did elvis really die?
The King is dead. Long live the king.
Did Elvis really die? There are, after all, some suspicious minds out there who believe that Elvis lives. They may not be the same people exactly who believe that Princess Diana was assassinated on orders from Buckingham Palace, but they have something in common. Elvis, along with Diana, JFK, John Lennon, and Marilyn Monroe, had something so special, an aura so mesmerising, that the thought of his death is, to some, intolerable.
The conspiracy theories that have grown up around Elvis can be seen as a symptom of ‘denial’: I wish he hadn’t died, so I fabricate alternative explanations to shelter me from the painful truth. It’s a way of coping with life in Heartbreak Hotel. As a concept, denial, now so familiar, dates back to Sigmund Freud. According to him, we are born into the world as pure ego, and the ego just wants to feel good, going out of its way to avoid anything that might upset it. Later we acquire the ability to take other people into account, to socialise, or even be altruistic, but denial can always flare up as a throwback to that childish state. It may be crude, but it is one of the ego’s chief ruses for blocking out ‘unpleasure’, as Freud calls it - the psychoanalytic equivalent of the ostrich burying its head in the sand.
Less familiar, but just as relevant to the passing of Elvis, is Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia. Melancholia - today we might call it depression - affects us when we haven’t grieved properly, when we have lost a loved one and not fully internalised them. The dead figure hovers at a distance, like a plastic Elvis on the dashboard, a constant reminder. Mourning, by contrast, is the more successful process because, over time, the lost person gets taken inside ourselves, and life can carry on: in the best possible way, we forget. The King is dead, long live the King. In other words, those individuals who believe that Elvis lives, might be melancholics. Rather than having mourned and achieved closure by absorbing the memory of Elvis, burying him way down in their minds, they keep him alive.
Freud’s notion of ‘melancholia’ can be applied not only to the individual, but to the nation. If Elvis has become such an icon of America, it may be to do with a melancholia of the US as a whole. The youthful, snake-hipped, erogenous Elvis stands for a golden age in America’s own history, so if Elvis gets remembered so ardently, it is partly because of a need to hang on to that idea, or ideal, of America. In Greek, nostalgia means ‘pain for the past’, a melancholia that the US hasn’t quite got beyond. Instead of having mourned for Elvis, the plethora of impersonators suggests an ongoing melancholia, or a ‘denial’ of the middle-age of the US, which itself is increasingly associated with the obese, drug-dependent and paranoid figure that Elvis became. When pilgrims stop visiting Gracelands, America will have begun to mourn properly, and to grow up.
Slavoj Zizek, a third-generation disciple of Freud, might have a slightly different take. It’s not so much that Elvis stands for a lost ideal, but that he can be made to stand for anything. It doesn’t matter who Elvis was: people just need some figure to relate to. The mind is like an alcove, a shrine waiting for its statue; or, taking an equally apposite image, it is like a doughnut, where the hole in the middle is what allows us to want things, long for things, desire things. ‘Elvis’ is meaningless - he merely reflects the absence at the centre of our minds, but at least he lets us practise our desire on him, as if he is crooning ‘Love me tender’ into our innermost ear. That has a more sinister implication, of course, and Zizek writes about how it is possible for extremist leaders such as Hitler to be believed in. The psyche would rather someone fill the gap, even with something malign, than not have it filled at all. Filling the gap allows the psyche to desire, which is our most fundamental instinct. This is why we are able to feel burning love even for what is ostensibly evil.
So if someone believes that Elvis lives, they are likely to be more sad than mad, and part of their sadness is a longing, which is what the psyche is all about. In this sense, it might even be more ‘normal’ to believe that Elvis does live than that he doesn’t. After all, human beings are capable of belief, not just reason, just as they are capable of fantasy, dreams and imagination. It’s one of the things that defines us and, for all we know, sets us apart from other creatures (do blackbirds believe? do ants dream? do tuna imagine a different life?).
But saying all this flies in the face of conventional wisdom and more traditional philosophy, which tends to start at the other end. If you were a thinker of the Enlightenment, for example, an Isaac Newton or a Bishop Berkeley, you’d say it’s completely irrational to believe that Elvis lives: not only is there no evidence that he does, there is evidence to the contrary. What’s more, it is the faculty of reason, not belief, that sets us humans apart. Believing in Elvis’s still living is a failure of reason and therefore a failure of humanity. Not sad, but mad, after all.
But there is a catch. Those Enlightenment thinkers, living in the largely Christian Europe of the 18th century, then run up against the problem of how to account for God. To them, it’s essential that we use the light of reason to conquer and convert the dark continent of belief, which is primitive. But without belief, how can you believe in God? In modern terms, the very thing that makes you able to believe that Elvis lives, is what allows you, in the absence of conclusive evidence, to believe that Jesus lives too. Belief is the joker that can always be played against science (and perhaps it is no accident that in the fundamentalist deep south of America, Elvis and Jesus are practically neighbours).
How did the thinkers of the Enlightenment overcome this problem? The truth is, it divided them. Some argued that God himself was a scientist, and that the universe was rational, the result of ‘intelligent design’. The earth and the planets, motion and eyesight, cause and effect, work on the laws of physics, which are objective. They are self-evidently godly. That relieves you of having to believe in God, which would be a fallback to superstition. Others said it was illegitimate to infer the existence of God from the construction, rational or otherwise, of the universe. If there is no evidence for God, there is no God, full stop. The allegedly ‘rationalist’ justification of God was a dressing-up of the same old mumbo-jumbo.
Today the question, ‘Did Elvis really die?’ also divides people. Most believe he did, of course, but a minority (mad, sad or both) believe he’s out there. It is a question about belief, and it defines modern times as much as it defined the 18th century. The fact that some people believe Elvis lives, and that, up to a point, we indulge them, suggests we are caught between two systems, the subjective and the objective. Western modernity has founded itself on the twin principles of individual freedom (you’re entitled to believe Elvis lives) and scientific or technical progress (we’ve got more and more reliable ways of proving that he’s dead). But these twins are essentially at war, and Immanuel Kant, who probably represents the climax of Enlightenment thinking, would have been horrified. Letting people believe in Elvis’s survival is the thin end of the wedge: we’ll never create a universal set of norms that could provide the foundation of society.
Personally, I believe that Elvis does live on. It’s to do with his name. You may have noticed that ‘Elvis’ is an anagram of ‘lives’ - just the sort of coincidence that sustains conspiracy theory - but that’s not the point (it’s also an anagram of ‘evils’ and ‘veils’, two further words that seem pregnant with meaning). For all its distinctiveness, the name ‘Elvis’ has some generic properties. Like any name, it can be evoked in the absence of its owner. Elvis himself doesn’t need to be here for me to mention him, and you, dear reader, do not need to have him thrusting his pelvis at you, to know who I’m talking about.
It doesn’t even matter that Elvis is dead (and I believe that he is), because his death doesn’t stop me referring to him, thanks to his name. Without his name, I couldn’t write this essay, and you wouldn’t know what I was going on about. We say that a name ‘belongs’ to someone, but the truth is, Elvis is no longer around to claim his name, and even when he was alive he couldn’t stop people referring to him. On the contrary, he was famous, which requires having something by which you can be referred to when you’re not around: a name. After all, it’s going to be hard to get to you.
A name allows people to talk about us when we’re not there, and even after we’ve gone to the great jailhouse in the sky. And they don’t have to wait until we’re dead. From the moment we are given a name, it is taken away from us. Even though it’s my name, the word I probably feel the most ownership of, it is already public property, something that can do away with me. My name implies that I will die: it not only will survive me, it has already begun to. I am mortal, but in principle my name could live forever.
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