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Before there were memes, there was graffiti, and in the 1980s and ’90s you’d sometimes see the anagram “Elvis Lives” scrawled in spray paint around this or that city or town. It was a furtive declaration with an unclear meaning. Was it a reference to the popular conspiracy theory that Elvis hadn’t really died on August 16, 1977, at age 42, but was instead hiding away somewhere, living a happy, secluded life as a private citizen? Or did it mean that after his death, the molecules of energy he’d left behind had simply taken another living shape? As the critic Greil Marcus put it in his 1991 book Dead Elvis, “The enormity of his impact on culture, on millions of people, was never really clear when he was alive; it was mostly hidden. When he died, the event was a kind of explosion that went off silently, in minds and hearts; out of that explosion came many fragments, edging slowly into the light, taking shape, changing shape again and again as the years went on.” Elvis died one death, only to spring back in an infinite number of forms, as uncountable as the stars in the sky.
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But sometimes, Elvis goes a little underground—he’s never fully forgotten, but his reformed molecules, jiggling away in their eternal Brownian motion, can grow a little hazy. Within the past few years, it’s Baz Luhrmann who has done the most to bring them back into focus, first with his fantastically unruly 2022 biopic Elvis, starring Austin Butler, and now with a film that’s less a documentary than a kind of spiritual conjuring. Luhrmann’s EPiC, short for Elvis Presley in Concert, is constructed of previously unreleased footage Luhrmann’s researchers found when they were looking for material the director might use in Elvis: this trove, 59 hours’ worth of performance and interview material, had been languishing in a Warner Bros. film vault located, according to the movie’s press notes, in an underground salt mine in Kansas. (Where else?) In addition,…
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