Eugene Jarecki’s documentary The King is two hours long, but it doesn’t feel long enough for the amount of stuff it tries to stitch all together.
The best way to describe it is as a patchwork quilt of ideas. Poor people working their way to the top. Cultural appropriation. The civil rights movement. Self-destruction. Money, fame, and power. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The euphoric high that comes with those things, and the inevitable downfall that comes after. They’re all stitched together using the biography of Elvis Presley, who lived a life that personifies the American Dream – as well as our nation’s deepest-rooted flaws. It’s movie not about Elvis himself, but Elvis as a metaphor for America’s past, present, and future.
It’s an out-of-the-box kind of analogy, one that some people might see as a stretch – but it works. Mostly.
In many ways, this documentary is like a stone skipping over the surface of a pond. Important issues are brought to our attention, but we don’t get enough time to dive deeply into them. We’re shown a glimpse of how the rock ’n’ roll industry is built upon racial tensions and corporate greed, just like the rest of our nation.
That glimpse, while brief, is powerful. As viewers, we walk away with a new picture of America. We see our nation not as a messianic keeper of democracy, but as a celebrity with an addiction to money and power.
Coupled with some fantastic cinematography, it’s jarring in a good way.
The one glaring problem of the documentary is in the conclusion. Or rather, the lack of conclusion. The King ends with a poetic message about the power of art and music, reminding us that these things keep us grounded in our humanity. But compared to the roller coaster of themes and issues that led up to it, this type of ending feels clichéd. It feels like a more somber version of a Disney movie, where everything will be okay if we just believe in the power of song.
My guess is that the film ends like this simply because the nature of Elvis’ death is where the metaphor dries up. Elvis Presley died suddenly, and he caught the entire world off guard. But nations like America – even if they are headed towards self-destruction – take much longer to fall to pieces.
And there’s the silver lining that the documentary should have highlighted in its conclusion. We, as people, can learn from Elvis’ mistakes in order to create a better society. We can learn to not be so in love with the idea of being the world’s biggest superpower, so that when hardcore nationalists like Trump run for president, we can shut them down. We can choose to give credit where it’s due, so that we all stand on equal footing. We can choose civil disobedience over our own comfort.
We can find ways to protect America from its own self-destruction, in ways that America couldn’t protect the King from himself.