Elvis has left the building...
Essay-satire
Elvis has left the building…
“I was always a distinct no-one, whose fiercest wish was to be an indistinct someone.”
John Banville in his new novel “The Sea”
Banville’s old-man narrator in the just released The Sea is talking about an inferiority complex. This is a keeping up with the Joneses kind of thing, which is such a sad yearning that so many of us succumb to. It’s as if we need to invent fresh boots to kick ourselves with nightly and the ambition isn’t even grand enough to want to stand out as exceptional! We are content, according to Banville’s narrator, to merely pass as “successful” so that no-one laughs at us behind their masks of propriety. We don’t want our prominence to be too clearly understood in its particulars as that would hardly be awe-inspiring and possibly get in the way.
If we decide to agree with old Banville for a moment, isn’t this then a fig-leaf kind of success we’re after- being both good enough and unremarkable at the same time? It may really be a yearning for freedom in disguise but I’ll be damned if I can a get anyone to admit it! Everyone likes to go around saying they’re “fine, just fine”. But Banville’s old man needs to explain how come he can see his no-oneness so clearly when most of us can’t even see our someoneness that we are assured and reassured decidedly exists!
What we observe, to our discomfiture and chagrin - looking up and down, left and right, on the road of substance, are lots of Flash Harrys - well, flashing by. And what we want to know is how they do it, all these indistinct someones who know how to flash by when we don’t.
Other traditions go into different parts of the garden. We have the compelling fantasy of The Invisible Man read in childhood in which H.G. Wells created that sweet bushy-tailed scientist who concocts a potion (but no antidote) that renders him completely invisible forever and this being not there gradually turns the gentle genius into a homicidal maniac. He can’t accept that the very thing he’s invented hasn’t actually erased him and thereby hangs the whole tale. Most poignantly, he becomes visible once again, like magic-ink, only in death when he meets his premature and tragic end by misadventure.
In the same section of the garden is the Oscar winning musical Chicago wherein you have the cuckolded husband of the Roxie character singing Mister Cellophane in clown make-up lamenting his nobodyness. Hard going on the heartstrings as this is, the shrewd will identify that stuff like this happens when reach exceeds grasp and dullards aspire to Roxies! The Cellophane guy may have been perfectly happy if only he had picked on someone his own size, but, as we know, the rivulets of love don’t always flow where they should.
This theme of misfit-induced agony has been around so long that we’ve perhaps grown a little blasé about it. A dark comedy staple is about the old-lusting-after-the-young memorably showcased in Josef von Strindberg’s B/W classic The Blue Angel. Generations of art-film buffs, particularly in their acne-ridden teenage years, have squirmed in anguish for the hapless and horribly humiliated professor played by Emil Jannings. There he is, fat and sixty - prancing and panting in a chicken suit for the amusement of a bored, brassy but oh-so-sexy Marlene Dietrich. This film created Dietrich and she set off for Hollywood and an international career the same day The Blue Angel premiered on April 1, 1930. Emil Jannings? We don’t know what became of him but why does it seem so appropriate?
Still, around this particular garden, you soon realise that visibility is less than half the story. The winners don’t end up taking all. That some people grow richer and more successful than others is true enough but the mystery is in the suffering that is spread pretty evenly like Marmite on the no-ones and someones alike. This is baffling in the extreme and panic inducing too. Isn’t success meant to be the greatest revenge? Are there to be no celestial trumpeters announcing our new status as henceforth free-from-all-worldly-harm now that we have crossed over and have the brass ring firmly in our grasp? But, in effect, we find that many successful people are far from happy.
Take a look, for instance, at the other side of the same garden where, metaphorically speaking, you have these giant permaglo-color flowers that have a presence that even death cannot subdue! The owners of legendary success are many but let’s just take one that cannot be denied. And in talking of Elvis I want to mention only the love that he inspired rather than his very many accomplishments. The soul of a singer is in his singing and in his live performances. Elvis evoked such adoration that long after his encores, his dressing room champagne and pills time and even after the tail lights of his Cadillac had winked away Memphisward - the announcers would still be at it, intoning that Elvis had indeed left the building. So to me, writing this decades after Elvis went skywards, the point is not about presence and absence but about being no-one and someone at the same time. I think we all have this in common with Elvis and that is why we belong in the same garden, Banville’s old man, the unnamed Flash Harrys, H.G.’s invisible one, Mr. Cellophane, Emil Jannings, You and I.
(924 words)
By Ghatotkach
20 May 2005
Banville’s old-man narrator in the just released The Sea is talking about an inferiority complex. This is a keeping up with the Joneses kind of thing, which is such a sad yearning that so many of us succumb to. It’s as if we need to invent fresh boots to kick ourselves with nightly and the ambition isn’t even grand enough to want to stand out as exceptional! We are content, according to Banville’s narrator, to merely pass as “successful” so that no-one laughs at us behind their masks of propriety. We don’t want our prominence to be too clearly understood in its particulars as that would hardly be awe-inspiring and possibly get in the way.
If we decide to agree with old Banville for a moment, isn’t this then a fig-leaf kind of success we’re after- being both good enough and unremarkable at the same time? It may really be a yearning for freedom in disguise but I’ll be damned if I can a get anyone to admit it! Everyone likes to go around saying they’re “fine, just fine”. But Banville’s old man needs to explain how come he can see his no-oneness so clearly when most of us can’t even see our someoneness that we are assured and reassured decidedly exists!
What we observe, to our discomfiture and chagrin - looking up and down, left and right, on the road of substance, are lots of Flash Harrys - well, flashing by. And what we want to know is how they do it, all these indistinct someones who know how to flash by when we don’t.
Other traditions go into different parts of the garden. We have the compelling fantasy of The Invisible Man read in childhood in which H.G. Wells created that sweet bushy-tailed scientist who concocts a potion (but no antidote) that renders him completely invisible forever and this being not there gradually turns the gentle genius into a homicidal maniac. He can’t accept that the very thing he’s invented hasn’t actually erased him and thereby hangs the whole tale. Most poignantly, he becomes visible once again, like magic-ink, only in death when he meets his premature and tragic end by misadventure.
In the same section of the garden is the Oscar winning musical Chicago wherein you have the cuckolded husband of the Roxie character singing Mister Cellophane in clown make-up lamenting his nobodyness. Hard going on the heartstrings as this is, the shrewd will identify that stuff like this happens when reach exceeds grasp and dullards aspire to Roxies! The Cellophane guy may have been perfectly happy if only he had picked on someone his own size, but, as we know, the rivulets of love don’t always flow where they should.
This theme of misfit-induced agony has been around so long that we’ve perhaps grown a little blasé about it. A dark comedy staple is about the old-lusting-after-the-young memorably showcased in Josef von Strindberg’s B/W classic The Blue Angel. Generations of art-film buffs, particularly in their acne-ridden teenage years, have squirmed in anguish for the hapless and horribly humiliated professor played by Emil Jannings. There he is, fat and sixty - prancing and panting in a chicken suit for the amusement of a bored, brassy but oh-so-sexy Marlene Dietrich. This film created Dietrich and she set off for Hollywood and an international career the same day The Blue Angel premiered on April 1, 1930. Emil Jannings? We don’t know what became of him but why does it seem so appropriate?
Still, around this particular garden, you soon realise that visibility is less than half the story. The winners don’t end up taking all. That some people grow richer and more successful than others is true enough but the mystery is in the suffering that is spread pretty evenly like Marmite on the no-ones and someones alike. This is baffling in the extreme and panic inducing too. Isn’t success meant to be the greatest revenge? Are there to be no celestial trumpeters announcing our new status as henceforth free-from-all-worldly-harm now that we have crossed over and have the brass ring firmly in our grasp? But, in effect, we find that many successful people are far from happy.
Take a look, for instance, at the other side of the same garden where, metaphorically speaking, you have these giant permaglo-color flowers that have a presence that even death cannot subdue! The owners of legendary success are many but let’s just take one that cannot be denied. And in talking of Elvis I want to mention only the love that he inspired rather than his very many accomplishments. The soul of a singer is in his singing and in his live performances. Elvis evoked such adoration that long after his encores, his dressing room champagne and pills time and even after the tail lights of his Cadillac had winked away Memphisward - the announcers would still be at it, intoning that Elvis had indeed left the building. So to me, writing this decades after Elvis went skywards, the point is not about presence and absence but about being no-one and someone at the same time. I think we all have this in common with Elvis and that is why we belong in the same garden, Banville’s old man, the unnamed Flash Harrys, H.G.’s invisible one, Mr. Cellophane, Emil Jannings, You and I.
(924 words)
By Ghatotkach
20 May 2005
posted by GHATOTKACHSERIES @ 12:07 AM
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