Seeing Elvis

Elvis Culture: Fans, Faith, & Image. By Erika Doss. Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 1999. 289 pages. $24.95 (cloth).

OVER THE PAST TEN YEARS, THERE HAS BEEN A NOTABLE INCREASE IN PUBLISHED studies of mass media stars and their fans. ¹ Whereas in 1990 the Library of Congress listed "fan" as a subject heading only for mechanical blowers or hand-painted works of art, today "fan" includes a number of different sub-categories that refer to the human beings that participate in the cultures of television, movies, and music. In part, this trend is the product of the widespread acceptance of the cultural studies approach in the humanities, especially its focus on neglected areas of study like popular culture and identity. But it also comes from the growing pervasiveness of mediated communications and entertainments in daily life. Before World War II, people could actually go through an entire day without encountering someone famous. Today, people encounter hundreds of stars and celebrities each day, whether they want to or not: on cereal boxes and clothing labels; on morning talk shows and news programs; on bus advertisements, billboards, and magazine covers; over public audio systems in elevators, supermarkets, and malls; on the radio, the World Wide Web, and television. On the East Coast, Bell Atlantic customers are greeted with the voice of James Earl Jones every time they dial the telephone.

Erika Doss's new book is a welcome addition to the growing body of work that explores America's star-saturated culture and its effects. Doss daringly focuses on one of the most visible and overwritten figures of contemporary media culture, Elvis Presley, but rather than re-examine his life story or analyze his specific work in music, television, or movies, she interestingly focuses on the ways in which people see Elvis, both literally and figuratively. Inspired by the similarities between the widespread popularity of Walter Sallman's 1940 painting, Head of Christ, and the current ubiquity of Elvis imagery, Doss argues that Elvis has become the central icon of mediated society in the late twentieth century. For Doss, Elvis's image encourages "multivalent" meanings, especially regarding the historically-important American social issues of gender and race, and such flexibility has enabled Elvis to become an important catalyst for diverse Americans' understandings of themselves, their relationships to others, and their experience of the modern world.

In order to fully investigate why Elvis Presley has become such an important cultural symbol, Doss initially set out in a couple of different directions. First, she started to document and experience the sheer extent of Elvis culture: she joined fan clubs; she made a pilgrimage to Elvis's home, Graceland, in Memphis, Tennessee, and to Elvis's birthplace in Tupelo, Mississippi; she participated in the rituals of the anniversary of his death; she "plowed through the books, essays, articles, editorials, graduate student theses, short stories, screenplays, and novels that make up the vast Elvis Culture industry" (24); she watched videos of his movies, listened to his music, and attended Elvis impersonator contests. Second, she contacted the "fans for whom the image of Elvis is especially meaningful." She put an ad in several newspapers across America "asking fans why they were fans and which Elvis image they liked the most" and had long conversations with fans "in homes and hotel rooms, in coffee shops and family-style restaurants . . . in studios and galleries, on airplanes and in bus stations" (25).

The book brings these two directions of research together. Doss rightfully criticizes the literary orientation of much reception theory and argues for a new approach to reception that focuses less on the derivation of meaning from texts and more on the interaction of art, culture, and audience. As she explains, "Visual culture is very much the product of response, the result of active and subjective relationships that take place between ourselves and the things we look at. Its ongoing construction consists of images and objects, their makers and viewers, and the spaces in between--physical...