A doc about The King and his kingdom

If you are unable to see Elvis Presley as a symbol of everything that's both right and wrong with America, you may not get much out of The King, director Eugene Jarecki's far-reaching and often incisive documentary. Although Jarecki includes biographical information about Presley's rocket-ride of a life, he also uses Elvis as a launch point for larger observations about cultural appropriation, American bloat and other matters that, in sum, paint a portrait of American life on the downswing. Some of the interviews in The King take place in the back seat of Elvis's 1963 Rolls-Royce, a car that breaks down during Jarecki's travels, resulting in a bit of unplanned irony. Among the people Jarecki interviews, Ethan Hawke stands out as both knowledgeable and insightful. We also get music, including a show-stopping performance from EmiSunshine and the Rain. Jarecki bites off so much that he almost tears the film apart as we try — not always successfully — to digest its broad array of thematic elements. And, of course, it's all supported by the familiar arc of Elvis's story, a tale that follows him from dirt-poor beginnings in Tupelo, Miss. to the glitz and indulgence of Las Vegas. Rapper and producer Chuck D sounds one of the movie's strongest notes, noting that he’s not about to jump on the Elvis train. Elvis found his style by listening to black music, and many feel he never acknowledged the debt. These days, I'm up for some serious pessimism, so The King hooked me with its sweeping observations and culturual criticisms. Watching The King is a bit like sitting at the end of the bar while a slightly tipsy man rails about everything under the sun. The difference: Much of The King proves interesting and some it, even salient. That's because The King is as much about the kingdom as it is about Elvis’s pop-cultural royalty.

America's losing war on drugs

My taste for drug-riddled crime movies may be far too indulgent. Perhaps it's time that I stopped viewing such movies (the British movie Pusher qualifies as a recent example) as viable forms of entertainment. I reached no conclusions, but thought about the matter while watching Eugene Jarecki's potent new documentary The House I Live In. Jarecki has taken a persuasive look at ravages inflicted on many Americans by the country's apparently endless and extremely costly war on drugs. Some of the movie's tilt derives from Michelle Alexander's book, The New Jim Crow, Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Alexander, who teaches law at Ohio State University, is interviewed in Jarecki's movie, along with many others, including David Simon. (The title of Alexander's book gives you a decent idea of where she stands.) Before creating The Wire, Simon reported on cops and crime in Baltimore, which is to say he has been a war correspondent in America's battle against drugs. Jarecki began the movie when he decided to learn more about Nannie Jeter, a woman who worked for his family as a housekeeper in New Haven, Conn. Jarecki says he thought of Jeter as a kind of second mother. As it turns out, Jeter lost a drug-addicted son. Jarecki effectively lifts his movie from the anecdotal to the global, augmenting the movie's personal focus with lots of beefy information about the ways in which the drug war has masked consequences that have ravaged minority communities and, more recently, working class white communities. I don't know if it's fair to go quite as far as someone such as Simon, who calls the drug war a slow holocaust, but there's little question that the U.S. war on drugs -- which has been going on longer than any other war the country has fought -- has been a failure, leading mostly to the creation of a profitable prison-based economy that keeps a variety of small towns thriving and also has led to the establishment of private corrections firms. In the face of the failure of so many of its stated goals, it's difficult not to wonder why the drug war persists. This steadfast commitment to failed policy makes the conclusions Jarecki reaches powerfully plausible -- and deeply unsettling.