PRISCILLA, and the Gilded Cage of Celebrity

A review of the Sofia Coppola film.

“Promise me you’ll stay the way you are now.”

Sometimes, my mind subconsciously makes connections between things that I can’t immediately figure out, yet I still feel as though there’s some ephemeral, irrevocable pull guiding me toward decisions that will only make conscious sense later.

Case in point:
Without any solid plan in place, I had the choice of watching any of the films that were playing in cinemas at the time — The Boy and the Heron, Godzilla Minus One, Anyone But You, Wonka, Ferrari, Priscilla, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, Night Swim, One Life, Next Goal Wins, or hell, even the re-release of Oppenheimer if I felt like it — but out of all of them, I was drawn to starting with Priscilla.

Now, oftentimes and whenever possible, I like to pick whichever film I next watch by way of how it may link to the last film I saw, whether they’re linked by cast member or director or genre or thematic similarity; it’s sort of a way to narrow down the overwhelmingly vast array of film choices available at one’s fingertips, by focusing on what I feel like watching, rather than some phantom obligation or pressure to watch one thing or another. (This system falls by the wayside when it comes to theatrical releases I want to see before they leave the big screen, and/or films that are imminently expiring from streaming platforms, so my silly little system needs to be temporarily put on hold. But I digress.)

So, the day before this choice in question, the last film I’d watched was Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience, and something was telling me that, if I was going to see any film at the cinema as a fitting follow-up to that, Priscilla would be the best option.
Maybe it was as superficial as them both being films with female protagonists, both films by stylish auteurs about women navigating unusual and isolating lives informed by men and capitalism in some fashion… something like that. I didn’t think on the why of it too closely, I just went with it.

It took a full extra day, after seeing the film and sleeping on my thoughts about it, for the big epiphany to strike me like a bolt from the blue:
The Girlfriend Experience went on to be adapted into a TV show, the first season of which starred Riley Keough… who is the daughter of the late Lisa Marie Presley… who was the daughter of Priscilla Presley herself.

So that’s the connection my mind was making, deep deep deep down beneath the surface, only revealing its machinations hours after the fact!
Good job, brain.

Anyway, that all marks my entry point into actually discussing Priscilla (the film) itself.

In a nutshell: it’s very good. Sofia Coppola is fully in her wheelhouse with this subject matter, regarding girls and women finding themselves at the same time as they find they’ve become trapped in gorgeously gilded cages they long to escape. The fact that Priscilla’s truth, of her story of her time with Elvis, was already in keeping with Coppola’s recurring themes present throughout her filmography, is a serendipitous match made in heaven.

Meanwhile, Jacob Elordi’s transformative turn, as the man once uncritically heralded as The King, is an astonishingly uncanny recapturing of Elvis’s spirit. Better than any deepfake could ever hope to be, and from certain angles (particularly in side-profile) the man’s spitting image, Elordi miraculously manages to effortlessly embody one of the most famous people who ever lived. Having not yet seen Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis biopic, I can’t say how Elordi stacks up against Austin Butler’s much-ballyhooed mind/body/soul-inhabiting performance that (allegedly) permanently altered Butler’s voice due to how deep into character he pushed himself. Admittedly, the two actors had somewhat different goals to reach in the portrayals they were guided to by their two extremely different directors (because Coppola and Luhrmann couldn’t be any further diametrically opposed in their respective styles and intents if they tried). Butler had to encompass the near-totality of Elvis’s persona on- and off-stage, with major visceral emphasis on his immeasurably iconic singing and dancing. But with Priscilla not having the blessing of the Elvis estate to use any of his songs (for obvious reasons, considering this is far from hagiographic in its unflattering depiction of the man, yet still a lot more generously humane and complex than it could have been), Elordi focuses more on the Elvis that existed in the quieter moments of intimate domesticity away from the prying eyes of the world beyond his tightly controlled bubble of friends, family, and staff. His is an Elvis who’s often soft-spoken, mumbling, and stammeringly uncertain with how to begin his sentences, which sometimes showcases his genuine vulnerability, and other times is a practiced facade to minimise the responsibility he ought to face for his toxic misbehaviour. In other words, it’s yet another Jacob Elordi character who’s the object of desire for many people drawn to his magnetic personality and towering height, but who is soon revealed to be a manipulative, controlling, volatile, dangerous man to be around, spurred on by a lifetime of getting what he wants and rarely getting punished because of his looks and his charisma… except now, instead of his fictional characters from Euphoria and The Kissing Booth trilogy (and maybe Saltburn too? I dunno, I haven’t seen it yet), he’s playing real historical figure, Elvis goddamn Presley.

But this isn’t Elordi’s film. This is Cailee Spaeny’s film, through and through. It belongs to her, and her performance as Priscilla is so unreal in its incredible depth and astute attention to character evolutionary detail, she makes it look as easy as breathing. She’s been on my radar since the unfortunate Pacific Rim: Uprising, and the criminally underrated Bad Times at the El Royale, and now, Priscilla is the proper star-making role she deserves. Some of the extraordinary growth her Priscilla visibly goes through is greatly aided by the changes in her clothes, and her increasingly stylised hair and makeup (kudos to the respective costume and hair/makeup departments that Coppola always populates so well). But a lot of it is down to Spaeny’s preternaturally youthful face and petite frame — especially when scaled against Elordi/Elvis’s imposingly taller and older self — really hammering home the unquestionable disparity in age and power there was between Elvis and Priscilla. Spaeny herself may be in her mid-20’s, but with the wardrobe and the hair and makeup accentuating the adolescent affects she conveys through her voice and body language, she looks unmistakably young. Distressingly young. Too young, and obviously so to anyone with eyes and a brain and a heart.

This had me thinking, during my time watching Priscilla, about the unenviable existential threat to one’s psyche and identity such a story poses for those in the Presley family who are still alive, and personally affected by the rest of the world’s perception of their far-too-public family history. Most of all, I thought about Lisa Marie Presley, mere months before her sudden death, actively voicing her aggrieved displeasure with Sofia Coppola for making this film whatsoever; about how she thought it would unfairly ruin her father’s image and legacy, depict him as nothing but an irredeemable monster in direct contrast to her memory and image of him, and drive a further wedge between her and her mother than Priscilla’s memoir had once already created, all of which Coppola should have felt ashamed for.
But I can’t help thinking that the bare minimum of unavoidable facts about Priscilla’s story — of meeting, and being courted (groomed) by Elvis, when he was 24 and she was only 14 — are enough by themselves to make you see him in a negative light. There is no world in which that’s anything other than wrong, and regardless of how their relationship and her feelings for him evolved over time, especially once they had a child together, the foundational core of their romance was built on a choice most people can see was immoral, if not outright criminal.
So put yourself in the shoes of one of the children born into the Presley dynasty. Imagine having Elvis as your father or your grandfather or what have you, and his seismic imprint on pop culture defines your life in ways most people will never understand. Imagine that if he lived long enough into your childhood that you still had memories of him, you’d remember all the best parts about him, bolstered by the lifestyle of luxury and privilege you’ve always inherently known, which came about through his incalculable success during (and even long after) his lifetime. Imagine growing up into adulthood, and learning right from wrong, learning about exploitation and abuse, learning what should be clearly good and clearly bad. Now imagine that the fairy tale of your parents’ meeting, and the very reason you ever came to exist in this world, was historically factually proven to be a story of an adult man seducing a teenage girl a decade his junior; a literal child by every conceivable metric; an act you know and would say was irreconcilably wrong, if it was anyone else… but it’s not anyone else. It’s you. And the man who did that awful thing was your dad, or your granddad, or however further along down the direct family line you may be from him. You are now cursed with the knowledge that you were born out of circumstances that were objectively sickening, but subjectively you have to live alongside that one horrible truth you cannot get away from, plus the other possible truths of his character that only worsen the picture you have of him, if you think about them too long. What do you do? Do you accept it, publicly denounce his past actions, and learn to work through and live with the cognitive dissonance between the comfortingly idealised image you had of him, and the disquieting truth of the shades of dark and light intrinsic to who he really was? Or do you prioritise protecting his image as a means to protect your self-image, to perform all the mental gymnastics necessary to maintain those things for your mental wellbeing, and prevent yourself from confronting the devastating thought that he was perhaps a bad man, and even worse, if he was bad, what does that make you?
All of that, with the added traumatising pressure of your life playing out for the spectators of the world eager to pry, and for random internet douchebags you’ve never met intrusively conjecturing over what you think or feel, as if they had any earthly idea. (It’s me, hi, I’m the douchebag, it’s me.)

I dunno. Even though I wish the film had a bit more extra bite and emotional oomph to it, which it feels a little lacking in on a gut level, Priscilla nonetheless gave me a lot to think about, and a lot of feelings to feel about them, and that’s the mark of a pretty great film by my estimation.

Sofia, you’ve done it again!

Originally published January 6th 2024 at https://jackandersonkeane.substack.com.