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I’m almost a year behind, but I finally watched the movie Elvis, which was released in June of 2022. It is up for eight Oscar nominations and is back in some theaters near my house, so you will be hearing more about it. The star of the movie, Austin Butler, is up for Best Actor, and the movie itself is up for Best Picture.
As you would expect, there is a lot of drugs and alcohol in the movie. That’s why I am reviewing it here. As I have done in the past, I will give it a standard movie review that is similar to reviews you might read elsewhere, but I also try to assess the way addiction and recovery are shown in the movie. In this case, there is no recovery. I hope I’m not spoiling anything here for people, but Elvis Presley died a pretty ugly death at age 42, on his bathroom floor. The official cause of death was cardiac arrest, but multiple studies of the lab reports over the years have said that drugs were a significant part of what killed Elvis. One lab found 14 different drugs in his system, according to Wikipedia.
Okay, so the movie itself: I was pretty underwhelmed. It’s glitzy and does some very cool visual things. I also think Butler is quite impressive as Elvis, including his performances. As I watched it, I couldn’t imagine another human being on earth doing a better job than what Butler does. Tom Hanks is in the movie, playing Elvis’ controversial manager, Colonel Tom Parker. Hanks has mostly gotten big thumbs down, and I was thrown off the entire movie listening to his strange accent that seems to come and go at times. But I didn’t hate his performance as much as some people did—to me, it was more bad casting than anything else.
But the story is often times a mile wide and an inch deep. Director Baz Luhrrman made the decision to try to tell Elvis’ entire life in this movie, rather than one chapter, so it speeds through Elvis’ life, and that makes all the supporting characters along the way cardboard cutouts of real people. I do wonder what kind of movie we might have gotten if the entire film was centered around, say, the making of his infamous Christmas album, rather than his four decades.
Now let me address the addiction part of the story. I really thought they portrayed addiction in an accurate, affecting way. The tendency with Hollywood is to simplify addiction stories down to very 1+1=2 stories. Scriptwriters will take one traumatic event—loss of a loved one, a sexual assault, a painful divorce—and then voila, an alcoholic or drug addict is born. In my experience, addiction is usually a lot more complicated than one singular bad thing that caused it all. I get why writers do that. It’s a clean, easily-explained thing you can point to as the thing that changed the person, but in my life, I have seen addiction to usually be a complex mix of factors that all swirl and team up to cause the spiral into addiction.
With Elvis, the movie shows him with some alcoholism around him as a kid, and then we see him turn into a big star who needs the adoration of crowds. The crowds fill him up, and his manager weaponizes that throughout the movie. He needs people to love him, to fill that bottomless pit inside him. But, as is usually the case, the bottomless pit can’t be filled up with anything external. Elvis starts in on hardcore drugs, uppers and downers around the clock, and that doesn’t work either. He also has all sorts of affairs, and that doesn’t fill the void, either.
I really identified with that idea that so many of us addicts try to feel complete. I wasn’t exactly Elvis Presley, but I always thought if I could find the perfect combination of drugs, alcohol, love, professional success and so on that I would feel content in the world. When I began to go overboard on drugs and alcohol, I started to think if I could be good at my job and have a great marriage, then maybe I wouldn’t need the drugs and alcohol any more. It was a cloudy mess in my head, because it was a cloudy mess of substance abuse and overrating what romance or professional success could ever do for me. Trust me, I know now that if I had a perfect marriage and was the absolute best in the world at the perfect job… it wouldn’t have mattered. I had a spiritual pit inside me that had to be filled with spiritual things.
Unfortunately, Elvis never got a chance at sobriety. He died at age 42, and he was suffering by the end. I can’t say I loved the movie—let’s give it a C for a grade—but I did think they did an impressive job capturing the concept of more not being better. And because it was Elvis Presley, a king in so many ways, with so much money and adoration and success and material stuff and people who loved him, that really was a boost to my recovery. It’s a reminder that there is no amount of fame or fortune or romance that can ever make me complete. It’s an inside job.
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
"I have to do things that get my mind off myself and out of the center of the universe. It's too crowded, anyway."
(Credit: AA Grapevine, by Jim F. of Tasmania, September 2008)
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