Priscilla

A woman who understands that things like this might happen

Left: the real Priscilla and Elvis Presley / Right: Priscilla by Sofia Coppola

The Sunday Letter #38

Last week, I mentioned that I’d watched Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film Marie Antoinette in advance of seeing her newest haunted fairytale, Priscilla. There are certain directors, and Coppola is one of them, for whom I feel more appreciation when viewing their work in quick succession. Well-known for her intuitive style, Coppola is adept at using pillowy, pastel pink set design to lure us into a false sense of comfort, only to come barreling through with a devastating analysis of womanhood, power dynamics, and complicity. 

Based on Priscilla Presley’s own memoir, Priscilla offers a quieter counterpart to the ostentatious Elvis that dominated Hollywood last year. For that reason, Coppola came under fire from certain unnamed members of the Presley estate. She wasn’t given permission to use Elvis’ music, so the film features an anachronistic soundtrack much like Marie Antoinette. Her portrayal of Elvis as less victim than knowing perpetrator is sure to piss off the Elvis mega-fans; the older gentleman behind us shouted, “Well that movie fucking sucked,” as soon as the credits started rolling. But watching Priscilla, it’s easy to understand the Coppola fandom; her strengths lie in adapting highly unusual biographies of iconic women into fables universal in their pain.

From the first moment we see Jacob Elordi (of Euphoria fame) as Elvis, it is through the eyes of 14-year old Priscilla, witnessing a god from across a crowded room. My friends and I kept turning to each other in horror every time their ten-year age gap was referenced; accentuated by their height difference, he feels all the more like a wolf stalking his prey. He’s a perfect Elvis: boyish and tall, with a dreamy face tinted by a slithering darkness behind the eyes. 

One moment, she’s a normal teenage girl, and the next, there he is: the most famous singer in the world, turning his light towards her. She practically basks in his glory, which she manipulates to her own ends to achieve freedom from her family, school, and the shackles of an ordinary life. Yet once she arrives in Graceland, she realizes that the key to her cage has merely changed hands from her father to her boyfriend. He chooses her babydoll dresses, he instructs her in what to wear, how to dress, and how to behave. Keep in mind, at this point she hasn’t even graduated high school yet. 

She swallows the pain of his infidelity, trading it for the comfort of his hand in marriage, while he continues to treat her as a doll, pristine and pure. In a rage at her perceived nagging, he hisses, “I need a woman who understands that things like this might happen. Are you going to be here or not?”

As this Priscilla review notes, “Sofia Coppola’s girls want, but do not get.” It’s all the more agonizing then to watch Priscilla fumble through early adulthood into marriage and motherhood all while resembling a childlike doll herself. She aches and yearns, it’s what drove her into the arms of her idol in the first place; but he’s incapable of giving in to her, he requires that subservience to give him reason for living and being. The women around Elvis are no more meaningful than a plaything, with even his grandmother becoming a live-in caretaker for his wife and child. He’d become a messianic figure to his acolytes in his own search for meaning as someone deified without a sense of purpose of his own, and the waifish Priscilla can’t decipher how to provide it.

While unevenly-paced and lacking the sumptuous visuals that made Marie Antoinette so iconic, Priscilla feels purposefully claustrophobic, and it isn’t until *spoiler* our heroine leaves the man himself that we see her emerge as a fully-fledged human from the shallow drudgery of Graceland. Her fate is not unlike that of her mother, who we mostly only ever see frowning in her family kitchen. Unfortunately, Priscilla’s freedom only comes in the last frame. Worse still, the real Priscilla’s legacy remains deeply entwined with Elvis’, though the real tragedy is the years of her life she spent trying to save him, only to be rejected by him at every turn. 

Cailee Spaeny plays Priscilla delicately, watchfully, and at times stubbornly. By the time Priscilla starts blowing up at Elvis the way he does at her, it feels completely out of place. But perhaps that’s the point, as she looks like a child having a tantrum. He laughs her off, continuing to hunt her down and wear her down until there’s nothing much left of either of them. It isn’t until she’s able to understand herself as a woman capable of desire outside of his gaze that she emerges from his gilded cage. It’s telling, then, that when she finally leaves, she’s wearing pants.

This week’s recommendations

Bringing Up Baby (1938), which I watched last night and delighted in; a joyous screwball comedy about the power of wildness in love. Also: Chinatown (1974), perhaps one of the most deliciously colour-graded films I’ve ever seen. Faye Dunaway is a revelation, but the film noir genre and nihilistic message of the film meant that her character’s ending felt tragically bleak, despite leading to that iconic final line.

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From Vox, the lie of deinfluencing in a social media landscape in which influencers have replaced the traditional advertising model.

From The Cut, the final frontier of helicopter parenting is Facebook groups for parents of college students: “Nearly all the moms I interviewed were trying to find the line between helpful and harmful.”

Nicolaia Rips on why Gen Z loves Fran Lebowitz: “If you’re worried about what people will think about you after you’re dead, you have other problems.”

From Coveteur, the questionable origins of love languages:

“On the surface, it’s about putting effort into communication and learning what your spouse needs. Once we get a little deeper, the advice starts devolving into reliance on scripture and an insidious but profound inability to acknowledge the gendered dynamics and issues at play in heterosexual marriages, which are, of course, the only kind he addresses.”

This Week in Animal News: Meet Flaco, the escaped zoo owl on a futile search for love :(

Finally, from LitHub, the art of looking and seeing: “One starts looking for things only once one thinks they’re lost…this might tell us something about looking per se. Are we always looking for what we’ve lost?”