Priscilla

Rating: R
Runtime: 1 hour, 53 minutes
Director: Sofia Coppola

Quick Impressions:
I heard Cailee Spaeny won the Volpi Cup for her performance in Priscilla. Then I kind of forgot about it as our entire fall became one endless marching band event. (I’m enjoying our total immersion in the artistry of marching shows and thrilled to see our daughter thriving.) I wasn’t sure Sofia Coppola’s film was a must-see for me. In fact, I was all set on seeing Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers on Thursday evening. My husband was excited for it.

Then for over a week, my phone bombarded me with notifications for articles exploring how mad Lisa Marie Presley is about the portrayal of her father in Priscilla. Only Tuesday (when trying to explain this to my husband) did I realize, “Wait! She’s still mad about it? Now?! She’s been dead all year! This must be one incendiary portrayal!” (I’m not trying to make light of Lisa Marie Presley’s sudden, untimely death. But I do question why some algorithm decided these news items so urgently demanded my attention.) (I understand the months-long, relentless barrage of torturous articles about Vanna White deserving a raise—please, phone, that’s out of my hands! I’m a powerless person!—but what have I done to make these algorithms so sure I want to keep informed on all Presley family drama?)

Finally, I started reading these (aggressively) recommended pieces and discovered that while Lisa Marie was still alive, she read a copy of the screenplay and wrote to Sofia Coppola expressing grave concerns that it portrayed her father as a predator. She said she’d be forced to denounce the movie when it came out (even though it’s an adaptation of her mother’s memoir, and Priscilla Presley is credited as an executive producer of the film).

For some reason, when I discovered Priscilla would stop playing at the theater near us on Thursday (so The Holdovers could open), I utterly panicked and feverishly begged my husband to buy tickets for Wednesday night. I still didn’t exactly want to see it, but the thought of missing it was suddenly so distressing. (So I guess my phone’s tactics proved effective! That algorithm was right, after all.)

It all worked out in the end because the Chili Fest at my son’s elementary school is happening on Thursday night. (Fun story. I thought it was Tuesday night, so I sent my son to school with two containers of coriander in his backpack. Because I’d put the spice jars in his snack pouch, he assumed I’d sleepily packed them as his snack, and kept repeating this outrageous story to everyone all over school. A teacher he doesn’t have somehow heard the story from another child and figured out what was going on. Much to his surprise, when he got back to his classroom, the coriander was missing from his backpack (because this teacher had taken it, he assumed). (I’m still not clear why that was his assumption. His story was so convoluted!) This little comedy of errors ended in us driving to the school Tuesday night with a big plate of bacon for no reason because I had the date wrong. I’m a terrible volunteer! I signed us up to serve chili in the first place because when his teacher asked us if we’d heard about the Chili Fest during our parent conference, I panicked and started making vague excuses that ended in, “I will help now! I’ll send something. I promise I will! I really will! I’m unable to resist direct appeals.”

His teacher leaned forward, smiled, and replied, “Oh, well then I guess I’ll see you there!” So I guess she will! I’ll just keep showing up with bacon every day until something happens. Meanwhile, we’ll have to see The Holdovers later, so I’m glad we did buy last-minute tickets to Priscilla.

The Good:
You should skip this movie if you’re triggered by portrayals of sustained, pernicious, low-key abuse. Elvis doesn’t beat Priscilla or routinely verbally abuse her (exactly), but their dynamic is clearly unhealthy.

I can see why Lisa Marie Presley might not have been thrilled with this portrayal of her father, but I don’t know that Elvis comes across as a predator. Is he grooming Priscilla? Well, yeah, kind of. But I don’t think the movie portrays him in a sinister light. To me, he seems like someone who is in pain and struggling with both addiction and fame.

My husband’s take was, “He seems like someone who compartmentalizes his life, so he chooses the wife his mother would have wanted and gives her the kind of life his mother would have approved of, away from the life he lives as an entertainer.” My point of view is similar. Missing his own mother, Elvis handpicks Priscilla to be the mother of his child. He hasn’t really thought farther than that. She’s the kind of wife he wants, but he doesn’t know how to be the kind of husband she needs.

Could the film show this with more nuance? Maybe. But maybe there’s not more nuance to show. Priscilla Presley ought to be able to express her lived experiences. She has praised Coppola, and she helped Spaeny prepare for the role. There’s a reason the film is called Priscilla, not Another Elvis Movie. What comes across is that he was captive to his fame, and she was captive to him. Watching this film after seeing Baz Lurhmann’s Elvis so recently left me with the impression that Colonel Tom Parker groomed Elvis, and Elvis then groomed Priscilla (using tactics he perceived as loving). This interests me on a personal level because I was once in a somewhat similar situation. When you’re young, it’s hard to understand these types of things as they’re happening to you. Then when you grow older and reflect, it’s easy to fixate on the negative moments because they’re so loaded with self-recriminations (i.e. “I should have reacted differently there,” “that’s another red flag I missed,” “now that I’m older, I see how much advantage that would give me over someone younger and more sheltered.”)

So the movie does focus (pretty tightly) on Elvis’s negative qualities as a suitor/husband. But, of course, by the nature of its subject, it will highlight these aspects of his character. Besides everybody already knows Elvis, especially because Luhrmann’s movie was a major player at both the Oscars and the Razzies so recently, and Austin Butler memorably couldn’t stop speaking in his Elvis accent at events, even after interventions and exorcisms (I made up that last part). My point is, the audience already knows who Elvis is, so we can fill in the gaps ourselves. It’s nice to see more of Priscilla’s story. What mainly happens to her is…nothing. That’s the problem. (And it’s a problem a lot of young people have also endured, though few of them were dating someone as famous as Elvis.)

Though I understand why Lisa Marie would feel protective of her father’s image, the movie is not showing us anything radically new. My mother always said that Elvis had a Madonna/Whore complex. That’s how I first learned the term. I don’t know how she came by this information, but she told me back in the 80s, and both she and my dad took it for granted this was true. They weren’t Elvis scholars, so this movie can’t be presenting a version of Elvis no one’s encountered before. Possibly in the past, such a thing was viewed more as a quirky hang-up than an abusive behavior pattern. His behavior in this film is kind of abusive, though he does not appear to be intentionally hurting Priscilla. He comes across as confused, not malicious.

Another thing algorithms have gleefully pushed on me lately is excessive material about narcissists. Online, narcissists are scarier than any monster you’ll meet on Halloween. Lately in pop culture, there’s just nothing as evil as a narcissist, and they’re made out to be these insidious monsters who relentlessly seek out victims to torture. Surely, more often than not, real narcissists torture others inadvertently, and their bad behavior stems from their own distress and dysfunctional coping strategies (or perhaps inability to self-reflect).

My husband would get so exasperated as I worried I was a narcissist and excoriated myself to the point of madness. There is such a thing as healthy narcissism. My problem is, a lot of people online seem to take these harsh criticisms and apply them to their exes or difficult relatives; whereas, I apply the critique to myself, whether or not it fits. So being force fed material about narcissists by my phone was torturing me, even though my psychiatrist told me I’m not a narcissist.) (I’m so vain I think the narcissist posts are about me.) (You’re probably getting the idea by now that I have no idea how phones work and should never use the internet.)

My point is, I’ve given a more than average amount of thought to this subject over the past couple of years. In this film, Elvis (Jacob Elordi) ticks all of the boxes pop psychology on the internet tells you to look out for. (Note: I am not trying to trivialize abuse. That’s one frustrating thing about pop psychology narcissism. Apparently complaining past relationships were abusive is another hallmark of being a narcissist. Obviously, this is problematic because if someone was abused, they can never say so without being labeled an abuser!)

The scenarios in this movie fall into that nebulous, “Was this abuse?” category. (In many cases, it’s hard to say for sure if you were abused in this type of relationship because 1) Everyone is bad at relationships when they’re young, so naturally, some things that go wrong are going to be your own “fault” and 2) Even dysfunctional, abusive relationships usually have loving elements.) Situations like this stir up a web of overlapping, confusing bad feelings. You feel bad that maybe you were abused. You feel bad for letting that happen. You feel bad for not knowing if it’s abuse for sure. You feel bad for the abuser. You feel bad because you see ways in which you also failed in the relationship. You feel bad for having the poor character to speak negatively of someone you dated.

Were this movie just some director’s whimsical flight of fancy, I’d be more inclined to dismiss it as one of those celebrity biographies that reimagines the life of a conveniently dead star to advance the creator’s own agenda. I’d be much more suspicious. But this is based on Priscilla Presley’s own memoir. So I see no reason to dismiss it or to view it as character assassination.

In this film, Elvis is grooming Priscilla. He meets her when she’s very young and conditions her like he’s training a dog. He shows classic hallmarks of being an abuser, all the red flags you’re told to watch for. He does not come across well. Though Elordi’s understated performance is well done, Austin Butler’s Oscar nominated portrayal last year was far more sympathetic. But even though Elvis’s behavior is abusive, he doesn’t strike me as malicious. Does the distinction matter? Well, I mean, not to someone in Priscilla’s position, but she eventually leaves, and he doesn’t stop her. If the movie were meant as a character assassination, it could make him look worse.

In Elvis’s defense, the film shows us very clearly that he is taking far too many drugs. In one scene that really got my attention, he gives Priscilla one of the sedatives he regularly takes. He finds the pill mildly relaxing. She falls into a deep sleep, and no one is able to wake her for two days. Again and again, we see that Elvis has an entire nightstand of pill bottles. He’s taking so many strong prescription drugs, plus occasionally LSD. So when he loses his temper or makes terrible decisions, there are some extenuating circumstances. His judgment must be off sometimes. The heavy drug use doesn’t excuse his behavior, but it does, in part, explain it.

But, yes, in this film, Elvis is systematically manipulating and conditioning Priscilla, plus keeping her relatively isolated while he leaves home for extended periods and does whatever (and whomever) he wants. I’m sure it did come across strongly in the script Lisa Marie read because it’s the focus of the entire film. That said, he doesn’t appear to have any sinister reason for abusing Priscilla. He may not be consciously aware of his own strategies. He doesn’t come across as a great boyfriend, though. For me, his behavior is tricky because he does have a tragic, mysterious allure. And it is easy to understand why someone so ridiculously famous and stalked everywhere by sex-crazed women would seek out a quiet relationship with a young girl devoted solely to him.

If I were Priscilla, I’d probably be like, The way he treats me is unacceptable. I will only put up with it for ten more years. But then I stop and think. What if I weren’t Priscilla? What if my daughter were Priscilla? That changes everything.

I was once in a relationship sort of like this myself. The less palatable qualities sneak up on you. I don’t have inside knowledge of Priscilla’s relationship with Elvis, but the way their abusive dynamic plays out rings very true. Even if it’s not true of Elvis (though that’s not what I’m suggesting), it’s definitely true of someone, of many people. It’s a common abuse pattern.

Cailee Spaeny is very good as Priscilla. To me, she’s the only character who feels like a fully realized person. I feel like we’re reading an adolescent’s diary. Priscilla is the only person we really know. The Elvis we get is merely Elvis as he interacts with her. We’re left with the impression that he’s living a fuller, more well-rounded life somewhere else.

I’m glad to see more about Priscilla, though. As a child, I was much more a fan of Priscilla Presley than of Elvis (because I loved The Naked Gun movies). I pretty much only watched Elvis movies hoping to see Ann-Margret. (Don’t get me wrong. I’m perfectly open to learning more about Elvis. It’s just nice to see a bit more of Priscilla.)

Best Scene:
That scene where Elvis gives Priscilla a sedative that puts her to sleep for two days really got my attention. For two days?! What the hell is he taking? You know what would put me to sleep for two days? Nothing. And the pills barely have any effect on him, which is so scary.

Elvis’s interpretation of the woman at the well story in his Bible study is also quite telling. Someone asks, “Do you think the woman at the well was a virgin?” On the surface, this is an idiotic question considering they’ve just read the text. (“Jesus said to her, ‘You are right in saying, “I have no husband;” for you have had five husbands, and he whom you now have is not your husband.’”) But maybe Elvis’s response is telling of how he views marriage. He also thinks Jesus is probably attracted to her? That’s a strange reading. (Now I find myself thinking, “Could the text support that? The story has never occurred to me that way.”) This is what I worry I’m like when I read the Bible with my kids. Yes, I read them the Bible, but with about this much authority as a theologian. I also noticed that Elvis is so entranced by the one woman’s perfume, as if she’s wearing such a rare fragrance. But she’s just wearing Chanel No. 5—which we have seen earlier is the same fragrance Priscilla herself wears. What a humiliating experience for Priscilla!

Best Action Sequence:
There’s a moment I love when Elvis hurls a chair at Priscilla, and it smashes into the wall beside her. I love it for its visceral violence. A red flag for later abuse is supposed to be the person throwing or breaking objects near you. I’ve always maintained that this is not necessarily a red flag. (Isn’t it better to break objects than to hit a person in anger? And breaking objects or hitting walls does not necessarily mean the person will graduate to hitting people. I’ve known many people who hit walls who never hit people.) But what Elvis does here clearly crosses a line. I thought, “Ah! Yes, okay! That’s a red flag!” It was very nearly a black-and-blue face!

I also thought, “I have Elvis’s mama’s temper, too. But I never throw chairs.” Does he get away with stuff like that because he’s a star or because he’s a man? I do have a flash temper (though I’ve grown much better at controlling it with age), but I can’t even imagine being physically violent to that degree. I can’t fathom physically attacking someone like that. (I can fathom attacking someone, just not like that.) And I would never attack someone weaker! Why does he think that’s okay? Every time he roughs her up, he makes me think of Happy Gilmore (that, “I’m sorry baby,” scene at the callbox).

Admittedly, I’m not as scared of tempers as I probably should be. (In fact, I get suspicious if people don’t have a temper.) (I’m kind of weird.) The first time I met my mother-in-law, she took me aside immediately and warned me that my husband has a temper. Guess what? Me, too!

A temper isn’t a problem. Domestic violence is.

I would be scared if someone threw something that large, that fast, that hard at my head in front of other people…and then just said, “I’m sorry, Baby. You know I have my mama’s temper,” as if that’s an adequate explanation. When I lose my temper, what I’m usually trying to express is that I’m so upset I can’t think clearly and need help. I’m never trying to hurt the person. I only attack people if I think they’re stronger. (To be clear, I don’t “attack” like that). I, too, have a flash temper, so I relate to quick bursts of rage chased by immediate regret (or exhausted relief). But I do not understand how you almost smash your wife’s face in and think a two-second apology is adequate.

(I have one of those tempers that’s both easily fanned and easily defused. As a child, pretty much every day at some moment, I screamed hysterically at my mother, then ran in horror out of the room. Then I would immediately be sorry (and often have no recollection of the particulars of the episode), and my mom would be mad for two weeks. I’ve been working on this my entire life. Thank God, this never happens with my husband. He de-escalates immediately. He makes it very difficult to be mad at him. He immediately asks, “What’s wrong, sweetie?” (This only works because I know he thinks I’m a sweetie.) He just stays calm, and then it goes away.) (I don’t think it’s okay to lose my temper. That’s why I’ve given it so much thought.) (I think I’m making myself sound like a violent maniac, which is not true.) (I just find allegedly not having a temper much scarier and full of possibilities for someone murdering me unexpectedly.) Elvis crosses a line into physical violence on several occasions.

Honestly, I don’t think it’s a good idea to give your wife a bunch of guns, and then try to brutalize and humiliate her by throwing a chair at her head in front of everyone. (I’m not saying it’s okay to brutalize her in private. But when he attacks in a room full of people, it’s doubly upsetting because he does it with impunity. She sees no one else will protect her either. She’s also humiliated because they all see how poorly he treats her. And he’s too lazy even to reserve his violent abuse for when they’re alone. He knows he can get away with doing whatever he wants at any time. That can’t make her feel great!)

Later, we get an echo of this moment and see that Priscilla has learned how to avoid such situations. Through violence, Elvis has conditioned her to realize she needs to reassure him (not give him any sort of critique, even if it mirrors his own thoughts) when he expresses concern about the quality of his work. (This is like the reddest of flags. This is right out of the abuser’s handbook.) The movie so pointedly shows us how she learns to respond that it’s almost a bit off-putting. (Was the abuse so textbook? I guess it was if she says so. Nuance seems missing, but maybe there’s just not time for nuance on a limited budget. Or maybe there was no nuance!)

Best Scene Visually:
I suppose I shouldn’t count the scene where the dog peers down at the newspaper like he’s reading it. There’s a little white dog in this movie with the best facial expressions. Elvis gives it to Priscilla inside a little fenced-off pen. The dog is adorable, but it’s also a metaphor for the life Elvis offers Priscilla herself. She has to stay in her place and submit to her training.

There’s one moment when Priscilla stands and looks out a window. I thought, “She really does look like Priscilla Presley there.” Then I thought, “Wait. Does she look like Priscilla Presley? She also looks a little like Ann-Margret.” Then I thought, “Maybe it’s the eye make-up.” It’s a very striking pose.

The opening credits immediately caught my eye, too. We see in close ups all the beautiful clothes, all the lovely accessories, all the pretty things in the room. And we also see Priscilla. She is one of the pretty things. That’s how Elvis treats her—as a pretty thing, a decoration for his house.

The Negatives:
We probably should see more of an upside to the relationship. This isn’t a very balanced take. Surely Priscilla fell in love with Elvis for some reason. We aren’t shown any of that. This watches like a litany of remembered abuses (perhaps abusive moments recognized as such later). But what happened between the two of them on those early dates? Priscilla doesn’t show us that. Did Priscilla’s helpful classmate get to come to a party at Graceland as promised? What were the parties like? On the other hand, this does suggest that Priscilla really did deeply love Elvis. Maybe she doesn’t want to show us the intimate moments in their private relationship that worked well. Maybe those are too precious to her.

Of course, there’s another possibility. I read that because of budget constraints, Coppola had to cut a bunch of scenes she’d intended to film. I’m not sure what those scenes would have shown.

I tend to crave nuance, but I don’t get to tell Priscilla Presley’s story. It’s not my story, and it’s not my story to tell. Sometimes I do wonder how much we’re collectively influenced by prevailing narratives running through the media. But it’s not like Presley just thought of all this. She took her child and left her dysfunctional marriage decades ago. She didn’t walk out for no reason. It’s interesting to see her take on their relationship. One thing I noticed is that Priscilla doesn’t become increasingly beaten down. Instead, she starts to get cynical. Then she leaves. She’s never a beaten down victim. She’s a child who grows up (though perhaps she’s never so much of a child as Elvis and her parents want her to be).

The film also couldn’t get permission to use Elvis’s actual music. My husband thought that hurt it a bit, but I’m not sure. Part of me thinks that if we heard Elvis’s music, our brains would say, “Oh right! Elvis!” and just plug in the familiar version of the star we have in our heads instead of truly noticing the story the film is telling from Priscilla’s perspective. When we don’t keep getting reminders that Priscilla’s husband is a huge, beloved superstar we already know, it’s easier to look critically at his actual behavior toward her. Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis was Oscar-nominated just this year, and most people know what Elvis’s music sounds like because of his recordings, movies, and impersonators. We can just fill that in for ourselves, surely. I remember when the movie Sylvia (starring Gwyneth Paltrow) couldn’t get permission to use any of Plath’s poetry. That was much more of a problem for that film than the lack of Elvis performances is for this one. Some of the music that Priscilla does use brings an appeal of its own. I especially like “I Will Always Love You,” at the film’s close.

The whole time I watched, I tried to decide how problematic the beginning of this relationship was. When they first started dating, Elvis was twenty-four, Priscilla fourteen. Fourteen is pretty young. But behavior we now label as grooming used to be much more normal socially (I think). (Look at Jane Austen’s Emma.) Is it wrong to play a large role in a young girl’s life as you wait for her to grow into a potential wife? When I first became aware of Priscilla Presley (in The Naked Gun), I had a crush on Ricardo Montalbán. In fact, all of my male celebrity crushes were decades older than I was (at nine or ten). I don’t know. When I was younger with an older boyfriend, it seemed fine. But when I was twenty-four, dating a fourteen-year-old would not have seemed okay to me. Now that my daughter’s in high school, I encounter actual teenagers all the time. I cannot fathom dating any of them. They’re clearly still children (compared to me). At one point, Elvis assures Priscilla’s father that his intentions are honorable. That used to mean, “It’s okay. I’m going to marry the girl.” But whether you “dishonor” a girl or not, surely you run the risk of damaging her through such behavior.

Recently (because I’m a catechist for second grade RE), I had to attend a harrowing, three-hour Ethics and Integrity in Ministry training session. We listened to the first-hand accounts of abused children and the reflections of some abusers. All of Elvis’s behavior in this movie is the kind of thing we’re supposed to flag and report. The traditional idea that marriage makes everything “honorable” is a bit questionable by contemporary standards of behavior. “Honorable intentions” seem so patriarchal, like the focus is on not embarrassing the father. Does marriage blot out all sins that come before? When I was young, I used to think so. (It was more desperation than logic, the surety that the one way to “fix” the mistakes I’d made in a disastrous relationship was by hanging in there until it culminated in marriage which blotted out all sins that came before. I would not want my daughter to resort to such thinking!)

In the end, the movie’s strongest point (its tight focus on this dysfunctional dynamic) is also its biggest weakness (basically because it offers us nothing else). For its entire runtime, the film is nothing but a close look at a bad relationship. It’s well done, but a bit one note (especially when one person in the relationship is Elvis!). (Of course, part of the point the film is making is that while Priscilla remains in this relationship, she can’t flourish in a life of her own.)

In a way, this reminds me a bit of the film Spencer. It’s not a fun watch. Like Diana at the royal Christmas gathering, Priscilla lives surrounded by luxury in Graceland, but she’s always watched and controlled, and her life has become a bit of a nightmare. (What was her life like before Elvis? I wanted to see that, too.) I find it interesting that sometimes people feel trapped in marriage when they have a child, but Priscilla finds agency and the courage to leave after having her daughter. It’s like she’s finally able to break out of the mold of being a child and become a fully realized adult. Once she has Lisa Marie, she suddenly also has friends, a life of her own, some control over the household. She transitions from being Elvis’s child to the mother of Elvis’s child. (This might work out if she were a queen consort back in the day.) (I mean, it worked out great for Catherine of Aragon.)

Overall:
I feel like I’ve talked around and at this movie instead of saying much about it, but there’s not much to say. This is the story of Priscilla Presley’s problematic relationship with Elvis. (You might ask, “Problematic to whom?” I’d answer, “Problematic to Priscilla Presley. She’s the one who wrote the memoir.”) I feel creepy peering into other people’s personal lives and passing judgment, but it’s Presley herself who has invited us in, and she’s the one passing judgment. She still seems uncertain what that judgment is, however. She just knows that though she loved Elvis and still loves Elvis, their life together wasn’t good for her, and she had to leave it. That’s pretty sad for a Wednesday night, but Spaeny’s performance is good.