Plantation Rock
Forty years later, Elvis is still dead.
For a long time, I've wanted to watch all of Elvis Presley's movies and try to draw some conclusions about co-optation, dissipation, cultural fantasy, and the evolution of celebrity media as the 1960s proceeded. There is something so overtly perfunctory about these movies — Presley made more than 30 of them in less than a decade and a half, sometimes shooting three a year, often in a drug-addled, distracted state per Peter Guralnick's account in Careless Love. But precisely because they were taking the most expedient route to a quick buck, they reveal something about what sort of buttons were the easiest for cultural products to push then.
By the mid-1960s, the "Elvis movie" was a genre unto itself. Even if you've never seen one, you probably have a sense of what they are: Elvis is generally in some sunny Technicolor vacation spot, playing a race-car driver, pilot, or boat captain. Usually he has a pointedly generic name (Chad Gates, Charlie Rodgers, Mike Edwards, Rick Richards), as if the screenwriters didn't want to distract the audience from the fact that he was just Elvis being Elvis. He lip-syncs lots of songs, makes out with several different women, gets into a homoerotic fistfight or two with a rival, serves as a nonthreatening babysitter for some children (often nonwhite children, as if he were a walking synecdoche for paternalist imperialism), and eventually overcomes his money troubles and chooses a wife.
That the movies were formulaic was no secret to anyone involved: According to John Lennon, when the Beatles met Elvis in 1965, they asked him if he was coming up with an idea for his next movie; he replied, "I sure am. I play a country boy with a guitar who meets a few gals along the way, and I sing a few songs."
Though he was making millions for starring in these films, Presley would eventually complain about being trapped by interminable contracts on studio lots, forced to sing dumb songs and play lackadaisically written roles in dreck like Harum Scarum while being kept from live performance. Tom Parker, his manager, seemed to have the idea that to maximize the box office for Elvis movies, Elvis should make as few public appearances offscreen as possible. Music videos or the distribution channels for them didn't yet exist; there was only the cinema and television, and movies paid more.
The movies popularized the songs, which popularized the movies and on, generating a happy cross-promotional spiral, as Guralnick notes. The films mainly just allow fans to see Elvis doing the sorts of things they want to see Elvis doing — singing, dancing, appearing shirtless or in tight clothes — with as little intrusion as possible from the plot.
But these movies still have plots, and that is what mainly fascinates me about them. The economics of the entertainment business then and the products it was equipped to distribute demanded that Elvis make movies and these movies have stories, and that professional writers must find something for "Mike McCoy" to do when he wasn't singing, kissing, or fighting. They are flimsy pretenses, but the flimsier they are, the more effective they become.
In Hard Core, Linda Williams argues that "part of the pleasure of the movie musical resides in the tension between these different discursive registers" — the narrative and the musical number — "each seeking to establish its own equilibrium." In Elvis's musicals, the numbers rarely "restate or resolve the problems posed by the narrative" in a convincing way; the tension instead is in how detached they appear, which appears to underline Elvis's singularity as a singer: his talent is so important, he must be afforded songs to sing despite their narrative nonsensicality.
That said, the throwaway parts of the plot are probably the least innocent aspects of these films; they gratuitously trade in cultural stereotypes for reasons that seem to exceed the need to put Elvis on display. Rather, they place Elvis within a context where he can serve as the presiding spirit over an empty and homogeneous would-be luxury "utopia," where nobody has ideas or expresses opinions, where race serves as a sure marker of class position, gender roles are fixed and absolute, and no songs are protest songs because the idea of resistance can't even be formulated in diagetic terms.
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Given that everything in an Elvis movie already feels like filler, it can be hard to believe that some material was actually edited out of them. What are the guidelines for making those decisions when narrative coherence is ruled out? The producers must have fallen back on ideology, felt as an instinct for what was and wasn't appealing to their imagined audience of teen Elvis fans.
When I first read about the song "Plantation Rock" being cut from the 1962 film Girls! Girls! Girls! I naively assumed, without thinking too long about it, that it was because someone found it inappropriate. The lyrics play on the "proslavery plantation pastoralism" that Saidiya Hartman describes in Scenes of Subjection, the way the spectacle of enslaved people dancing (frequently under coercion) was used to excuse or rationalize the practice of slavery. "You'll wanna dance around the clock" if "you do it as you were shown."
Hartman writes:
the simulated jollity and coerced festivity of the slave trade and the instrumental recreations of plantation management document the investment in and obsession with "black enjoyment" and the significance of these orchestrated amusements as part of a larger effort to dissimulate the extreme violence of the institution and disavow the pain of captivity. Indeed, the transubstantiation of abjection into contentment suggested that the traumas of slavery were easily redressed.
Needless to say, it unlikely that this sort of concern led to "Plantation Rock" being cut. Elvis movies have no shortage of scenes that not only revolve around racist stereotypes but specifically make an egregious spectacle of people of color ostensibly "enjoying" their debasement.
In Elvis movies, these people of color are rarely black. Black people are not shown in roles of abasement because they are generally not shown at all. It may have been a different sort of perceived inappropriateness that drove the decision to cut "Plantation Rock" — a desire to counter the view that Presley appropriated black musical traditions and approaches. If he were to be viable as a cinematic idol, it may have been that producers felt he needed to be insulated: If Elvis is onscreen with black actors, or even trading in racist stereotypes about black people, it would remind audiences how he rose to fame white-washing "race music" and raise the question of what fueled audiences' desire for such a cross-over.
An earlier Elvis movie, the Western drama Flaming Star (the name was changed late in the process from Black Star, forcing Presley to re-record the title song), seems to address Presley's cultural hybridity more directly: Elvis, in what's generally regarded as his last credible attempt to be a serious actor, plays a half white, half Kiowa rancher who tries and fails to mediate in a conflict between whites and indigenous people. This film's relative failure meant Elvis movies would stick to sunshine and bikinis for the most part for the next seven years.
In the subsequent films, Elvis would be no more than Elvis, and his milieu would be what the producers decided Elvis fans wanted, for Elvis to stand in for a particular fantasy of what adult life would hold. This entailed not the possibility of racial integration but the extrapolation of a deeply segregated world to its implicit conclusion. The movies seem to promise an exculpatory escape for those living with and committed to segregation, dealing with the cognitive dissonance and injustice of it, by equating the ambiance of "pop" with whiteness and erasing blackness entirely. When these movies evoke nostalgia for audiences, it's not for the world they show, which never existed, but for the ability to commit such erasures without censure.
Elvis films are not Confederate monuments exactly, but they are memorials to a fantasy of white supremacy. Maybe they can't be taken down, but certainly they should be viewed in that light, if at all.