Very few things about Elvis in 1961’s Blue Hawaii aren’t upsetting, from the way he holds his dog:
To the way he greets his girlfriend after two years in the army: by tonguing down a stewardess, laughing, and saying, “good, she’s jealous!”
The moral of Blue Hawaii seems to be, yeah, Elvis is a dick, but you know you’re horny for him anyway. It’s a thesis that’s outright stated in the last few minutes of the movie when Elvis proposes to his girlfriend by telling her he won’t put her last name on the business they plan to start together.
“In case you didn’t recognize it, that’s a proposal,” he says.
“You’re sure?” his girlfriend asks.
“Well, I suppose I could get romantic about it, but you’d say yes anyway,” Elvis replies. A line so dickish if he were saying it today, he would legally have to exhale a quarter-mile long puff of vape smoke afterward.
It’s like the movie was written by a man whose wife left him for Elvis. I mean, the dudes that wrote Elvis movies obviously weren’t trying too hard in general, as evidenced by the title of the 1965 film Girl Happy.
It’s a movie whose plot involves a mobster hiring Elvis to keep his daughter out of trouble during spring break.
MOBSTER: “Hey, you, the hottest man on Earth, get over here and make sure no one fucks my teenage daughter!”
You’ll never guess what happens, you guys– Elvis falls in love with the mobster’s daughter! It’s cool, though; because Elvis is portrayed as a protector of virginity in his movies. In fact, that’s what leads to the most upsetting part of Blue Hawaii.
The main plot of Blue Hawaii is about Elvis trying to figure out what to do with his life after his return from the army. His parents want him to work for his father’s company, but Elvis wants to do literally anything but that, because he doesn’t want to use nepotism on his Dad’s part to build a career. So, he decides to use nepotism on his girlfriend’s part to get a job at the tourism company she works for.
He ends up leading a tour group that consists of a pretty schoolteacher and her four teenage pupils. His interview for this job consists of the teacher asking, “Do you think you can satisfy a teacher and four teenage girls?” While pretty much winking at the camera.
There’s one teen girl in the tour group who is a horny nightmare. She’s mean and stuck up and tells Elvis to call her Ms. Corbett instead of Ellie, but then three minutes later, she’s hitting on him. She’s got two modes: hate mode and horny mode, which is honestly not that inaccurate of a portrayal of what it feels like to be a teenage girl.
Elvis tries to get Ellie to enjoy herself. He even gives her a little nickname, “Duchess.” There’s a scene where Ellie’s finally like, why won’t you have sex with me? And Elvis says, “I don’t rob cradles.”
“Did you ever see anything like this in a cradle?” She replies, ripping off her dress to reveal…a very modest one-piece bathing suit. Elvis is pretty much like, “Yeah, that looks like a babies onesie, now GTFO.”
However, thirty seconds later, he sings a love song directly into this lovesick teenage girl’s ear.
I think it’s important to point out that Elvis would never have responded to actress Jenny Maxwell’s affections in real life because she was 19, which made her way too old for him. When he met his future wife Priscilla, she was 14 and he was 24. According to her memoir, they divorced because he couldn’t have sex with a woman who had a child. At 19, Jenny Maxwell was divorced with a three-year-old son because the sixties were GRIM.
So at this time — when the movie Elvis was telling the 17-year-old Ellie he doesn’t rob cradles — he was maintaining a real-life relationship with 16-year-old Priscilla through letters and phone calls. He wasn’t a robber of cradles. He was the goddamn pirate king of cradle robbing. Again, whoever wrote this movie fucking hated Elvis (rightfully).
Ellie continues to be mean to her friends and cranky towards Elvis as the trip goes on, until she meets a middle-aged man at a luau whom she hits on right in front of his wife. Even more upsettingly, his wife is just like, ‘get it, girl,’ as the older man tries to drag her onto the dance floor. Movie Elvis, who again hates when older men try to have sex with teenage girls, steps in to defend Ellie’s virtue and ends up punching the married guy right in the face.
This punch leads to the kind of fight that only happens in the movies, where everyone goes nuts and starts hitting each other for no reason and with no affiliation or opposing sides. I don’t know what insane person thinks that if you’re in a bar and you see someone else get punched in the face, your response should be to turn to the person next to you and punch them in the face for no reason. Punching isn’t like sex where you see another person doing it, and you’re like, ‘that looks fun. I should go do that too!’ Except in Blue Hawaii world, where it totally is.
That one punch devolves into a full-blown riot that makes absolutely no sense and ends with Elvis in prison. It was very clearly shoehorned into the movie, so Elvis could sing a sad song about being in jail.
Elvis gets bailed out and returns to tour guiding (a bunch of other things happen because this is wildly only a B-plot in this movie, with the A-plot being a lot of songs about Hawaii and also, I think classism?)
Ellie assumes Elvis punching the married adult man who tried to have sex with her is a declaration of his true and undying love. So she steals her roommate’s outfit and perfume and heads to Elvis’s room at night to throw herself at him again. Her roommates show up and are not at all concerned about finding teenage Ellie in the room of their adult tour guide; they just want their stolen shit back. Now Elvis has three underage girls in his room at night, and he’s like…
Of course, their teacher shows up because guess what, it looks like she’s also horny for this terrible man. She kisses Elvis right on the mouth, and all of her students who are hiding on Elvis’s porch see it. Ellie, in the world’s biggest overreaction to witnessing a man be mildly kissed, steals a jeep, wrecks it, and runs into the ocean in an attempt to drown herself. This movie is rated PG.
Elvis, of course, dives into the ocean and pulls her out, the whole time treating her with tenderness and care because she’s suicidal. I’m kidding. He tells her she needs “a good old-fashioned spanking.” That is a direct quote. Then, even more upsettingly, she agrees with him.
“Maybe I do. Nobody ever cared enough about me, even for that.” She says. And then Elvis proves to the teenage girl he cares about her, via the ass.
That shot fades out, and we close-up on Ellie in a New York City therapist’s office where she’s getting the help she needs for — obviously I’m joking, it fades into a close-up of Ellie’s recently spanked ass. Elvis has fixed the woman by hitting her!
We pan up to reveal Ellie is happily eating breakfast with her friends! And she’s nice to everyone! And they’re nice to her! Who needs Prozac when you could get spanked by Elvis!
And the moral of the story is: if you know a woman with mental health issues, you can slap that shit right out of her. Also, teenage girls really want to have sex with Elvis, but he would never ever have sex with them, only sing them love songs, give them cute nicknames, and spank the crazy right out of them.
If you follow Lydia on Twitter @youknowlydia she will promise never to mention this again.