Between pandemic theatre shutdowns, streaming wars, and Gen Z’s disinterest in celebrity culture, the big screen has been having an existential crisis over the last few years. Resultantly, the Academy Awards expanded the number of films it nominates for Best Picture and Nicole Kidman did some iconic work for AMC.
The reaction to this home-movie-watching trend (or, maybe, the fuck-movies-I’m-watching-TikTok trend) seems to be revisions to the way films are marketed as opposed to crafting new approaches to the ways films themselves are made.
Olivia Wilde is one of the most notable (or maybe just noticeable) filmmakers to argue for the screen itself as the reason viewers should get to the cinema with Don’t Worry Darling. Greta Gerwig, likewise, has now famously gone old Hollywood with Barbie in a production style shaped by the orgiastic glam of MGM musicals. Yet — neither Don’t Worry Darling nor Barbie are actually about the screen as the medium upon which the film projects. Rather, these are films “about” the patriarchy that arguably undercut themselves immediately by working squarely within the aesthetic prescribed and privileged by the patriarchy. (Please see
’s pieces on these films here and here.)Unless Tom Ford follows up on A Single Man someday, I’d argue Sofia Coppola is the only director working who cares more about style than substance.
Coppola is like the fashion editor who factors in not just the way a latex corset will read under set lights, but also how the gloss of the magazine page itself will effect the texture of the garment. Coppola is fascinating because she doesn’t spend a single second wondering about the moral implications of a seven page spread on post fetish couture sold to fifteen year old girls in, like, grocery store checkout aisles in Indiana.
In other words: Coppola is fascinating because of her amoral approach to socially and historically rife subject matter.
So, yes: you must see a Sofia Coppola film on the big screen.
I want to write something here about Laura Mulvey’s (overly) influential essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Not about the whole triangulation thing*, but rather about the two kinds of pleasure Mulvey believes the movies give us.
1. The “narcissistic pleasure of ‘identification’ with the male protagonist” ie., the camera’s POV.
2. And Scopophilia, or, the “pleasure of looking.” Freud (sorry, I know a lot of you are tab out on the name alone) used the term Scopophilia to explain the concept of Schaulust, or a form of looking related to the childhood process of forming a personality. Put more simply — the stories we tell ourselves about what we look at as children might have a lot to do with who we become.
More interesting to me, though, is what we choose to look at. In what way does the direction of the gaze, of our innate desire, tell us who we are before we are that person?
So, obviously, it is no coincidence Sofia Coppola, our foremost auteur on Girlhood Writ Large, is nearly an anagram for Scopophilia. She doesn't make films “about” girls or women or femininity, but rather about the production of girlhood.
The process not of being looked at, but of looking while being looked at; she points to the inherently meta quality of being “girl,” which is to say to be both produced and producer, camera and subject.There’s something more godlike than girllike about this capacity to float above; to create while being creation.** Going to the new Sofia Coppola film in the theatre always feels kind of like going to church for me.
If this were a personal essay, I’d take a minute here to reminisce on seeing The Beguiled in a jewel box theatre in Kansas right after turning in my comps and drinking two cans of Sofia’s Brut Rosé to erase all the stuff I'd memorized about trauma and Freud (didn’t work, as is evident in this Substack).
But this isn’t a personal essay, so here are five short meditations on Priscilla.
It’s Faustian
I like the melodrama of calling a situation a “Faustian bargain,” but I think it’s gone out of style since existence in Late Stage Capitalism is all pretty Faustian (i.e., we trade our wellbeing/time/soul to survive). Priscilla’s Faustian bargain is the ‘60s version, though, and what she trades is her life as a normal high school girl for the attention of Elvis Presley. The couple’s marriage doesn’t actually occur until well over halfway through the film, situating it as the story’s climax, which is to say that Coppola makes a very big deal of the many points at which Priscilla chooses Elvis.
First she chooses him over her family and friends (of which, as a military brat, she seems to have none). Then she chooses him over material agency, agreeing immediately not to make extra money as a shop girl because, as Elvis drawls, he needs her in Graceland whenever he calls. Finally (and most damningly in the cinema of Sofia Coppola) she chooses him over Style Itself.
The one and only time in the entire film that Priscilla tells an emotionally and physically abusive Elvis to go fuck himself is when he criticizes a balloon-cut psychedelic print dress she’s just purchased. “You’re a small woman,” Elvis explains, exasperated. “You gotta remember you can’t wear big prints.” Priscilla agrees to return the dress, then she agrees to dye her hair black and wear more eye makeup at The King’s suggestion. Coppola’s film will probably feel like a slow (and boring) burn to some audiences — or, it will feel like a true representation of the metronymic pacing by which one surrenders every aspect of their lives to a controlling spouse.
Or, you know, Satan.
It’s Sofia Coppola in Conversation with Baz Lurhmann’s Elvis
In preparation for Priscilla, I finally watched Luhrmann’s ’22 Elvis. It strikes me that it might be very difficult for anyone not familiar with the ins-and-outs of Presley’s biography to make sense of Priscilla. Coppola doesn’t bother to explain why the biggest star in the world is stationed in Germany at the start of Priscilla (he’s enlisted in the Korean War) nor does she ever show “The Colonel” Tom Parker, Elvis’ now notoriously exploitative manager. Luhrmann’s film is told from The Colonel’s perspective, played bizarrely by Tom Hanks in a lot of prosthetics.
Where Coppola omits The Colonel, Luhrmann largely omits Priscilla. While Elvis spends nearly forty minutes on Elvis’ comeback Christmas special, it does not spend even one second on Elvis and Priscilla’s wedding. In fact, Priscilla just sort of appears out of nowhere — which, I suppose, may very well have been how the Colonel felt about his star’s child bride.
Coppola and Luhrmann are both filmmakers obsessed with Camp aesthetics. While Coppola seems interested in documenting Camp style in period pieces, Luhrmann creates modern Camp textures whole cloth through the art of Bad Taste. Because of the significant overlap in both the subject matter and aesthetics of these two filmmakers, it’s interesting to note their very different treatments of race. To put it briefly: Coppola ignores race entirely (most egregiously in The Beguiled and notably in Priscilla) while Luhrmann has (sometimes very awkwardly) shoehorned it into his most Americentric films (The Great Gatsby and Elvis). Both approaches are problematic and deserving of an entire post (or book), so I’ll just leave this at: what is going on here?
It’s Sofia Coppola in Conversation with Sofia Coppola
Priscilla deals with all of Coppola’s usual themes: femininity, privilege, and isolation as explored in The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, The Beguiled and The Bling Ring. I think we were all hoping Priscilla would be the maximalist rococo extravaganza of Marie Antoinette, though. Sadly, it doesn’t quite achieve the sublimity of Marie Antoinette nor does Cailey Spaeny’s somnambulistic performance come near rivaling our Sovereign Sleep Walking Beauty and longtime Coppola muse, Kirsten Dunst.
But! There’s a hell of a lot of plot points in common between these two films. A child is plucked from obscurity (Marie Antoinette, Austria; Priscilla, Bad Nauheim, Germany) and dropped into an isolated palace (Marie Antoinette, Versailles; Priscilla, Graceland) to an existence solely in service of a powerful yet sexually stunted man (Marie Antoinette, Louis XVI; Priscilla, Elvis) and yet she triumphs to varying degrees through her incredible sense of style and becomes an ICON.
Also, Coppola gives both characters small dogs to comfort them.
That noted, I do wish Priscilla had maintained just one more parallel to Marie Antoinette and given it’s heroine a direct address to the camera in a Black Lipstick Let Them Eat Cake moment.
I think the nod to the artifice of Icon Creation is what lets the light in and allows Dunsts’ Marie Antoinette some degree of interiority, the absence of which in Priscilla leaves the eponymous character blank. But perhaps that’s the gesture. Perhaps Coppola’s point is that Priscilla is the rare icon who was always acted on and never acted herself.
None of this is a critique of Coppola’s scriptwriting, but rather an observation about her obsessions. I think all writers actually write the same story, again and again, and it’s up to readers to figure out how they are they same.
It’s Actually Not About Style, It’s Subversive!
So maybe I’m wrong that this movie is all about the act of watching others watch. As I’ve mentioned, Elvis is a really bad guy in this movie. Based on Priscilla’s 1985 memoir, Elvis and Me: The True Story of the Love Between Priscilla Presley and the King of Rock N' Roll, Coppola makes a point to portray Elvis as controlling, abusive, insecure, and dishonest.
At the same time, he is still Elvis and he’s still talented and stylish and Jacob Elordi’s himbo performance is pretty objectifying, which is to say: Coppola’s King is stupid sexy. Now that we’re about five years past the big think pieces about Bad Men*** it seems we will have a wave of films made in the aftermath that reckon with the fact that our culture has been shaped by abusers in both insidious and quotidian ways. Priscilla neither apologizes for nor especially critiques Elvis. Like a traumatic experience that has been metabolized via therapy, the reality of Elvis is just, well, there. Neither too hot to touch or so compartmentalized it can’t even be considered.
It’s an Anti Biopic
There are no monologues in this film, and yet Cailey Spaeny is in every single scene. Priscilla never says more than three lines in a row and, in fact, the word she uses most is “Hello.” She says it so much that at one point Elvis mockingly repeats it back to her, as if to point out that she has nothing to say; that she is always trying to begin the moment, to begin her existence.
At only one point in this film do we actually see Priscilla do anything to really direct her own life: she realizes she isn’t going to pass high school, which is a big problem because she can’t stay in Graceland unless she graduates. In Bling Ring style, she trades an invitation to one of Elvis’ parties to the girl next to her so she can copy her final exam. My point here is: our heroine is not smart. She is not articulate.
The movie ends cold, with Priscilla driving out of Graceland as Patsy Cline’s “I Will Always Love You” plays. One interpretation, I suppose, is that Priscilla’s life ends when Elvis stops being in it. The interpretation I like more came from my friend, Rachel, who saw a late night showing of this in Philly right after I texted her during the credit sequence from a theatre in Iowa that I thought the movie was incredible. As always happens when you overhype something, it disappoints. But Rachel pointed out that maybe she found the ending disappointing because it was broken, like life actually is.
I like that a lot. As I’ve written about before in this Substack, I don’t think true depictions ever read neatly. There’s an emotional truth to the end of Priscilla — one that is sad but familiar: the triumphs and braveries of women leaving difficult domestic situations are actually deeply unglamorous and lacking in closure.
I said this wasn’t a personal essay, but the end of this movie was deeply personal to me. One of my mother’s sisters loved Elvis Presley. I went into the movie thinking of her bedroom, with its canopy bed and set of Hallmark Commemorative plates of Elvis arranged the side of the room where she could see them before she slept. This aunt had a set of stemware displayed on a bar cart composed entirely of glasses she stole from a disco by smuggling them under her cape. Her special disco cape. I haven’t seen her in a long time, but my pervading memory of her is that she was fabulous, like Priscilla.
My other memory is of her choice to be alone. After a very difficult first marriage that ended in divorce and a second marriage that ended with her husband’s death, I can remember her sisters and daughters pressuring her to date again. There was some teasing about the mailman’s infatuation with her. Even as a child, it was obvious to me there was a line of men interested in becoming my aunt’s third husband. So what I remember is the response that finally ended the pressure, issued over Easter brunch: I’m not lonely, I’m alone.
Like Priscilla, the meaning is understated but the style — the style is immortal.
My camp rec this week: Capes! The garment that draws attention while obscuring content.
*TL;DR: there’s a triangle between camera, (male) director’s gaze, and the way that forces the viewer to see everything from a male gaze.
**I strongly encourage you to read “Culture, Digested: Six Theories About Sofia Coppola” over at
by where Crispin directly disagrees with a lot of my take on gaze, girlhood, and Coppola. Also, she points to a number of other (less nepo baby) female identifying directors doing similar yet more more subversive work.***A brief works cited of Think Pieces on Bad Men:
Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer
"Can You Love the Art and Hate the Monster?"in The New Yorker by
(a review of Dederer’s book)“The Storykiller and His Sentence: Rebecca Solnit on Harvey Weinstein”
“My Woody Allen Problem” in The New York Times by A.O. Scott
ok love this all! especially the comparison between priscilla and marie antoinette. but the film ends with dolly parton singing i will always love you, a song elvis wanted to do a cover of but dolly refused to sell him the rights to the copyright/publishing
I really loved this essay and am now extra excited to see the film. Marie Antoinette is probably my favourite film and I've been hoping this is a return to form for Coppola after On The Rocks, which I wasn't interested in. I did read the Jessa Crispin's take and did not vibe with it at all, so I was excited to hear your opinion and it did not disappoint!