Where is your cover story, Jacob Elordi?
I have not found it appealing to write on this platform; while there is plenty to say about the world, none of it is fun which is the whole point of being alive. The only fun thing happening that I feel passionate about is Killers of the Flower Moon, but as neither a Scorsese scholar nor licensed pontificator of Indigenous knowledge, I’m really not comfortable saying anything about it. So, with my favorite celebrities on strike, I’m in what is called “Priscilla Limbo,” which is where I have to wait for Priscilla to come out to release my manifesto about Elvis and Me and the utter failure of Jacob Elordi as a heartthrob, actor, and Elvis. Or, so I thought.
I have been freed from Priscilla Limbo today by the new cover of Interview, press for Dune Dos (DUNE?) that no one could reschedule, a flub of spectacular celebrity curation that I just know is making David Zaslav’s blood boil. But it’s making someone’s blood boil even more, faster, until it’s coming out of his beady eyes and making a mess of Olivia Jade’s apartment (I’ll explain this momentarily). There’s not much of substance I can can say about my boyfriend’s Jeremy-Strong-esque turn in Interview today, narrated by Josh Brolin and released simultaneously to Timothée Chalamet’s equally amusing GQ cover story, which is literally almost more about Austin Butler than it is about Chalamet.
But what I will briefly make abundantly clear is that Austin Butler is a movie star. He is undeniably more handsome than Dune’s original heartthrob and always has a better tailor. He is also far dumber, which endears him to the public in a manner reminiscent of when Colin Farrell inappropriately fidgets his way through an Oscar campaign. Butler is much more sophisticated, but only when we’re looking at him (as true Butheads remember he punched or didn’t punch international terrorist Ezra Miller in the face). As I continue to insist, he is a moderately talented hunk and as such an exciting addition to Hollywood’s boy culture, long impoverished for a new age Pussy Posse. I can talk more specifically about Interview’s new photos of Austin Butler wearing a Celine wife beater (sorry, not calling it a “white tank top” as if “wife beater” isn’t a hilariously iconographic way to describe a white tank top), but that can wait until “Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen” is officially released to me. What I’m here to discuss is an epidemic affecting teenagers and Emerald Fennells everywhere.
First, the good: Jacob Elordi is a saving grace of Euphoria. Playing a poorly conceived villain, he is a far more delicate and considerate actor than the show deserves him to be, and the only scenes I remember now, years after the last new episodes, are with him. I also hold a fairly empathetic characterization of Jacob Elordi in my mind because of a video he did for Vogue where he laments being friendless while eating Jeni’s and implies he feels trapped on “streamers” despite his lifelong dream to be in “real movies.”
Generally, I find his nervous and sorry affectation genuine, and consistent with his career that began too close to COVID in The Kissing Booth franchise. All that said, Jacob Elordi does not a movie star make. He’s certainly not ugly, and I am sympathetic to people who love when a random guy is so tall it’s frightening. But he just doesn’t seem particularly stupid, smart, culturally engaged, or disengaged: he’s just kind of desperate, for anything–work, money, another girlfriend, whatever. This really wasn’t a problem–I wouldn’t be normal if I had to grow up around Sydney Sweeney, either–until he was rendered the new stand-in for Elvis Presley. That’s where I’m drawing the line.
Much like my forthcoming review of Austin Butler’s teeth and arms, I will likely unleash more refined musings on my contextual concerns about and enthusiastic anticipation for a Sofia Coppola adaptation of Priscilla Presley’s memoir. But for now: I only dislike one Sofia Coppola movie and think all the other ones are basically perfect. I am especially fond of Somewhere, The Bling Ring, and On the Rocks because I like when movies are so whip-smart they are apathetic, and when they are about rich people, who are dumb and apathetic. If a movie isn’t whip-smart, it had better be the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen, which Elvis is a great example of. To the end of playing Elvis’s music, Warner Bros. erased Ann-Margret and Richard Nixon from Elvis’s life. Without those eccentricities, though, Elvis isn’t Elvis, so Baz Luhrmann made Elvis into Austin Butler, not the other way around. The Elvis who sings over “Toxic” is not Elvis Presley, it is a new, totally different dumb hot guy. That worked out great for me, which I’ve spoken of plenty on this Substack and in groupchats on iClouds all over the country. What isn’t going so smoothly in my life is an attempt to make Jacob Elordi do The Real Elvis.
I have only one doubt about Priscilla, which is likely to otherwise be a neatly wrapped gift–a funny and sympathetic shrug toward the epic of America’s most famous man marrying a teenager who would herself become an icon of American tackiness and sexuality–but that one! I would describe my reaction to the following image as similar to Veda Pierce’s when she discovers Mildred Pierce is working as a uniformed waitress: cruel and ultimately unjustified horror and disgust.
Elvis is not a movie that requires an impression, and Austin Butler doesn’t do one. Voice and all, not unlike how Melissa McCarthy captures Lee Israel’s strange dowdiness without any real physical resemblance, or how Tom Hanks makes “The Colonel” his own by doing an accent that has nothing to do with anything, Butler harnesses Elvis’s hyperactive, whiplash-inducing public behavior in his own language. Priscilla, on the other hand, is something I think requires a fairly legible impression. As I will explain in more detail sometime after November 3, Elvis and Me is as much about its author as it is an assertive re-contextualization of Elvis from one of the people who knew him best. Not necessarily as an abuser, as some have implied, but as exactly the same person in his private life as in the public: a speed-and-depressant-fueled, unstable, idiotic, mother-obsessed and, in my own mother’s words, “sexually different” musical savant. The picture above does not suggest, nor do any stills or theatrical previews of Elordi’s performance, or any of his prior performances in anything else, such an energy. Elordi seems perfectly capable of doing a quiet performance of a person that never existed in real life, but Elvis is neither quiet nor mythical. I welcome Mother Sofia to prove me wrong, but the recent revelation–true or not–that she kind of hoped Justin Bieber had done it instead is not particularly comforting. No one is more hyperactively grating than Justin Bieber.
In other words, I’ll be annoyed if Elordi’s incessant climbing renders what could be a perfect Sofia movie into a pretty good one. What’s almost more annoying, though, is the way woke scolds have insisted on pitting Elordi and Bulter against each other as if there’s a competition, of which they also insist Elordi is the winner. I understand why; they have a notion that Elvis Presley–who married a teenager–is upheld as a hero, despite his reputation as a freak clown for the years leading up to his death and all the decades after, and they are charmed by Priscilla reportedly dismantling the Presley estate that Elvis supposedly substantiated. Really, though, it’s because liberal moralists between the ages of 12 and 30 don’t like that Austin Butler is 32 and his girlfriend Kaia Gerber is 22. This is about as consistent as Gaylors saying Travis Kelce is growing a beard because he is Taylor Swift’s beard (I learned this on X.com last night!), because it wasn’t so long ago the same scolds were determined to derail Olivia Jade Giannulli’s career as an influencer after her mom paid for her to get into college. Olivia Jade, as she’s known on YouTube and Instagram, is now dating Jacob Elordi, Kaia Gerber’s most recent ex, with whom she did an Elvis and Priscilla couples Halloween costume in 2020.
I guess there really is a competition between Elordi and Butler, but the winner is clear. It’s public knowledge the former vied for Elvis in Elvis before Priscilla ever existed, and that they’ve both dated Kaia Gerber (who talks about books on Instagram Live, by the way—I love when girls do this). Elordi is also Australian, which would have made him make a whole lot more sense in Elvis than the nobody from Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood!. Ok, Elordi got the (likely) better movie, but at what cost? Is this, combined with “Saltburn” and overshadowed by Butler’s own misplaced and random Dune press, really the cinematic breakout he so desperately wanted? To quote my own private X.com posts from September 2, 2023: “man who starts his career by being in disney sanctioned relationship with vanessa hudgens vs. man who starts his career with fake netflix relationship with [zionist] joey king…you’re laughing. there are two elvises and one of them sucks and you’re laughing.”