Priscilla is a movie about fear. It is a movie about the fear that your mother was never allowed to be a person, not even in your imagination. It is about the fear that you have bequeathed nothing to the world, the young girls around you, to your daughter, but a superficial emptiness, a template for romanticizing objects and songs and surfaces that mean nothing to them. It is a movie about the fear that you are not even an object of desire but a costumed doll trapped in pristinely preserved Polaroids. It is a movie about the fear that you have spent your formative years bored, waiting patiently for your unremarkable suffering to cease. It is about the fear that once you come into your own, you will be nothing but the iconographic fantasies that have failed to offer you any solace. Priscilla is a movie that grieves in pillow shots of Chanel No. 5, a perfume that smells so striking that it could never belong to one woman. Priscilla is a movie about the fear that you could never know another woman, let alone yourself.
The second time I saw Priscilla, I saw that it wasn’t very good.
I saw all the ways it The Real Priscilla of any agency within her relationship to Elvis. Though the film never seeks to condemn him, to vindictively desecrate his legend, we never really get a sense of him, vacant even in the most intimate moments. Elordi is tall and has a nice chin. The film’s answer to Baz Luhrman’s superhero is an equally anonymous black hole of schoolgirl doodles.
I saw how the film squanders its lead performance from Cailee Spaeney. She pulls off an astonishingly well-realized metamorphosis of micro-gestures and slight adjustments to her posture in a movie that pushes these details to the margins in favor of a mountain of products and Elordi’s towering frame. When the camera looks at Priscilla it must always be looking also through a certain gendered gaze. Coppola has never rested on such an ironic distancing before, but in the absence of a script that gives its titular character any interiority, the compositional refusal to engage with such a great performance feels inevitable.
I saw how this film’s wistful Gothic romance pales in spiritual depth or hysterical catharsis of Lana del Rey, who traffics in a similar mid-century Americana and tortured waif feminism.
I saw how the film was so pre-occupied with its own ambient mournfulness that Coppola often shoots herself in the foot. Priscilla’s female friendships must be sidelined or omitted entirely, because they would complicate the suffocating isolation which serves as the film’s narrow-minded structural conceit. Priscilla cannot rebel or pursue auxiliary interests amidst her Rapunzel-esque Graceland residency, because that would undermine her own martyrdom.
I saw how the Sofia Coppola that once thrived on the tension between individuality and societal strictures had chosen not to bring these defining strengths to the fore this go-round. A filmmaker who relished in the rewarding pleasures of boredom now saw only despair and stasis. This was, technically, the same filmmaker who a decade ago laid out a searching, fun vision for what materialistic self-actualization would look like in the age of the front-facing camera, now, at the dawn of even further technological advancements in the realm of projection and representation, had retreated, terrified, to the past. This is a filmmaker who not three years ago had seemed to settle into making movies about the disillusioned process of aging and falling out of love with the people one once held dear. Priscilla is of a piece with all these movies in that it is a half-hearted rejection of them all, a curious approach for a movie that could have benefited from being a summation of these fixations.
I can imagine that movie without the aforementioned shortcomings, and it’s a really good one. The one I saw, though, and will see again, probably several times over the course of my life, is a different beast entirely. Priscilla, released on November 3rd, 2023, directed by Sofia Coppola, is a movie about dehumanization, an anti-bildungsroman where the protagonist remains exactly as unformed, from the first frame to the last. It is easy to see yourself in, for the same reasons it is so tempting to dehumanize yourself, put yourself in the passenger seat as you watch yourself drive away and the screen cuts to black. It is a movie I love deeply, obsessively, a bit of memorabilia as close to me as much as any of the items I’ve salvaged from my own life. It will live underneath my bed, and I will bring it out and show visitors, and they won’t get it, and I will try to explain it, and I will falter.
Coppola dumps her anxieties into this movie until they scratch the wood panels and dent the carpet. Priscilla is a void that swallows up its own flaws as much as its copious merits (its production design and costuming, its languid beauty, its tenderness, its understated and moving miniature dramaturgy, its perfect soundtrack). Rarely have I seen an artist doubt her own eyes the way this movie does. And her eyes, I’ve always thought, taught mine. And I know other girls feel this way, but I don’t know them, because Priscilla isn’t a movie about a real woman. It is about the fear that you are the version of yourself that never became a real woman.
great work, as usual. thank you.