Sofia Coppola's Priscilla is a Disturbing Affirmation of Humanity
What do we want, and why do we want it? And what would happen if we got what we want?
These questions are, in one way or another, the heart of all of Sofia Coppola's films--as, indeed, of many films. What sets Sofia Coppola apart from practically all filmmakers of her (or any) generation is two things: (1) her almost exclusive focus on female desire and perspective, and (2) the honesty and empathy of her portrayal of desire and of the people caught in its spell.
From this perspective, Priscilla represents the peak of her career. This is, paradoxically, because it is by far her most restrained film, the film where she most lets go of typical auteur control and its accompanying obsessions and allows another person's perspective to fully take center stage. To take a small, but telling example, Sofia Coppola, like other auteur directors, has a stable of actors and actresses she uses repeatedly in her films; and Priscilla contains none of them. Yet Priscilla is at the same time a film that profoundly reflects, and fulfills, Sofia Coppola's prevailing style, aesthetics, and overriding obsessions. I honestly cannot think of any other director, any other artist, even, who could have created anything remotely like this film. And that is no small praise.
Teenage Dreams
To recap for the unaware: Priscilla is a film about Priscilla Presley, the sometime wife of Elvis Presley. It chronicles the basic story of their relationship, from beginning to (mostly) ending: the two meeting in Germany when Priscilla was 14 and Elvis 24 and already a global superstar, him courting her there, her visiting him at Graceland several years later, coming to live with him there at the age of 17, marrying him at the age of 20, and finally divorcing him at the age of 28.
This is obviously a narrative that raises a number of sensitive, possibly inflammatory, possibly horrifying questions. And indeed, this is one of the most common (negative) reactions to the film I have come across, particularly from genuine Elvis fans: that the film portrays their relationship as inappropriate, possibly grooming, possibly even abuse, and therefore treats Elvis fundamentally as a moral monster. And on the other hand, there is the other sort of negative reaction to the film I have seen: that it soft-pedals the inappropriateness of their relationship, romanticizes it, lets Elvis off the hook, and, perhaps most damningly of all, ultimately chooses to again suppress Priscilla's individuality and agency by telling only the story of Priscilla with Elvis, ending the film as their relationship comes to an end.
I do not think either reaction is fair--but in the defense of everyone who finds the film uncomfortable and disturbing and perhaps even morally irresponsible, such discomfort and horror is by no means an unreasonable basic reaction to Priscilla. It is precisely, though, I would argue, the film's uncomfortableness, its bizarre double-vision between the romantic and the abusive, fantasy and nightmare, love and control that gives it its unique insight.
Of course, nothing I say will make any sense without acknowledging the specific, bizarre details of the film's portrayal of Elvis and Priscilla's relationship. For one thing, Elvis scrupulously gains the approval and permission of her parents both for his initial courting of her and his eventual taking of her to live in Tennessee with him. For another thing, until she turns 18, Elvis enrolls her at a Catholic school and makes her finish her education. For a third thing, even after bringing her to live in his house, even while sleeping in the same bed with her, Elvis refuses to have sex with Priscilla until their marriage when she is 20.
This is one of the film's more technical achievements: that it manages to convey an enormous amount of information, an enormous amount of extremely specific detail, about Priscilla and Elvis and their lives and psyches and relationship, without virtually any exposition. Everything is conveyed rather via story, anecdote, showing rather than telling, from Elvis' obsession with guns to his flings with starlets to his final drug-addled decline. Here is a film that solves, almost effortlessly, every typical problem associated with the "biopic" as a genre, from its obsession with iconic nothingness to its endless repetitions to its typical lack of insight into the actual character and choices and psyche of its subject. If the typical biopic is a superhero origin film with roughly an extra hour and a half of additional exposition, Priscilla is equal parts screwball comedy, psychological horror film, and teenage romance.
While the film is frequently horrifying, while the film is (to a vastly underappreciated degree) very frequently hilarious, it is the last genre just mentioned that is, I think, most important to understanding the film as a whole. About half-way through watching Priscilla in a mostly empty theater, I realized, with a strange abruptness, that I knew this story: and it was Twilight.
Here, put simply, was the story of a relatively ordinary, un-distinctive teenaged girl fixated on out of the blue by an obsessive older man whose love isolates her, takes over her life, separates her from her parents and friends and brings her into a drastically different social world; a man who desires her passionately but absolutely refuses to have sex with her until a long-delayed marriage that quickly leads to the birth of a single child. Like Edward in Twilight, Elvis is simultaneously both in some sense an adolescent like her, a peer, and an older, more experienced, glamorous, powerful figure. Like Edward, he is both sensitive and blind, both mature and childish, both domineering and needy, both obsessive and eager to please, both sexually desirous and sexually controlled, tender and violent, intimate and distant, licit and illicit, safe and dangerous.
In this, of course, Edward and Elvis alike are simply instances of the broader genre of female fantasy figures, contained in many genres and forms of art, including rom coms and romance novels and even serious literature (Will Ladislaw, I see you). What defines this sort of figure, and the female perspective that shapes and defines it, is not only desire and fantasy in the abstract, but a basic, overriding immaturity of perspective: and this immaturity is put on display, portrayed and interrogated, in Priscilla.
The very heart of Priscilla the film is Sofia Coppola's basic realization that the story of Priscilla Presley was, both for millions of teenage girls in America in the 1960s, and above all for Priscilla herself, first and foremost and above all things a teenage female fantasy. And in this, she is absolutely correct--for nothing about the film, nothing about Priscilla Presley's life, makes sense until this is understood.
One of the things that makes Priscilla so effective, and so unusual for a biopic, is the degree to which it was conceived and worked on and finished in active collaboration with the figure it portrays. Priscilla Presley came to Sofia Coppola insisting that only she could tell her story; and she is listed in the film's credits as Executive Producer, and by all accounts is quite happy with the final results.
Memory is a strange thing; perspective an even stranger one. What defines Priscilla above all is the degree to which it is a story told from the perspective of Priscilla herself; not in the technical-filmic sense (we see scenes where she is not present), but in the overriding sense of her actual feelings and reactions and perspective on all the situations and places and people we see. The film is not just based on her book of memoirs: everything in the film is "as experienced by Priscilla Presley," from Elvis himself to Graceland to her daughter. And we get, I think, from watching the film a rather excellent sense of who Priscilla was, and who she is.
This is, bizarrely, more or less a totally unheard of thing for biopics. Practically every biopic I have seen is told rather from the point of view of the "audience," the American public, the "fans," those obsessed with the iconography and media and songs and "scholarship" and juicy anecdotes. The biopic for the most part exists to give us what we want: the moment when Joaquin Pheonix puts on the wig and becomes Johnny Cash singing Folsom Prison, or performing at San Quentin prison, or doing any of the other Johnny Cash things we expect and demand that he do. "He looks and sings like Johnny Cash in that scene!" we declare, charmed once again by a simulacrum of the simulation we loved as a child.
Sofia Coppola is certainly interested in such iconography, here and in her other films--but in Priscilla, at least, she is immensely, immensely restrained in how she deals with, deliberately touching upon it lightly and only from Priscilla's perspective and only to the degree that Priscilla Presley herself was interested in it. In a late scene, we see Elvis being measured for his iconic "King" outfit, and asking Priscilla sheepishly if he looks silly: you look great, she tells him, supportively, but without much interest. In many similar films, the moment of Priscilla's physical transformation--when Elvis demands that she dye her hair black and assume the hairstyle associated with the iconic pictures and films Elvis fans are so familiar with--would be the summit and climax of the film as a whole. In Priscilla, however, from the perspective of the person Priscilla Presley, this is only one in a long line of compromises and acquiescences to fit into the lifestyle and wishes of the (famous, powerful) man she loves, and very far from the most impactful or frustrating one. Dying her hair from dark brown to black does not seem a disturbing change or infringement on her identity: what does deeply frustrate her is Elvis' absolute insistence that she not wear dresses with prints, even when she really likes them. Such is life--at least to those who experience it firsthand, and not through mass-media simulations.
In all this, the film bears throughout, not the brand of simulation, but the subtle, indelible imprint of genuine experience and genuine memory. And as Sofia Coppola fully recognizes, the deepest content of memory is in fact personality. Priscilla is not a story told objectively from an objective point of view; it is the retelling of the memories of a very particular, individual person. Only a very honest, very empathetic, very romantic, very sentimental young woman could have lived such a story and reacted as Priscilla did, and only a very honest, very empathetic, very romantic, very sentimental old woman could have remembered it in such a way. Many young women, and most old women, are none of these things.
Priscilla Presley is thus, in a sense, as much present in Priscilla as an old woman as she is as a young woman. The young woman is experiencing, reacting, desiring, without context or understanding: the young woman is looking back, with experience and understanding, but is almost equally moved--perhaps even more, since our emotions often only take shape, deepen, put down roots, with age, time, reflection. This old woman is in a direct line from the young woman: they are recognizably the same person, one looking forward, and one looking back.
This triumph of Sofia Coppola in Priscilla is, then, precisely and at the same time the triumph of Priscilla Presley, and it is indelibly a triumph of memory. The power of the film--a power that in my experience is unique--is that in its portrayal of Elvis and Priscilla's relationship, in every scene it conveys a dual perspective, almost a dual reality as it were.
On the one hand, this is, as many Elvis fans recognize, a blisteringly honest portrayal of a not particularly healthy relationship. It gives details upon details upon details, most not at all flattering to the King of Graceland: it shows his violent moods, his domineering control, his immaturity, his childishness. Yet while giving all these realities with total honesty, the film never loses sight of the basic naivete and romanticism of Priscilla's own perspective. With one half of our minds, we recognize, abstractly, the negative, frequently horrifying nature of the situation: and with the other half, we see it as it were naively, as one episode in the young Priscilla's romantic fantasy. Almost every scene is thus both horrifying and romantic, without one destroying or even undercutting the other.
This is accomplished in large part filmically because of the way Sofia Coppola chose to shoot the film, aesthetically and cinematographically and narratively centering it on the facial reactions shown by its lead character. In every scene, Priscilla is our center: we are shocked when she is shocked, angered when she is angered, made uncomfortable when she is made uncomfortable, amazed when she is amazed, seduced when she is seduced. In this, the performance of the lead actress, Cailee Spaeny, can hardly be sufficiently praised. Her performance, and Coppola's direction of her, simply is the film.
Celebrity as Adolescent Trauma
Above all else, then, the content of Priscilla consists precisely in its recognition and play with a fundamental (rare) disconnect between the perspective the film gives us, and the perspective the film is equally aware of in the audience watching the film. Put simply, Priscilla does not react the way we might expect her to react; she does not react the way we, the audience, react. By giving us this strange dual reality, highlighting it, emphasizing it again and again, the film insistently asks us: why is Priscilla reacting like this?
To take an early example, on her first night in Graceland, Elvis gets into bed with Priscilla, kisses her, then abruptly refuses to have sex with her 'until the time is right'; a decision that offends her, but which she accepts. Then, to defuse the awkward moment, Elvis takes a pill to help him sleep, and belatedly offers one to Priscilla as well; which she accepts. Then she wakes up two days later to an Elvis stumblingly chiding himself for being stupid, and is neither terrified nor upset, but merely confused. Then, he asks her if she wants to go to Las Vegas; and she accepts this too. We see from her perspective the excitement of the airplanes, the crowds, the gambling (21! she says: no, he mumbles, that's 22), all accepted in Elvis' company as romance and excitement without any context, almost without any content.
The deceptively simple answer to the enigma of Priscilla's reactions is that she reacts like this because she is an adolescent. Which is to say: she is someone without enough knowledge, enough context, enough insight, to fully understand what she is accepting and therefore to make choices in the way she, in the view of older people, should. And yet anyone who has ever been an adolescent, male or female, should be able to recognize, remember, this basic, strange perspective on the world.
In recognizing that Priscilla's story is to a large extent an adolescent fantasy, the film, its own gentle way, makes the rather important point that, for virtually all of us, it is a very great blessing that our adolescent fantasies were not fulfilled; that, for most of us, such fantasies coming true would be closer to a nightmare than a dream come true. This is the mission statement of many of Sofia Coppola's films; but of none more than The Beguiled, a masterpiece in its own right, a remake of a '70s pseudo-porno that takes an adolescent male fantasy scenario, recognizes that it is also, to some extent, a female fantasy scenario too, and then brutally deconstructs it to show the nightmare it is for all involved. None of the sheltered characters in The Beguiled can handle the mere fact of sex, none can handle their own sexual desires, their own sexual fantasies, their own relationships with the opposite sex, and so all ends inevitably in murder.
In Priscilla, however, this fundamental adolescent naivete and fundamental human desire is not merely condemned, not merely deconstructed; it is also, in its strange way, understood, empathized with, even to a degree affirmed. In Priscilla's mind, Elvis is her boyfriend, her crush, her fantasy, the overriding goal and content of her life. Everything she encounters in his company, then, is something she must accept, deliberately and willingly, as romantic background or romantic hardship or romantic burden, for her one overriding telos. There is present in such adolescent consciousness a kind of infinite potential for sacrifice, for labor, for love of a sort, despite and even because of the ignorance and naivete and stupidity. After all, the basic task of the adolescent is to grow up; and this requires, normally, a great deal of acceptance of things much more strange and bizarre and even terrible than Elvis Presley.
Human creatures are influenced by their environment, by other people; but they only grow from within, from their internal desires and teloses and impulses. As Priscilla explains to Elvis in a central scene, she is a woman "who needs to be desired"--which might perhaps be taken as the chief idea of all of Sofia Coppola's films. For Priscilla, then, Sofia Coppola's most fundamental, perhaps most transgressive, insight is that Priscilla, for all Elvis' money and power and domineering personality, is emphatically not just a passive victim or a passive tool. She is an active recipient, an active partner, seduced (if she is seduced) much more by her own desire and her own fantasy than by Elvis himself.
Another equally important insight of Sofia Coppola is that the film is to a degree not merely about one adolescent perspective, but two: the adolescent female perspective of Priscilla, and the adolescent male perspective of Elvis Presley.
If there is anything that dulls the abusive overtones of Priscilla's leading relationship, it is the film's clear-eyed understanding that Elvis is also fundamentally an adolescent. Elvis' reactions to the world around him, other people, and above all Priscilla herself, are all shaped by the same context-less, content-less adolescent acceptance and fantasy and desire that dominates Priscilla's life. If Elvis in this is a bit more external, a bit more domineering, a bit less self-sacrificing and a bit more driven by his own selfish whims...well, is this not also true for practically all adolescent boys in comparison to adolescent girls?
Here, though, the film poses another (implicit) question: Why does Elvis, 24 when he meets Priscilla, 30 when they marry, 38 when they part, come off throughout the film as an adolescent? Why does he react the way he does, to Priscilla and everything else?
In its unaffected, matter-of-a-fact style, the film shows that, for Elvis, celebrity is above all a form of stunting, a form of perpetual adolescence, partly imposed, partly embraced. The world Elvis lives is adolescent not only in general shape, but in practically all specific details. Graceland is the house he bought for his dead mother: it is inhabited by his (permissive, kindly) grandmother, who takes care of the housekeeping, by his cold, distant father, who manages all his business affairs, and by his posse of immature male friends, who hang out with him and play pool and cards and bumper cars and swim and talk and drink. When Priscilla first arrives at Graceland, she is driven from the airport by Elvis' father, and embraced by his grandmother: "the boys are in there," she tells her. This is nothing if not a fantasy vision of American adolescence: where fathers provide money and pay bills and deal with difficult adult matters, but do not control or give orders or make demands, where grandmothers and mothers cook and clean and love, but do not provide moral or emotional guidance or insist on propriety or cleanliness, and where boys run amok, perpetually being provided for, perpetually being coddled, doing whatever they please.
Elvis, it is true, does go away from the family home, with his posse of male friends, to visit Las Vegas, to tour, to film movies: but what are these if not the ultimate adolescent male excursions? Whenever he leaves, as Priscilla soon learns to her fury, he ends up in a childish fling with one starlet or another, portrayed lasciviously on the front pages of gossip papers: but then he comes home again to eat his grandmother's cooking and stay up too late with his friends shooting off firecrackers.
Once again, though, Sofia Coppola's portrayal of Elvis' adolescent state is not merely negative. If Elvis has the lust and selfishness of an adolescent, he also the neediness of an adolescent--as in his initial meeting with Priscilla, where he tells her of his loneliness in Germany and sadness over the death of his mother, causing her to insist to her parents that "he needs me!"--the insecurity of an adolescent--as in his repeatedly expressed anxieties that his music is bad, that his fans will abandon him, that as an actor he will never measure up to his hero Humphrey Bogart--even the fear and sense of propriety of an adolescent--as in his painfully respectful and submissive interactions with Priscilla's father. If he has at times the violent rage of an adolescent, he has also the violent mood swings of an adolescent, going from tenderness to sudden anger back to tenderness at the drop of a hat. Above all, he has the indelible adolescent male trait of looking uncomfortable and mumbling a lot whenever emotion or honesty is called for. In one of the film's best scenes, a mumbling Elvis attempts, without looking at her, to break up with his 20-something, 6-month-pregnant wife, by suggesting they "take a break." A minute later, he has taken it back again, just as stumblingly.
For Priscilla, then, Elvis' status as a celebrity is most cogently expressed simply in the fact that he is a perpetual adolescent, stunted at roughly the age of 15.
It is in this way that the film, intelligently and insightfully and even empathetically, understands Elvis' fixation on Priscilla. When he first meets her in Germany, away from his fans, he is first drawn to her precisely because she is "a girl from back home," a kind, decent, respectable highschool girl from his own homeland of Texas. In other words, Priscilla is precisely the age-appropriate, personality-appropriate, location-appropriate girlfriend for an Elvis of ten years ago, an Elvis who had never become an overnight global superstar.
In this sense, celebrity is treated psychologically as a form of trauma, taking away its victim's shot at a "normal life" and stunting them emotionally at roughly the age and time of life when it first took place. In this context, Priscilla is, paradoxically, Elvis' shot both at returning to the past, to his life as an adolescent before celebrity, and his shot at finally growing up. By carefully and scrupulously courting her with the permission of her parents, by not having sex with her, by finally marrying her at an appropriate moment--Elvis will follow the normal path of development, and finally exit adolescence.
Of course, all this is mixed up with darker things. Elvis, like Priscilla, like all adolescents, wants to grow up; and yet, because he is a celebrity, because he is nestled in a fantasy world of wealth and power and media and corporate control, he cannot. This is his essential tragedy in Sofia Coppola's telling: and Priscilla is, more and more, drawn into this tragedy and this nightmare.
By bringing her to Graceland, by keeping her a virtual prisoner in his house chaperoned and overseen by his grandmother and father, Priscilla becomes merely one more prop in Elvis' adolescent fantasy world. Hence the bizarre, often horrifying, often hilarious set of contradictory demands and controls with which Elvis presents Priscilla in her new life. As he insists, she cannot come in public with him, cannot be seen with him, lest it harm his reputation: she must simply wander, alone, around his house with the dog he gave her, while he is away on the road romancing older women. She is his purely private possession, who nonetheless must alter her appearance to match his and join him for aestheticized photo ops and always be available when he needs to talk to her. She is his escape from an overriding branded celebrity lifestyle and identity, authentic and untouched and totally unlike the starlets he romances, who must nonetheless submit totally to this celebrity lifestyle and its demands. In the end, she is little more than the simulation of a private life for a public person allowed no privacy; the simulation of a normal, obligating family for a man defined by his complete lack of obligations.
In other words, she is his fantasy, his fantasy of a normal adolescence and a normal, healthy relationship and a normal, healthy life--just as he is hers. It is this which makes the film at once most insightful and most deeply disturbing.
Media Fantasies
Desire is a strange thing; what is even stranger, perhaps, is fantasy, those highly colored pictures we form of what we want, or think we want, or perhaps do not actually want at all. While desire is inchoate, coming from within, moving toward a real object, fantasy attaches itself to images, constructing itself out of fragments of experience and narrative and perception and second-hand idea.
No human being experiences or can experience desire in a purely physical, animalistic sense. Because we are rational beings, our desires are rationalized as well, depending as much on mind as on body. Because we are persons, our desires are personalized, depending on social context and relationship and emotion. Even the basest excesses and perversions of human desire are obviously based on, and embody, ideas, images, perceptions of the world and other people.
And yet, as Aquinas would have it, both reason and personal relationship are mediated, and must be mediated, through phantasms, through imagination and sensation. And hence, in desiring, human beings inevitably construct not only ideas about what they desire, but images, narratives, fantasies. Healthy fantasy, in this sense, helps to mediate between desire and its object, channeling it, developing it, directing it rationally to its proper object according to reason and the objective reality of the world and the objective good of other people. Unhealthy fantasy does the opposite, derationalizing desire and separating it from its ends in the world and other people and so, ultimately, decohering it and destroying it.
As I discussed in a recent post, one of the keys to understanding human development is to realize that children and adolescents are shaped, most of the time, most profoundly by the views and ideas and experiences of adults, the ideas and images and stories and impressions they get from grown-up people of what it means to be grown up.
In a normal, healthy society, these ideas and narratives and experiences come, normatively, from real people known to the children and adolescents directly: parents, uncles, family friends, teachers, priests, authority figures. We are far from a healthy society; and what has most defined modernity, what has most defined the American Empire of the last fifty to one-hundred years, is the absolutely unprecedented degree to which people's psyches and development are dominated by mass-media.
In America for the last century or more, people have commonly, even normatively gotten their fantasies, their expressions and mediations and directions of desire, from mass media, television and film and the Internet, produced by total strangers a world away in order to make money. When one speaks to contemporary Americans, one sees that this is not only not hidden, but is actually to a large extent seen as normative and even morally obligatory. What did you watch as a kid? What actor did you have a crush on? What film character did you want to emulate? What movie or television show made you want to pursue your current career? What pornography did you watch? To get one's ideas of the good life anywhere else, from private community or family or religion, is seen, on the other hand, as suspect, perverse, perhaps even anti-social and politically subversive.
Most biopics, as I discussed above, are in their heart of hearts, their essence of essences, a celebration and glorification of this basic state of affairs. Elvis was, for millions of women throughout the world, their first sexual fantasy object--and isn't this wonderful? Or at least, as Oppenheimer would have it, isn't this fact powerful, isn't it iconic, isn't it for that reason alone worthy of endless further glorification and affirmation and celebration? Like J. Robert Oppenheimer in the view of Christopher Nolan, Elvis was a person, but not an ordinary person--he was a person with a destiny, a person fated to ascend to the higher world of mass-media icons, his soul captured on film and rewound and endlessly replayed forever, his picture set up like the image of a god everywhere in the world for the rest of time.
In a real sense, the narrative of celebrity in modern America is analogous to a narrative of divinization in the ancient world. That the weak, imperfect mortal person suffers horrible things on the path to deity, that he does horrible things, that he inevitably dies young and tragically, is not opposed to this narrative but an essential part of it, because an affirmation of the subject's status above common humanity. Didn't Hercules do and suffer horrible things? Didn't Achilles die young in battle, and in so doing achieved kleos, being sung about and spoken about to the end of time, and so became immortal in the only way possible? And so it was for Elvis. And so it can be for you, dear children.
Who is the Villain?
It is this which makes the film Priscilla, in its context as an American big-screen film, most fundamentally transgressive: that it treats Elvis merely as a human being relating to human beings, living a human life, and refuses to pay homage to his alleged godhood. The Presley estate refused Sofia Coppola permission to use Elvis' songs in the film--but in truth this absence is an essential part of the film. We never, for a single moment, see Elvis the god in Priscilla: except in its effects on Elvis himself, and its effects on others. And these effects are all to the worse.
When we first meet the 14-year-old Priscilla, she is asked, out of the blue, whether she listens to Elvis. "Of course," she answers. "Who doesn't?" It is clear, almost from the film's first frame, that Priscilla's desires, her fantasies, have already been shaped by mass media, and even already shaped by the mass media image of Elvis. After their brief meetings in Germany, she collects press clippings, magazines, and images of him adorn her walls: just like most other American teenage girls. And so, when he reciprocates her impossible love, when he invites her to Graceland, when he refuses to have sex with her, when he asks her to marry him...how can she say no? For all its hardships and bizarre controls, there can be no doubt that life in Graceland is a fantasy, aesthetically complete and ready for television, with giant Greek columns and notes on the gates and crowds of fans outside and a giant bedroom decked out with blue velvet curtains and a statue of Jesus. For the next three years, they do not have sex; but in a bizarre scene, fueled by drugs, the chaste couple sprawl across the bed dressing up in various outfits and taking sexualized pictures of each other for hours upon end. Sexual desire may be for sex; but desire for a fantasy is first and foremost a desire for an image.
Nor is Elvis' power confined to adolescents. Even Priscilla's straight-laced military parents are impressed in part by Elvis' mass-media fame and status into doing as he asks; even the nuns at the Catholic school she attends in Graceland not only allow Elvis to send his underage girlfriend/ward to their school without questions, but eagerly flirt with him and pose for photos with him at her graduation. People, at least ordinary people, cannot seem to bring themselves to say no to Elvis, to this icon, this deity, this adolescent fantasy brought to life. They too are Americans, they too watch television, they too were once adolescents, and they too are susceptible to the teenage dream.
Yet the deepest cruelty of the scenario the film portrays is the degree to which Elvis himself is controlled and dominated by his own fantasies and his own status as a fantasy for others. As discussed above, both his life in Graceland and his relationship with Priscilla are to a very large extent adolescent fantasies; but so too are most of the aspects of his life. His romantic flings with starlets are more products of the gossip papers than any amorous desire within him. As he tells an offended Priscilla early on, rumors of a relationship with a co-star are just "for publicity"; yet these highly-colored mass-media flings have an inevitable way of coming true. Elvis sees in the papers that he is wooing a young starlet, a romantic and sexual fantasy served up for the willing gazes of millions; and he is no less seduced than they. As his decline continues apace, as the film suggests with a single wordless scene, it is a decline that consists in its essence of acting out a fantasy of himself, playing out the more grotesque and base perversions of a more hardened age, and using drugs to dull and destroy everything in him contrary to those fantasies. At virtually every stage of his life, he follows the path set for him by mass-media, by the mass-media fantasy version of himself. After all, how could he say no to such a fantasy? How can anyone say no to a fantasy?
One way to understand the strange, singular power of Sofia Coppola's Priscilla is to ask the simple question of who the villain is. In one worse version of the film, it would undoubtedly be Elvis himself, an icon of childish, controlling toxic masculinity for the (already long past) Me Too era. In another version of the film, it might be the adults of the film, Elvis' distant and infinitely obliging father, his clueless and doting grandmother, or Priscilla's bizarre parents, outwardly stiff and disapproving to her but infinitely obliging toward the military colleagues who act on Elvis' behalf and in the end totally submissive to Elvis himself. For while the '50s is bizarrely remembered as a high point for family and patriarchy in America, in fact it was the very lowest point in all of human history up to that point: families and fathers torn away from the communities and networks necessary for their authority to have any meaning, utterly dominated by military and corporate and mass-media power and networks, and left with nothing more than the ritual power to bless the abduction of their children. In another worse version of the film, it might be "the Colonel," an unseen figure who gives orders to Elvis and orchestrates his life and career and tours and media image from afar in the interests of making money, and/or what that character stands, "the system," the mass-media capitalism that turns people's lives into infinitely exchangeable media products to be sold and resold and profited from long after they themselves have died.
Yet as I watched the film, the pressure began to grow and grow on my mind that perhaps we are the villains after all. For are not we, the audience, the consumers of all these images and icons and celebrities, for whose sake they exist? Are we not the ones, deep down, who demanded that Elvis live out a perpetual adolescent fantasy, that Priscilla live out an adolescent fantasy, for the sake of our own long-buried adolescent fantasies, which were not fulfilled? Did we not demand that Elvis die, and be divinized, and become our god? Are we not Americans, people shaped by mass-media to the very core of our being? Have we not fed on fantasies our whole lives, worshiped idols, battened on the blood of celebrities? Is this not all for our entertainment? Isn't everything that happens onscreen in Priscilla, in some profound sense, our fault?
Yet even here, the film does not condemn. After all, if we are people shaped and in some measure controlled by mass-media fantasies, so too are the very human, sympathetic characters of the film Priscilla. This, I believe, is Sofia Coppola's deepest, most moving humanism, an indelibly Christian humanism: an affirmation of common humanity even across the existential divide, the unbridgeable chasm foundational to all American modernity, between audience and object, viewer and viewed, consumer and consumed. Priscilla and Elvis Presley are people just like us. Their plight is our own; and so, too, is the possibility of their triumph, their redemption. And it is on this redemption, or at least its genuine possibility, that the film ultimately centers.
Love in the Time of Elvis Presley
As I said, the main criticisms of Priscilla I have seen have related to its negative portrayal of Elvis, or on the other hand its not negative enough portrayal of Elvis, its focus on Priscilla and Elvis' relationship to the exclusion of the rest of her life "after Elvis." Yet I think, in the end, these choices are both absolutely necessary to the film's power.
There is, I think, a much worse version of the film that does function as a kind of feminist parable, in which Elvis is merely the villain, where she finally gains agency and unmasks his villainy and goes off to live her own life, a life in which by all accounts she romanced various men for short periods of time, found modest success as an actor, and had unprecedented success as a businesswoman managing Elvis' media empire after his death and turning it into a global powerhouse. Yet as even this brief summary shows, this narrative would be immensely dishonest: for the reality, for good or for ill, is that Priscilla's life after Elvis was, in many obvious senses, as shaped by her relationship with Elvis as her life with him. The very existence of the film Priscilla, and the memoir it was based on, show that at the end of her life, Priscilla was almost as much fixated on Elvis as she had been as a teenager.
It may be possible to make a good film about the career of a woman still preoccupied by and profiting from a former husband decades after the fact; but that would be a very different film, and a very difficult film to do well; and in some degree Priscilla, by showing what it does and ending as it does, gives us everything we need to picture that life for ourselves.
The actual "break-up," when it comes, comes with a gentleness more shocking than any. Films, especially that most formulaic genre of the biopic, are typically structured around a basic pattern of a gradual increase of tension leading to a release of tension, a climax. Yet what makes Priscilla so uncomfortable, so indelible, is that it denies the audience this pattern almost entirely, as it was denied to Priscilla herself, and indeed as it is denied to most of us in life. Again and again, tension is created and then not dissipated. No action has its proper reaction. The one minor act of physical abuse in the film comes in the context of a drug-fueled pillow-fight; this tension suddenly and violently emerges out of the hedonistic release, and then is not dealt with. Life goes on.
Most films would find a way to release all that tension at once, in a climax where Priscilla finally recognizes Elvis' evil and denounces him and regains her freedom. Yet this is not how the film, or Priscilla herself, work at all. None of the tensions and sufferings and controls of her life with Elvis are, in the end, determinative for their final parting, or indeed play any obvious role in it. Elvis begins to decline, living and loving in Las Vegas, and she begins to live more on her own, away from him; she takes a karate class; she develops a group of female friends her own age.
Subversively, what ultimately dooms Elvis and Priscilla's relationships is not the problems in their relationship, but the subtle fact that Priscilla has finally begun to grow up. Priscilla at 14 and Priscilla at 18 are both lonely, friendless adolescents; she is isolated in Germany, far from home; she is isolated as the girlfriend of Elvis at a Catholic school in Tennessee. In both cases, she has no connections with children her own age at school, no friends, no life. Doesn't she like any boys in her class? Her mother pleadingly asks in an early scene. The answer is no; not in comparison with the fantasy of Elvis.
What brings Priscilla and Elvis' relationship to an end is not some profound realization on Priscilla's part about the nature of their relationship, or even any profound personal growth on her part. In a sense, she merely advances from the mental and emotional age of 14 to that of 17 or so. She now has friends and extra-curricular activities and at least potential interest in men her own age.
This, though, makes her relationship with Elvis totally impossible. Elvis will never grow up; he can never grow up; and in fact, in his current decline he is moving in the opposite direction. If one will not grow up, the only alternative, finally, is death. The only way Priscilla can stay with Elvis is if she too remains in this eternal adolescence; and in the end, it will kill her too. And so, she quietly, gently tells him she is divorcing him; and he quietly, sadly accepts it. And they part.
There is also, I think, a worse version of the film that ends not with Priscilla's divorcing Elvis, but with Elvis' death several years later--thus making the opposite point, about Elvis' final and indelible impact and dominance of her life, even despite her choice to leave him. Yet the film Priscilla is not, in the end, as cynical or as grotesque as that. As the film emphatically shows, Priscilla does in the end achieve a measure of control and a measure of freedom in her life: and the film affirms that in the only way it can, by ending, as it were, with her moment of maximal agency. She has made a choice--the right choice--and however well or badly her life goes after this point, she has at least gained a life. She has survived her teenage dream.
Yet here Sofia Coppola plays her last and most brilliant card. For when the film ends, with Priscilla finally exiting Graceland and her gilded cage for the last time, it is not to epic music, not to bitter music, not to empowering music, but to the warbling, sentimental strains of "I Will Always Love You."
I will always love you. This is, in the end, the film's (and Priscilla Presley's) final take on her relationship with Elvis; and the way in which the film is ultimately both most subversive and most affirming of adolescence, of desire, of humanity itself. For all that Priscilla's relationship with Elvis was based on fantasy, in the end it was a real human relationship, between real human persons. Priscilla's female adolescent empathy, her romanticism and willingness to sacrifice for love, is affirmed in the only way it can be: by affirming that it at least, to some degree, achieved its end, in the real world and not the world of fantasy. The whole film is finally a testament to the fact that Priscilla Presley succeeded, in the end, and against all odds, in seeing Elvis not as a fantasy or a monster, but as a human being; and that she loved him, and will always love him.
And this, for Sofia Coppola, in her subversive, disturbing way, is an ultimate sort of affirmation of humanity, of all of us with our troubled desires, our troubled fantasies. And that is why it is her best film, and a film only she could have made.
No comments:
Post a Comment