But such intimacy is short lived. It soon sets
and freezes, for Graceland is above all an
abstraction. Striving for the universal,
pretending to belong to everyone, it reaches no
one in particular, which is the price to pay, I
believe, when the private is made public. At
Graceland, memory has become stale,
depersonalised. A marketable memory. Graceland
deliberately sets aside Elvis, the man, in
favour of Elvis, the commodity. Graceland,
despite its origin, is an artificial place, a
memory built from scratch.
It does not
result from a spontaneous upsurge, a natural
desire to remember. Everything there is
carefully organised. Elvis's memory is kept
alive by means of celebrations and anniversaries.
Thus in January 1997 there was a Birthday
Banquet with former Elvis bandmates The
Jordanaires, Scotty Moore, and D.J. Fontana, as
well as Sam Philips, his first producer. Every
year, on January 8th also takes place the Elvis
Presley Day Proclamation ceremony, on the front
lawn of the mansion, with city and county mayors
cutting the official birthday cake. In August it
is time for the yearly Elvis Week, a dazzling
array of events celebrating the life and career
of Elvis, so we are told. Fittingly, Graceland
was placed in 1991 on the National Register of
Historic Places, a proof of the new status
ascribed to popular culture in the American
celebration of memory, and of the overlapping of
the notions of history and memory.
Graceland is meant to be a faithful trace of the
past, relying consequently on the ubiquitous
recording tape, as logic would have it owing to
the nature of Elvis's works. The visit of
Graceland resorts increasingly to audio and
video paraphernalia. An individual headset is
provided for the visit that offers music and
commentaries from Elvis himself, his wife and
friends. A small theater shows a short film with
highlights of Elvis's career as well as home
videos, and a small Drive-in theater located in
the automobile museum offers clips of Elvis's
movies. Not forgetting the "Virtual
Graceland CD-Rom" as well as several
Internet sites. High-technology, high-fidelity
means for an illusory attempt at achieving
absolute faithfulness far removed from the
necessarily subjective and selective process of
memory.
To
tell it all, to keep it all, to freeze life so
as not to miss a single speck, such is the
professed ideal. It results in a duplication of
reality by its trace, two parallel times
overlapping and eventually cancelling one
another. Of the past, nothing remains, neither
in the memory nor in the painstaking but
hopeless reconstruction of by-gone days. The
whole process in fact betrays a fear, a fear we
should miss something important that would
escape our attention, that would be gone and
lost for ever. As we cannot decide what is and
will be of importance, we accumulate, jut in
case.
Just in case
it would become significant some day: hours of
musical rehearsals in the studio, dozens of
takes, footages of screen tests and rushes,
miles of home video, all equally interesting,
all equally meaningless, that we scrutinize with
aching eyes and bleeding hearts in the hope that
one overlooked second of sound or image may
reveal the secret Elvis and open the door to
understanding his real self. A vain quest.
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