Reclaiming the Gilded Cage of Girlhood in Sofia Coppola's ‘Priscilla’
Under the pastel veneer of Sofia Coppola’s biopic of Priscilla Presley lurks an empathetic look at the trials and tribulations of modern girlhood.
When it was announced in September of 2022 that Sofia Coppola’s next feature film would be a retelling of the untold story of Priscilla Presley, based on her 1985 memoir Elvis & Me, it seemed like an opportunity for the storied woman to finally be given her due diligence as a complex figure. Australian auteur Baz Luhrmann’s June 2022 biopic epic Elvis had already been covered to death in mainstream media, thanks to its tastefully kitschy, over-the-top approach to the makings of a superstar and the method acting gimmick that it took for its leading actor to channel him. The film, doused in the glitz and glamor of Luhrmann’s signature style is more of an overly ambitious spectacle piece, resembling the larger than life theatricalities of a Las Vegas residency show, than a nuanced portrayal of the man behind the King of Rock & Roll. Elvis is depicted as an unassuming manchild whose naïveté is taken advantage of and profited from by his professional guardian/manager Colonel Tom Parker (played by Hollywood-veteran Tom Hanks in one of the worst performances of his career). Overall, Elvis is more concerned with Parker’s self-seeking enterprise to immortalize the Presley name in the public consciousness than it is with illuminating the tragic irony of the rise and fall of a global superstar. What little we did see of Priscilla is reflective of the star’s end.
In Luhrmann’s Elvis, women are seen less as fully-fledged humans and more as avenues through which Elvis’ personal trauma is explored. Priscilla is used as a fictionalized placeholder for all the women who would ultimately abandon Elvis - starting with his beloved mother Gladys, who died when he was in his early twenties leaving him bereft with an indelible Madonna-Whore complex he would impose on his lovers. A fact that is corroborated by reports of his notoriety as a high-profile albeit unconventional womanizer: His alleged affairs ranging from salacious one-night stands to grand yet impotent romantic gestures, like unsolicited two-hour-long serenades in bed. Consistent with this flattened perception of women along the debased slut vs. motherly saint spectrum Elvis’ Priscilla has no traces of being a three-dimensional being with ambitions or emotions. This is not solely Luhrmann’s fault, since a biopic that is already well over two hours long can’t be expected to give screen time to every facet of its subject’s life without going over the 4 hour mark. That said, as one watches the credits roll at the end of those frenzied 159 minutes one can’t help but wonder what untold stories lurk behind the estate approved, self-aggrandizing mythology of Elvis Presley™. One feels left in the dark when it comes to the Priscilla behind the Presley.
As if in anticipation of the widespread ignorance of Priscilla’s story beyond her enduring relevance as a fashion icon, Coppola’s eponymous film opens with a montage of visual references to the instantly recognizable signature look of the First Lady of Graceland (brought to life by an imploringly affecting Cailee Spaeny): the raven beehive hairdo, the almond shaped red acrylics, the luscious false eyelashes and, of course, the iconic elongated cat eye. In the introductory shot, we see her pedicured feet take delicate steps on a pastel pink shag rug from a birds eye view as the harp strings of Alice Coltrane’s Going Home welcomes us into the dreamlike world of Graceland. We are told that this is the story of a girl inside-looking-out from the get-go with zoomed-in interior shots of Elvis’ (an artlessly brooding and quaffed Jacob Elord) grandiose family home interspersed with the opening credits. We learn that before Priscilla was inducted into the Presley Hall of Fame on a first-name basis, she was a lonely schoolgirl who, because of her father’s transfer to an air force base in West Germany, had to leave her hometown behind and move across the ocean. We see her eyes light up with incredulous joy after she is invited into Elvis Presley’s home for the weekend by a friend of his. We laugh at her juvenile attempts at trying to convince her parents to let her take up the invitation at the dinner table – as a ‘regular’ teenage girl might beg her parents to let her date drive her to prom – and once they acquiesce, we cringe in expectation of the ominous series of events that are to unfold before our eyes for the next hour and a half.
Following her introduction to the King at his West Germany residence, the 14-year old Priscilla becomes infatuated with the man behind his larger than life celebrity persona, an emotional beat that is greatly amplified by the 17-inch height difference between Spaeny and Elordi. For a sizable portion of the film, we see Priscilla strain her neck to look up at Elvis and hold his gaze, as a little girl might to heed the authority of her father’s words. This physical disparity of power becomes much more acute when Priscilla moves into Graceland: Elvis’ palatial 14-acre mansion in Memphis, Tennessee. Upon arrival we see her prepubescent, dainty figure donned in pretty pastels: a jarring contrast to Elvis’ rowdy, boldly clothed entourage of imposing groupies. She resembles a little girl who has unwittingly stumbled into the brazen world of adults. Hence, Elvis’ commitment to keeping her ‘pure’. He takes her up as his very own Madonna incarnate in a frilly nightgown; keeping his conscience clear while lying next to her in bed in strict refusal of her desires.
From then on, Elvis slowly molds Priscilla into his ideal of a woman. She becomes a life-sized live-in doll at the behest of her master, a doll who is taught to walk, talk and act like a woman. Her relationship with her husband-to-be is almost too reminiscent of the myth of Pygmalion to be credible. In Priscilla, the King of Rock & Roll is a stand-in for the Greek sculptor who, in his absolute abhorrence of the inherent faults of women, carves his version of the perfect female out of marble and begs the goddess of love Aphrodite to bring his creation to life to make her his wife. But unlike other contemporary adaptations of the myth (i.e. My Fair Lady, Pretty Woman) – Coppola’s film doesn’t reduce Priscilla's coerced transformation from naive schoolgirl to abandoned housewife as a mere marker of upward social mobility. Instead, she turns the camera on Priscilla, in her self-made isolation, trapped between the draped walls and carpeted floors of Graceland. Suddenly, Paul Simon’s wide-eyed hopes of taking refuge under the roof of the renowned Presley estate seem ill-considered. From the inside looking out, we discern that despite its enduring cultural legacy as a national landmark, Graceland, in Priscilla’s eyes, is nothing but a glorified gilded cage with an imposing miasma.
The ‘gilded cage’ as a metaphor for the sense of entrapment evoked by female adolescence is a recurrent theme of Coppola’s filmmaking: whether it be the iron barred suburban home of the Lisbon sisters in The Virgin Suicides, or the adorned mirrored halls of Château de Versailles in Marie Antoinette, the common plight of Coppola’s heroines seems to be their inadvertent imprisonment within the ornate four walls of ‘home’, an apt analogy for the distortive transition from girlhood to womanhood. But what makes Priscilla’s story uniquely tragic is the revelation that her legacy as an icon of her time was ultimately a product of abuse: like Pygmalion’s Galatea, she is paraded around on the arm of Elvis as the epitome of her sex; a schoolgirl in woman's clothing: an innocence green enough to entice his pursuit of the divine feminine but also mature enough to coerce into bed without raising too many eyebrows; to the prying eyes of the public, she is a woman before she is even close to coming into her own person.
We live in an age of perpetual self-surveillance; an age where the incessant pressures to embrace our ideal cyborgian self-presentation obfuscate a greater, more universal truth that – despite the pretense of technological progress – hasn’t changed since time immemorial. That is, the prerequisite to perform female selfhood as dictated by and for the validation of the ever looming gaze of the male Other. In the pre-internet days of yore this outward display of the feminine ideal – the facade of finding much needed fulfillment in housewifery and marital bliss — was confined to the immediate vicinity of the suburban family home, in the digital age it crossed over into the uncharted territory of the cyber realm, albeit under the guise of individual choice. Within this context Priscilla’s gilded cage serves as an allegory for the pitfalls of modern girlhood. As when a befuddled Priscilla in labor takes a moment from the agony of contractions to put on her fake lashes in the mirror while her husband runs down to call an ambulance, we can’t help but nervously laugh at the ludicrousness of the situation despite our faint recognition of the markers of an ever-so pervasive culture that continues to demand the facade of youth, beauty and poise from women in the most painful of predicaments.