How demon Waititi require Lizzo manbag against iconography?

“I try and make movies to deal with what’s going on now,” the director said at a screening hosted by GQ magazine in London this week. Luhrmann and his wife and collaborator, the costume designer Catherine Martin, have created a delicate, feminine on-screen portrait of the teenage Elvis. He wears lace blouses and carries his cassette tapes in a glossy leather manbag. Heavy-lidded and pouting under a sailor cap, he swivels his hips on stage with an energy that speaks as much to Beyoncé and Christina Aguilera as to traditional rock’n’roll. In Luhrmann’s luscious retelling of the mythology, the title role, played by the 30-year-old American actor Austin Butler, is cast as a beautiful innocent ensnared by the wiles of his manager Colonel Tom Parker, played against type by Tom Hanks.

Waititi also hinted at Love and Thunder taking an unexpected, but open romantic approach, teasing that while it sounds “cringey,” there is still “a way of doing it with cool characters making a cool movie, and also having a thing that no fan ever wants in a superhero movie, which is people talking about love, and characters kissing.”Thor: Love and Thunder will see the return of Jane Foster as the Mighty Thor, marking Natalie Portman’s first live-action appearance in the Marvel Cinematic Universe since 2013’s Thor: The Dark World. On reuniting Thor and Jane, director Taika Waititi revealed that he structured the film’s romantic edge using classic Mills & Boon book covers alongside Jack Kirby-inspired iconography as a way “to make it interesting to myself, and not do what everyone thinks I should do.”

The film explores how Elvis’s upbringing in a largely Black neighbourhood in segregated Memphis shaped his music and his style. At the GQ screening the British singer Yola, who plays Sister Rosetta Tharpe – the queer, Black “godmother of rock’n’roll” revered by Lizzo as a hero – recalled Luhrmann saying: “We need to put the story into context, to show that [Elvis] came from a Black world.” The young star is shown mesmerised by gospel in a church service and singing with BB King in the blues venue Club Handy on Beale Street, Memphis. Newspaper headlines shown on screen – “Elvis the Pelvis belongs in the Jungle”, “The White Boy with Black Hips” – testify to the prejudice and hostility with which the Black roots of his hits were met by the US establishment. Luhrmann told GQ that Elvis was “at the centre of culture, for the good, the bad and the ugly. And you can’t talk about America in that period without talking about race.”