Last night night I dreamed about Elvis Presley. I don’t remember the dream except that it’s logic went something like this:
I’m a kid in Brooklyn, cutting Yeshiva, going to the movies in Manhattan—which looks suspiciously like Beverly Hills—and I’m sitting in a theater watching an Elvis movie that does not exist. It’s a montage of various performances and I’m trying to rewrite the sequences into a coherent narrative. Naturally, I try and get Brigitte Bardot into the storyline, but she and Elvis don’t hit it off and, well, I end up on the subway back to Brooklyn wondering if I’ll ever have a career in Hollywood.
Sigh. Hunched over, head in hands. The anxiety never ends.
Brigitte Bardot and Elvis Presley were cultural phenomenons at the same time. Bardot ushered in a new female sexuality and Elvis did the same for the male of the species. They never appeared in a movie together, never even met. It’s tragic because a cinematic pairing could have been epic like Gilbert and Garbo, Gaynor and Farrell, Gable and Crawford, Tracy and Hepburn, Powell and Loy.