Caught in a trap

Film: Elvis

In cinemas or available to buy or rent on Amazon Prime

Documentary: George Michael: Freedom Uncut

Amazon

'What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music…. And people flock around the poet and say: "Sing again soon" – that is, "May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful."' Kierkegaard, Either/Or

Millions cry with Elvis Presley and George Michael songs and still mourn their deaths. In one magical song, George Michael mentions a phrase that sticks in his head, 'if Jesus Christ is alive and well, then how come John and Elvis are dead'; some have said this about George. My first poetry chapbook The Day Elvis Died (Poetry Monthly Press, 2001) reflected on my mother's tears on that fateful day. But, as Robbie Williams sang, 'Every tear that you cry/Will be replaced when you die', reminding me of Revelation 21:4 and Isaiah 25:8, 'he will wipe away every tear and death shall be no more'. What struck me from 'experiencing' Baz Luhrmann's Elvis movie and the 'new' documentary, George Michael: Freedom Uncut was how alone both stars were, but how this loneliness brought much of the world together.

In George Michael, Liam Gallagher calls George a 'modern-day Elvis'. Mancunian hyperbole perhaps, but despite being a cheeky lad from Finchley, George had more number one hits in America than the UK making him, like Elvis, more of an international star. Both stars had friends, family, hangers on, screaming fans, but through two significant bereavements each felt alone. The loneliness of these stars is tragic, but affirms what can be a positive existential truth from Sartre – we are all condemned to absolute freedom in our aloneness.

Some would argue that this absolute freedom breeds authenticity, an important concept in existentialism and in person-centre counselling. We go to the cinema, in part, to lose our self. By doing so we may lose elements of our existential angst and dread which exist due to human freedom and responsibility. Then we find our deeper authentic transrational self, the part of us that has feelings. Cinematic feelings are safe feelings, even as we hand over control.

According to Kierkegaard, the commonest form of despair is not being who you are. Elvis (Austin Butler) discovers he wants to be his authentic self, rather than singing Christmas songs in a dodgy jumper on the Colonel's (Tom Hanks) orders. George Michael transforms himself, and through his personal direction has his guitar and jacket blown up in the video to his hit 'Freedom'. At the heart of both these films is a question: which version of the narrative do we want to accept? In Elvis, Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), the King of Dirty Deals, attempts to cover up his part in 'his boy's' death through the hokey narration, ending the film by claiming we killed Elvis through our love for him. In the Colonel's version, Elvis craves the fans' adulation more than anything else. But in a parallel narrative, Parker kills him by forcing his cash-cow back on the Las Vegas stage, catching him in a financial trap. There is an interesting theory that Parker killed someone in Holland, and fled to America to reinvent himself without any trace of his former life, even rejecting his family when they made contact again. To paraphrase filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, we become our self when we become our dream, and Parker enabled Elvis to live his dream. For both Elvis Presley and George Michael, the dream turned into a nightmare – yet still part of the self, the shadow self in Jungian terms.

Cinema is a form of church and confessional, but we do not want to stay there forever. We want that 'doing self' back, the one that experiences existential dread. Outside the cinema, with the dominance of surveillance technology and social media, this doing self is a performative self. In Jonathan Coe's now classic 1997 novel The House of Sleep a character who wants to make a film plans to follow someone their whole life filming them. Both with Elvis and George Michael we are proffered sequences, fragments; no one knows the whole other, other than the Other.

In Elvis, Colonel Tom Parker, the King of Dirty Deals, attempts to cover up his part in 'his boy's' death through the hokey narration, ending the film by claiming we killed Elvis through our love for him.

That Austin Butler was in an existential crisis after playing Elvis is understandable; after being Elvis for three years, not seeing friends or family, he was asking who he was. We see this in the George Michael documentary, where he is cut-off from reality by touring. He eventually manages to do a deal with his label to take 30 friends to Brazil. According to Elvis, the King wanted to tour the world, especially Japan, but the Colonel had no citizenship and so invented security fears if they were to leave America. This is the binary opposition Parker set up – us and them – to control Elvis. But it is through a non-binary approach to fear, holding the tension and moving beyond this tension, as Jung describes in his work on yoga, that life can be fully lived. We cannot truly get rid of anxiety, but we can stop it overwhelming us and use it creatively.

We also get the sense that Elvis, despite the financial commitments, just could not stop performing. He needed the adulation, just as George Michael powerfully describes his red line that keeps moving up, fame being the beast that drives him on. As golfer Tiger Woods put it, too much is never enough. George Michael knows this is dangerous, but he implies it may be uncontrollable; where do you go after being the biggest selling artist in the world, as he was in 1988? Elvis follows the same route, with his hunger for the audience; he is still the biggest selling artist of all time.

In George Michael, the star reveals he suffered profound grief for three years after experiencing the death of his lover, and mother. Mental health professionals are debating whether certain types of grief should be labelled pathological. 'What labels me, negates me' is often attributed to Kierkegaard. Not adverse to labels, George Michael felt he had imposter syndrome – a non-official diagnosis common with high achievers. Both Elvis Presley and George Michael were existentialist in a Kierkegaardian definition, because of the intensity with which they threw themselves into what gave them meaning. It could be argued the intensity of their lives killed them.

Some believed Elvis was evil, possessed by the Devil and with the ability to possess others through his thrusting hips, as Elvis so authentically shows.

Elvis and George Michael deliberately position their heroes as not usurpers of African American music, but promoters. George was also demonised for being gay which has been equated with sin. There are speculations over whether Elvis had mental health problems; he came from the Deep South where mental problems were an aspect of sin, as was disability, so this would have been taboo. Some believed Elvis was evil, possessed by the Devil and with the ability to possess others through his thrusting hips, as Elvis so authentically shows.

Where does the sinful road lead within this theology? Hell. Which, as Sartre put, is other people. But hell is also an absence of anyone to trust, which Elvis and George Michael explicate so well. A road out is to trust, to have faith. For theologian Rudolf Bultmann, existentialist philosophy is 'in line with the deepest diagnosis of human existence found in the New Testament'. There is a profound message here, as explained by Kierkegaard. What is essential to faith is not the objective truth about what one believes in, but our intensity of commitment, the subjective truth. And before we start thinking faith and prayer are akin to magic, let us consider Kierkegaard's point that prayer is not about changing some type of God outside of us, but is more deeply concerned with changing the person praying. Despite – or perhaps because of – the trauma and sadness conveyed so well in both these films, what stands out profoundly is the passion of these protagonists to reach out beyond their trap of self.

Reviewed by: Professor Jason Lee, Director of Strategic Partnerships LMS, De Montfort University and a Chartered Psychologist