THREE INCHES is such a wretched height to be: Exactly halfway through the film. ( Elvis: That's the Way It Is. ) At midpoint. That is to say, at the very heart of the matter: Elvis up there singing, singing. Love, love me do. When suddenly he begins to shrink. Say from 18 feet down to about three. The screen shatters into a half-dozen other, simultaneous, images. Up left, an exterior shot of Las Vegas' International Hotel. By day, a pretty dull affair, not to be compared with Caesar's or the Sands. But by night! ELVIS. In mile-high neon. As if the very stars had fallen from the desert sky, the guts wrenched out of the moon; all so that some mad manipulator of electric gases could spell out ELVIS-COMIN AUGUST 10!

Meanwhile, back on the screen of the Center Theatre on the very bottommost bit of Washington Street, Elvis continuing to shrink and sing. While, from the screen's bottom left, shots of the International's mammoth kitchens. Great, grotesque hunks of institutional meat. Barrels of dough. Bread for the circus. And, over on Elvis' right, Brobdingnagian close-ups of the office staff, the maids, bellboys, waitresses, showgirls and hawkers, pr men. Tourists. But no, not tourists. Not in Vegas. And, the center of it all, Elvis, jes keeps on singin'. Surround him, cameras roll up and down through the labyrinthic entrails of the International. Elvis, dwarfed by eight foot high shanks of beef, by linen and glassware and advertising. By MGM celluloid. Elvis. That's the way it is.

A LA RECHERCHE du Elvis perdu: Forgive me, for I am forced to lapse into first person subjective. Not to tell of myself, but because of an incapability of telling of anyone else. Elvis Presley, I had thought, had begun too long ago, over 15 years, close to 20 years ago, for many of us to have really felt his presence. But others tell me no, even as seven or eight year olds we knew who Elvis was, though perhaps not why television refused to film him from waistward down. No? why his sideburns should upset our parents so.

But I'm not convinced. For the temptation is too strong, the temptation to convince ourselves that we possess a past that we might have never known, a past that certainly no longer exists. Pretend to the contrary though we might, the past is the victim of the present, is redefined and reconstituted along the lines of our experience in the now.

I came to know Elvis through parody. For which I don't necessarily feel regret. Admitted, I missed the purity of the early Elvis, but the parody, Broadway's Bye, Bye Birdie, was itself fine and gentle and, in the only way then available, even respectful.

Elvis still existed of course. On the periphery. An occasional single. Another film. (In the most recent of which he would play a big city social worker charming his way into the hearts of the ghetto kids and singing nuns.) But meanwhile, we sought out our past in whatever way we could.

Gotta get back. Recapture the lost. Rediscover our innocence. Whether it be through old clothes or a CRIMSON quiz on children's books. Or Sha-na-na. Or Camp. (For as the past receded more and more quickly, the parody becomes sharper, more brittle.)

We talked of getting back to the land, too. For many of us, a form of nostalgia even more blatantly contrived. For what did we know of the traditions of working the soil? A weekend sunk into the Woodstock mud was about the best we could manage.

The Elvis renaissance seemed to be a reprieve. Television brought us his special. RCA brought out a few retrospective discs. Las Vegas lured him back to live performance. MGM promised, and has just delivered, its instant replay documentary of his last Las Vegas gig.

But what we fail to see is that, while the content may be all nostalgia and would-be innocence, the packaging is relentlessly right up to date. Elvis, along with whatever else remains of the early fifties, along with folk music and rural traditions, along with the simplicities of our childhood, has been absorbed and reprocessed.

You can watch the Elvis documentary or its Woodstock big brother, but don't think you're getting the early Elvis or the simple life. It all comes to you courtesy of MGM or Warner Brothers, and, just as the form is the cold, calculating product of the corporate arm, the content has been twisted and frozen. Elvis is no longer Elvis and Woodstock never really was. Instead, they mock our need for a heroic and honest past.

THE COLUMN of flame: Vegas is the most unbelievable of cities. From the air, the solemn, silent desert appears to have split a wayward seam, spewing forth a hidden cache of tawdry jewels. Bingo, Nevada style.

From within, flattened by the heat and swept by desert winds, Vegas has the air of a city under siege, demonically challenging each godforsaken minute to be its last.

The men all look like cowboys. The women can't hide that they are whores. And beneath the gilt and bravura, the blue hair and mascara green and shiny sharkskin suits, there is the most frightening exhaustion imaginable.

The counter culture is anathema in Vegas. Hang around the blackjack tables and you'll see that the greening of America has very little to do with determined little plants poking their heads through concrete vistas. Vegas was to have a rock festival last July, a bone-dry echo of Woodstock was all set to grit its teeth against the drifting sands while digging into an abandoned airfield on the edge of town. The town fathers moved quickly to see that it never came off.