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
Plantation Rock
Plantation Rock
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