Return of the King: The Fall and Rise of Elvis Presley
Conan pulls a Keyser Söze
At first glance, Return of the King: The Fall and Rise of Elvis Presley (2024) seems like a typical documentary.
It starts with a voiceover laying out the stakes for what came to be known as the ‘68 Comeback Special. There’s tense, staccato music, similar to the beginning of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself,” playing in the background as Jerry Shilling, a member of the Memphis Mafia, Elvis’s entourage, explains this is a low point in his career. Elvis’s movies have flopped, and his albums aren’t selling. He hasn’t had a #1 song in five years and hasn’t performed on stage in seven.
Later, we learn that the Beatles and the Rolling Stones have already usurped his place in pop culture. We even see Ringo do a mocking, spastic Elvis impersonation. (Have you hit rock bottom when of all the Beatles, it’s Ringo who’s taking the piss out of you?)
Shilling says, “If Elvis did not give the greatest performance of his career, it was the end.” This sounds like hyperbole, but I don’t know anything about Elvis since the Baz Luhrmann biopic I had wanted to watch wasn’t on any of my streaming services. So, I can only accept Shilling’s assessment and the documentary’s premise as valid.
Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, Robbie Robertson (the guy who wrote Up on Cripple Creek) describes early Elvis as a dangerous, elemental force. We see black and white footage of Elvis on stage, with an audience of young women losing their minds and a couple of guys mixed in too, many of them experiencing what must have been an unexpected awakening.
So far, this is a fairly standard documentary, stitched together with interviews. We have people who knew him intimately (Priscilla) or performed with him (Barbara Eden and Darlene Love). We hear from historians with Scandinavian vowels in their names (Ernst Jørgensen), writers (Wright Thompson), record executives (John Jackson), and others we could plausibly consider to be experts (Baz Luhrmann). The documentary is rounded out with musicians who were shaped by Elvis (Springsteen and Billy Corgan from the Smashing Pumpkins).
But then, about 15 minutes into a perfectly normal documentary, Conan O’Brien shows up. He does an impersonation of his mom, who found Elvis disgusting. He makes her sound a little bit like Nixon. Then, he goes away.
Conan returns 15 minutes later to explain the significance of the TV special Sinatra hosted when Elvis returned from the army. Sinatra reintroduced Elvis to the country after his stint in Germany and welcomed him into the club. However, according to Conan, to be accepted into the mainstream, Elvis had to give up something: “Because in order to get into the club, you also have to give up ‘This person’s dangerous.’ ‘This person’s a threat.’ ‘My daughter might run off with this guy.’ That’s over. It’s almost like a negotiated settlement.”
Conan keeps returning after 15-minute intervals, bringing with him nuggets of insight into Elvis’s career and psyche. The next time he returns, he tells us that for much of the '60s, Elvis was stuck in a bad movie deal and forced to churn out awful Hollywood movies. Conan notes he was “completely isolated from anything that fed him,” that is, performing for and connecting with audiences.
Another time, Conan delves into Elvis’s motivations and insecurities. He claims Elvis was motivated by the fear of failure and voices his insecurities in a distinctly Conan tone: “They probably like the Beatles. They like Janis Joplin or Jimi Hendrix. No one’s going to care.”
Conan insists that despite the “hipshaking and big hair,” Elvis is a very shy, sensitive person, and, at this point, I get it. Elvis isn’t the only flamboyant performer with a signature pompadour. The pieces are starting to fit together like at the end of The Usual Suspects. Conan isn’t telling us about Elvis; he’s been telling us about himself this whole time.
His mother, a Yale-educated lawyer and a good Irish Catholic woman, was disgusted by his early work, which featured a masturbating bear and a licentious handpuppet that humped real dogs at the Westminister Dog Show. He’s telling us why he had to drop the edgy elements of his comedy as he became more successful and eventually joined the club as the host of The Tonight Show. He is talking about the isolation he experienced when he lost the show, but more crucially, lost the audience that fed him. Conan is confessing his own fears about losing relevance as audiences grow younger.
To whom could he really be referring besides himself when he explains how the comeback special’s intimate setting allowed Elvis to connect with the audience and draw from them “the thing that he loves and that was the reason for it all… It was ‘cause that lights him up. That’s lit him up since he was a kid.” Conan doesn’t know enough about Elvis as a kid to speak about him in these Citizen Kane terms. He can only be talking about himself.
The last thing Conan says is that the ‘68 Comeback Special opened the door to the final stage of Elvis’s career: “All of the great showbiz stories have to have more than one act. The real great ones have three acts. This special gives him a third act.” Conan is entering his third act, and he hijacked this documentary because he wants us to know it.
Return of the King: The Fall and Rise of Elvis Presley
Directed by Jason Hehir
2024
90 minutes
English
Recommended way to watch (at time of publication): Netflix
You’ll like this if you like: The Usual Suspects (1995)