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Two Men Who Would Be King - new book compares Evlis Presley and Bill Clinton - Critical Essay

Reason, Feb, 2001 by Paul A. Cantor

Bill Clinton vs. Elvis Presley vs. America

In his latest book, Greil Marcus, one of the nation's preeminent critics of pop culture, deals with--among other things--a man whose life perfectly embodies the classic American success story. And yet that man's public recognition was shadowed by scandals in his private life, reminding us that moral corruption is a price men often pay for fame.

Marcus' primary subject acted out the standard tale of a pop culture celebrity. Coming from humble--even dubious--origins in the deep South, he rose to world prominence. Soon his face could be recognized all around the globe, and he began to think of himself as a kind of king. Surrounded by an entourage of sycophants and other sleazy hangers-on, he indulged in all the excesses modern fame makes available. He came to live in the kind of large mansion he could only dream about in his childhood, a place visited by tourists from all corners of the earth.

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Gradually the figure who fascinates Marcus let his cravings get the better of him. He lost the youthful good looks that were in many ways responsible for his early success and ended up a bloated caricature of himself. He became the subject of vicious imitations on the stage and television; some entertainers even built careers around impersonating him. Eventually his private excesses eclipsed his public achievements. Even his loyal fans were forced to question whether he had squandered the talent evident in his youth.

And yet, several times when people were ready to count him out, he staged remarkable comebacks--often repairing his damaged reputation with a single successful performance in front of the microphones, lights, and cameras. But parents often cringed when this man appeared on television. They did not want their impressionable children exposed to the moral decadence and in particular the uninhibited sexuality he came to represent. They kept hoping the cameras would shoot him from the waist up.

But enough about Bill Clinton. Marcus also discusses Elvis Presley in his new book, Double Trouble. I have placed a different spin on the comparison between Presley and Clinton at the center of this book. Marcus is more sympathetic to Clinton than I am (exactly how much is hard to tell, but elementary mathematics dictates that any positive number is greater than zero). But even Marcus would have to admit that the juxtaposition inevitably works in Presley's favor.

Next to Clinton, Presley looks like a paragon of civic virtue (just compare their military records). And Marcus would surely agree that of the two, Presley has made the more lasting contribution to American culture. If people are still studying 20th-century American history a thousand years from now, perhaps some antiquarian rummaging through what Marcus likes to call the dustbin of history will come across this book, ponder its title, and wonder if this obscure Bill Clinton character happened to be president of the United States when the great Elvis was performing.

However future historians may sort out their judgments of Presley and Clinton, Marcus uses the two figures to plunge us into the 1990s and give us a feel for the decade's cultural politics and its politicized culture. Marcus has an acute eye for significant detail, and he's been one of the most perceptive commentators on the American scene for years. He begins his extended comparison with a simple fact: When Bill Clinton seemed hopelessly out of the presidential race in June 1992, he appeared on Arsenio Hall's television show and played the classic Elvis song "Heartbreak Hotel" on his saxophone.

For Marcus, this was the turning point in Clinton's campaign, the moment when he began to find a way to appeal to the American people, which eventually led to his victory over the exceedingly un-Elvislike George H. Bush. Marcus goes on to explain the many parallels between Presley and Clinton and in the process explores America's fascination with its flawed icons, figures who manage paradoxically to embody both the hope of youthful idealism and the threat of moral corruption.

"As white male southerners without family money (hillbillies, no-counts, white trash--the source of course of much of the identification made between Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley, and of Clinton's own heartfelt or cynical identification of himself with Elvis)," writes Marcus, "Presley and Clinton always had to prove themselves--and they never could, not without abandoning themselves in some essential way, some way that one or the other or both could perhaps desire but never master.... Both Elvis Presley and Bill Clinton reaped all the rewards available in American society except one: moral citizenship.... Our attraction to both is inseparable from our need to prove to ourselves that we are different from them--to prove that if we will never rise so high, we would never sink so low."

Double Trouble is a selection of Marcus' '90s journalism--chosen from his monthly column in Interview magazine, along with articles he wrote for such venues as The New York Times, Die Zeit, Esquire, and Rolling Stone. The most sustained piece in the volume, which neatly sums up his thesis, is the 20-page text of a talk called "The Last Laugh" he delivered as the keynote address at a conference on "Elvis: The State of his Art" at the University of Memphis in 1998. Some readers may at first have trouble seeing the connections between individual sections of the book and be put off by the way Marcus' argument appears to fragment. But in fact he orchestrates the book like a musician, turning what seem like abrupt transitions into subtle comments on cultural/political parallels.

Two Men Who Would Be King - new book compares Evlis Presley and Bill Clinton - Critical Essay

Reason, Feb, 2001 by Paul A. Cantor

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