dead mother, Al worries about whether he can trust Earn, who is family as well as on the payroll. When every relationship is transactional, who is looking out for your interests? After stumbling into an emotional scene that turns out to be part of a theatrical performance, Al is led on an adventure through the city by an actress, Lorraine, a woman with the same name as his late mother. Lorraine eventually leads Al to an infernal speakeasy called Cancel Club.
Al seems to have concerns about being cancelled that aren’t specifically spelled out, though it may have to do with a dismissive comment he made about trans people in the middle of an interview in an earlier episode. Lorraine is played by Ava Gray, a trans woman, further reinforcing the idea that Al’s trip is a confrontation with his fears and anxieties. The Cancel Club would seem to be a safe haven for the cancelled, somewhere they could comfortably hide from the world. The club’s old-fashioned European style, and the single beam of light that guides Al to a seat at the bar, is all executed using a visual language that reaches back directly to the cabaret in von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel.
Image description: A spotlight illuminates a seat at the Cancel Bar in the TV series, Atlanta
Inside, the actor Liam Neeson holds court, playing himself; Al separates from Lorraine to introduce himself, and Neeson responds with a line from his 2008 thriller, Taken. “I have a particular set of skills.” In 2019, Neeson had been briefly cancelled in real life for telling an anecdote during an interview: as a younger man, he had sought revenge against someone who had raped his friend. The rapist happened to be Black. Unable to locate him, Neeson prowled the streets for a week looking for trouble, hoping to get into it with any Black man he might encounter, “so that I could kill him.” Neeson expresses his frustration to Al at having been cancelled over this incident, and reveals that he still holds a grudge against Black people. They tried to destroy him, in his estimation, even though they didn’t succeed. “I’m sure one day I’ll get over it. But until then, we are mortal enemies.” Neeson leaves Al with the observation that “the best and worst part about being white is that we don’t have to learn anything we don’t want to”. Al is left stunned. Given that the real Liam Neeson went on to apologize profusely for his ill-considered confession, his decision to appear on Atlanta and rehash the incident, and to boast of having learned nothing from it, is shocking. But like Baz Luhrmann’s treatment of Colonel Parker, we should probably hesitate to take Donald Glover’s version of Liam Neeson at face value. He’s yet another devil in disguise.
This particular refusal to learn, it turns out, is a problem for Elvis as well. Elvis longs to spread the gospel of rhythm and blues, “the music that made me happy,” but White America prefers him restrained, dressed in tails, singing to a hound dog. They may want to feel something from Elvis, but they’re disturbed by the Black roots of his music. There are limits to what White America will learn to love, and Elvis cannot separate himself from the Blackness that made him. Consequently, the first act of the film, where Elvis is the most deeply connected with the source of his happiness, is also the most fun. This is where Luhrmann most spectacularly flexes his incredible sensibilities of musical editing, weaving together an audiovisual world that flows inventively from one moment to the next on a bed of music from the past and present, mixing the vintage sounds of the South that formed Elvis with contemporary trap and soul, standard bearers of this musical legacy in our own time. His signature style as a director is creating a fusion of old and contemporary, juxtaposing the past and the present in a single breath in way that is familiar to anyone who has enjoyed his films. In the middle of this flow of Black musical tradition, past and present, stands Elvis. Luhrmann showing us Elvis becoming Elvis is a joy, but watching Elvis struggle to maintain his sense of self in the face of unfathomable success and The Colonel’s machinations is a tragedy.
Image description: Tongues, a painting by Archibald Motley, from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art
After Al and Liam Neeson part ways in “New Jazz”, Al is visibly disturbed. He eventually reunites with Lorraine, who delivers Al some harsh truths about the state of his affairs. How can Al claim to be in control of his life, when he isn’t sure who controls his masters? His rap alter ego Paper Boi may be a star, but Al has ceded control of Paper Boi to Earn, perhaps foolishly. Later, when Al comes to after his dark night of the soul, he wakes up in a hotel room, with Earn waiting in a chair at his side. Al’s first instinct is to ask Earn whether he has control of his masters. “You do,” Earn assures him. And yet, we’ve been so unsettled by “New Jazz” by this point that it’s impossible to feel complete confidence in Earn’s answer. By the time Elvis begins asking similar questions of The Colonel, the hour is far too late.
These are timely, touchstone works about the contemporary problem of artists figuring out how to control their gifts and their lives. Beyond the possibility of being exploited by someone who is family or something close to it, show business itself has only grown more diabolical. Arriving in 2022 on the eve of a series of labor strikes and contractions that would rock the entertainment industry to its core, and make creatively daring films and series like Elvis or Atlanta harder to produce, it’s tempting to suspect that Donald Glover and Baz Luhrmann were trying to tell us which way the wind was about to blow. While making so much media instantly accessible, streaming has come at a steep cost to the creative class, decimating the record sales, box office receipts and Neilsen ratings that had previously made success verifiable and sustainable. A streaming series like Atlanta may only be a speculative success; viewership data is considered proprietary, and in many instances may only be made available at the streamer’s discretion. Elvis may have effectively been a slave to The Colonel, but at least he could have figured how many records he’d sold. A title card at the film’s end tells us that Elvis Presley remains the highest-selling recording artist of all time, but in the context of a story where the hero is a victim of success, it seems like something The Colonel would be more likely to take pride in. Elvis and Atlanta take a hard look at what success means, and the cost to the artist who achieves it. For this, they are among the most vital works of our time. The devil is in the details.
MATTHEW CARON
Elvis, the award-winning 2022 musical spectacle by master showman Baz Luhrmann, remains fresh and vital in 2025. Looking back at the criticism of the film, high praise as well as dim dismissal, everyone seems to have undersold the theme of the artist as chattel in the entertainment industry, which has only become more urgent in the two years since.
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