Can Netflix and the rest of the world get over Elvis now?

With just a few weeks left for this year’s Oscars in March, Elvis star and Best Actor nominee Austin Butler has finally gotten rid of his “Elvis accent”. Meanwhile, Netflix just dropped the trailer for its upcoming animated series Agent Elvis that finds Oscar-winner Matthew McConaughey voicing a fictionalised Elvis Presley who juggles between being the King of Rock n’ Roll and a world-saving secret agent.

Meanwhile, Sofia Coppola’s next project as a director is Priscilla, a biopic delving into the romance between Elvis and his ex-wife Priscilla Presley. With Cailee Spaeny playing the titular protagonist, Euphoria's Jacob Elordi has been cast as Elvis. 

All of this is happening right when last year’s biopic Elvis brought back the dead and controversial musician back in the public conversation (not that he was ever out of it in the first place). But after Austin Butler’s sensually-charged and quite accurate impersonation of the “King”, Elvis Presley has been rebranded for the Gen-Z. 

In the woke (or as some might say hyperwoke) era, Elvis Presley has become an enigma. While he’s already established as an American icon, his music has had global airplay with timeless hits like Can’t Help Falling In Love and Jailhouse Rock. But for those who find it difficult to separate the art and the artist (a perpetual issue to struggle with for Kanye fans), it is hard to love Elvis as the man behind those flashy outfits and hip-gyrating dance moves. 

It’s common knowledge at this point that Elvis was quite abusive towards the women in his life. While his divorced wife Priscilla Presley continues to love the music icon to this day, she does reveal in her 1985 memoir of how possessive and violent her star husband could be. Once, he even went on to forcefully make love with her with Elvis’s justification being, 

Future love interests such as model Ginger Alden also revealed his regular habit of randomly firing guns at the bedside or television, mostly in drug-fueled displays of rage. While this is touched upon slightly in Baz Luhrmann’s flashy biopic from last year, it is essentially glossed over taking out the fact how violent he could be with the women around him. Going back to Priscilla’s memoir, she writes about how she got slapped once because Elvis didn’t like the way she had set her eyebrows. 

Another major red flag associated with Elvis and many other musicians of that era was their behaviour towards underage women. In fact, a 24-year-old Elvis had first fallen in love with Priscilla in 1959 back when she was aged only 14. The movie yet again shows their early encounters even incorporating a kiss scene with Can’t Help Falling In Love playing in the background, very conveniently ignoring their concerning age gap. 

Even though Elvis married Priscilla when she turned 22, his biographers do add that he would often “play with” 14-year-olds during tours. 

With such a man for a muse, what new would Sofia Coppola’s upcoming film offer? We can’t predict for now. But given her previous work on modernist subversive biopic on French queen Marie Antoinette, there is a possibility for Coppola to offer a revisionist story of Elvis and Priscilla, a couple whose romance definitely didn’t age well. 

If Austin Butler indeed wins the Oscar over other frontrunners like Brendan Fraser in The Whale and Colin Farrel in The Banshees of Inisherin, then Elvis and his legend will keep on trending more than ever. 

But then again, many new-generation voices on social media would continue questioning not just Elvis Presley’s behaviour towards women but also the whole angle of him “appropriating” black music genres like the original R&B and Gospel. 

Again, the biopic tries to show Elvis as a sympathetic ally of the Civil Rights Movement and a singer who was just “influenced” by musical performances in black-dominated churches. Still given that Elvis’s Hound Dog is obviously more streamed than Big Mama Thornton’s original version, music critics and historians are not that gentle to Elvis. Not even Buz Luhrmann adding non-white artists like Doja Cat and Swae Lee to the Elvis soundtrack can change this. 

The movie also delves into his friendship with black artists like BB King and some of his fans even argue that he was no "culture vulture" and that his popularity actually opened the door for new black voices but then again these arguments are mostly within the echo chambers of social media. As is the case with many artists being discussed on Twitter, it has turned into a "pick your side" debate.

In his time and the decades after his drug overdose-fueled death, Elvis became synonymous with the word “King”. Even today, many of his ardent fans would continue to crown him King. But even in the wake of endless interpretations of Elvis’s life, it is also worth recognising the darker side of the star (no matter how glimmering Austin Butler’s eyes might be).