Elvis: Chameleon King (core response)

Pioneering the trajectory of the audio-visual performer, Elvis’s acquisition of the American spotlight and the endless reign of the Elvis image in American iconography fully demonstrates Dyer’s notions of celebrity contradictions. At the moment when musicians were not only being heard but also seen, for the first time, Elvis deployed his entire skillset (singing, dancing, gyrating--the list goes on) to captivate the American TV-viewing audience. We could look to our present day current generation of up-and-coming artists, who have turned to the digital sphere and world of social media to find their initial audience in innovative and more intimate ways, and we could see that Elvis reflects a similar entrepreneurship by bringing the realm of the physical and visual to his televised performances. During a time when colored television was newly available to a large commercial audience, Elvis became an undefinable everyman, full of contradictions that were both managed and exposed through his multifaceted presence in American media.  

Bringing forth Dyer’s contradiction theory, Elvis represented an endless variety of ideals, people, and livelihoods to different people. His fans reflected their own values in their pick-and-choose construction of his identity. Erika Doss notes that Elvis’s perpetual multiformity “might suggest that Elvis ultimately “means” nothing,” but additionally, “the versatility of his image is directly linked to his widespread cultural significance.” To many, Elvis was the “gentleman who truly loved his mother, believed in family values,” and was the kind of upstanding American they aspired to be. Yet, Elvis’s struggle with drug addictions and extramarital sexual relations were not well hidden secrets. These latter traits, which stood in direct opposition with the traditional South’s ideal moral lifestyle, did not keep Elvis from preserving his ‘gentleman’ image.

This reflects an ideology that we’ve seen repeated with the majority of our celebrities studied in 412, fans often acknowledge the contradictory traits, but the celebrity’s larger-than-life presence, coupled with their existence as human, congeals their differing identities into one whole piece, which then allows fans and critics to give weight to whatever values they choose. My initial introduction to Elvis was by way of caricatures in cartoons--an overweight, hairy-chested washed up Vegas performer that made his way into Nickelodeon half-hours. As time went on and I broadened my viewership to older movies shown on TCM that I’d watch with my mom, and only then was I exposed to the young, suave heartthrob that was Elvis, the Elvis that took the world by storm.