Play It Again, Elvis

Rodman’s argument draws attention to two separate quotes--one about Elvis and one by Elvis--and debates their existence as fact and as myth. These sort of quotational questions occur all the time. The most famous example I can think of is in Casablanca. “Play It Again, Sam” was never uttered in the film, but it’s become so much of a part of the quotable aura around Casablanca that it might as well have been. Rodman presents issues surrounding this aura or “myth” that somehow evolves (or perhaps leaps) from fact.

I appreciate what is going on here at first. Rodman tells us that Elvis is ubiquitous and pops up where we least expect him. I can attest to that--he’s definitely an icon. I really enjoyed his claim that “Elvis is an incredibly full signifier, one that is already intimately bound up with an entire range of important cultural mythologies” (457). The argument that begins to progress from this smells like the work of Jean Baudrillard, my cultural superhero. What we have going on here is that Elvis the man and Elvis the myth are not necessarily the same construct. We have copies of what we think is Elvis developing, and before you know it, it’s the copy or the simulacrum that is the full signifier here, not the man himself. I think this is what Rodman is suggesting the whole time, but he chooses Barthes over Baudrillard, and I really do wish he would have included Baudrillard. He also makes a passing reference to DeLillo’s White Noise, and I think if he would have fleshed out the comparison between the two figures (Jack and Elvis), we could more clearly see his point. The quote Rodman uses is “the false character that follows the name around.” In White Noise, this is the protagonist Jack, who is a professor of Hitler Studies (it’s exactly what it sounds like) at a university. At the suggestion of a colleague, he changes things about himself in order to be taken more seriously as a Hitler scholar. He changes adds an initial so that his full name is J.A.K. Gladney. He begins to wear dark sunglasses on campus all the time. Because of this, Jack feels that his name now invokes something more powerful/meaningful than he himself does, and thus he is “the false character that follows the name around.” Come on, that’s Elvis, too. The myth-making is better explained in that parallel between Jack and Elvis than in any of the other quotes about how myths work. Jack Gladney’s essential character or even perhaps his work are not what make him stand out in Hitler Studies. It’s his character, J.A.K. Gladney. It’s his mystique. It’s what people will inevitably make up about him. And the same goes for Elvis.

And then we hit the big claim of the article, where Rodman states, “Without trying to claim that Elvis’s music doesn’t matter, I would like to suggest that his myths matter much more” (460). Sure, culturally speaking, the myths speak louder than his lyrics. I also buy his idea that what people believe the facts to be matter more than what was actually said because these faux-facts become embedded in people’s minds to the point where even if a statement was released saying that these facts were sweet, sweet lies, people would still believe them. That’s believable to me as well. Rodman uses the examples of Marion Keisker/Sam Phillips quote as well as the shoeshine Elvis quote to illustrate his point that even if these were not true, people are still going to believe them to be true.

I am with him on all of this.

However, where I suppose I’ll start my raging dissent is where this argument goes from there. As in, it doesn’t really go anywhere. I appreciate that he’s looking at the issues of race contained within each one of these examples and how artists such as Little Richard (who is awesome, for the record) reacted to the white artists covering their music. We see lots of cameo appearances in the article by Guralnick and Marcus, our old and dear friends. And he even works to demystify some of the myths on race and what Elvis’s music was actually “doing” at the time.

Here’s my beef: Instead of looking for some kind of “truth” of what was actually happening or how “truth” won’t undermine and erase the myth surrounding it, why don’t we look at the myth more closely? Check out the shoeshine quote. Who cares if Elvis said it or not? The point is that it is out there floating in our cultural consciousness. My question is not simply, “Well where did that come from?” but “What does it mean that it got out there to begin with?” I think more can be understood about the surrounding culture itself if we take a look at these examples of myth and other broader examples and try to analyze and interpret what they mean in terms of ideology on the whole. This fits into our study of stereotypes as well. How do these myths perpetuate into the stereotypes or legends that they are today? And how seriously do we take them? Go back to the shoeshine. OK, so maybe Elvis said it and maybe not. What does it mean that we’re willing to believe it? What does that say about us? What does that say about Elvis? How do myths and legends about one of our most beloved (or at the very least, famous) popular icons affect our culture at large? All of these questions are thought-provoking and incredibly puzzling, which is probably why they haven’t been directly addressed. I am impressed by Rodman’s research, but I am just not sure if he’s asking the right questions. Nevertheless, his claim that the myth supersedes all possible facts is an accurate observation that happens in our cultural development across time and space, just as I pointed out with my initial Casablanca quote.

Here’s lookin’ at you, Elvis.