(Editor’s note: In an interview with the Commercial Appeal, Elvis director Baz Luhrmann discussed references in his new movie to Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane and discusses the lead characters. Special thanks to Wellenet veteran Colmena for bringing this article to our attention.)
The movie opens with Colonel Tom dying in his hospital bed. I almost hesitate to bring this up, because people wince at comparisons to Kane, often regarded as the greatest movie ever made, but the imagery in this opening, the structure that follows, suggest Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, also a story of a poor child who becomes an internationally famous but tragic millionaire. At one point Colonel Tom is reflected in a snow globe like the one that Kane breaks that set off his memories. Are you intentionally referencing Citizen Kane?
That is a nod. We shoot him falling through the snow globe. A lot of these things are just baked into my DNA because of the diet of movies I was brought up on. I was in an isolated place and we had a black-and-white TV and in those days one channel was just movies, it was considered filler. But yeah, there’s a bit of a Kane nod.
In Kane, the Joseph Cotten character says of Kane, “All he ever wanted out of life… was love… He just didn’t have any to give.” He tells Kane, “You just want to persuade people that you love ’em so much that they ought to love you back.” In Elvis, Elvis has the opposite problem, according to Colonel Tom. In his narration, addressed to the movie audience, he says: “I’ll tell you what killed him. It was love. His love for you… He was addicted to the love he felt from you on stage…”
The Colonel tells the story, but what he’s doing, he’s really arguing, “I didn’t kill Elvis, but I know who did.” What that is is a whodunnit structure. And I think the genius of Kane, for all its brilliance, it’s a whodunnit. Because it starts of course with, something happens, a guy whispers a word, “Rosebud,” and you go, “What’s that?” And a bunch of journalists are all sitting around a projection room and they go, “OK, we need the story, what’s the story,” and that sets us off on a journey that compels us through a life, a life that is very vast and compressed in three acts. There is something of that in the movie I’ve made. “I didn’t kill him, but I know who did.” So let’s go on that journey and find out how he ends up there, and we end up going back to (Elvis’) childhood, we see his progression, we see the way that that snowman and the showman meet, their ascension, they fly too close to the sun — and then the tragic demise of it.
Both movies essentially blame love — the striving for it, the lack of it or the excess of it — for the deaths of their characters.
Both, for different reasons, are children who for one reason or another feel they have a hole in their heart. With Elvis, it’s the shame of the dad going to jail, living in East Tupelo — which as you know is the poorest of the poor — then losing his mom when he did. Always this hole in his heart, always searching, always needing extra love. There’s two ways of getting that. If you’re gifted and can sing and can entertain, then you have mass ways of unconditional love coming across the footlights. If you’re Kane, then you can literally use power to get it. But of course in both cases it’s diminishing returns, it doesn’t fill the hole. And in fact pathos, the Greek notion of pathos, would mean the more of it you get, the bigger the hole is. So your need for it is greater. It’s like being a junkie for love.
Both characters compensate by accumulating stuff, for Graceland or for Xanadu….
More stuff, more this, more that. They never feel ultimately loved and it destroys them.
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