Gosh, it’s long but Elvis film has a message

THE new film about Elvis Presley lasted so many hours that my beard was visibly longer and bushier at the end of it than it had been at the beginning. Other members of the audience were actually brought meals on trays by cinema staff, to sustain them during the screening. I wouldn’t have been surprised if stretcher-bearers had been called before the end, to carry away the stunned and the exhausted.

Which is a pity, because we need to know about Elvis. Like the Beatles, he was as important as Lenin and Mao in overthrowing the existing order. Human behaviour, especially in Western countries, changed totally, especially in its attitudes towards sex and marriage, thanks to such people.

The world after Elvis was utterly different from the world before him. The crabby old Southern politicians and police chiefs who tried and failed to stop him or to control his concerts were pretty unlovely, but they instantly understood that this was a revolution.

But it wasn’t conscious on Elvis’s part. I don’t think he had much in the way of politics and as far as I know, he wasn’t exactly liberal in his views. I don’t think the Beatles or the Rolling Stones started out with any opinions, either, though they certainly developed them later. What was it that made girls scream and grab at Elvis’s pink suits? I’m not sure, though Frank Sinatra had the same effect on an earlier generation, and he was never accused of doing wild things with his hips, as far as I know. So did the Beatles, and they also are not famous for wiggling their pelvises. Yet the screaming and loss of control at their early concerts was so wild that nobody could hear what they were singing. My suspicion is that centuries of Christianity had more or less buried fierce passions that were well-known to the ancient Greeks and Romans.

And that somehow, maybe just in the curl of a lip or a surly scowl, or in some rediscovered combination of sounds, Sinatra, Presley and the others unlocked those passions again, so accidentally transforming the world. We will find out in time if our ancestors had good reasons for trying to keep such things under control, for the post-Elvis age has really only just begun.