Illustration by Sofia Ferry
Most of us have idolized Elvis Presley, The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, at some point in our teenage years. Regarded as one of the most prevalent, important, and attractive figures of the 20th century, girls used to scream and fawn over the rockstar as he sang on stage. And after Austin Butler’s 2022 reenactment of Presley, it felt like the Elvis phase just completely returned culturally. The thought that Sofia Coppola could create a film wholly disarming the fantasy around Elvis seems daring and quite unrealistic.
However, the way to achieve that turned out to be by narrating the story of how a 24-year-old Presley first began to “court” a 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu.
This is Elvis Presley. Taken straight from Priscilla Presley’s biography, Elvis and Me, Sofia Coppola manages to tell the story of who Elvis was, not as an international rock star but as a husband. The unfathomable shift seems like a betrayal to his fanbase, especially with how widespread and adored he is. The story reveals how a much more mature Elvis swept a starstruck teenage Priscilla off her feet right in the middle of her impulsive girlhood. As we all know, teenagers and adults never mix well romantically, and the movie shows the eventual effects of these sorts of relationships as they progress.
Before even the 30-minute mark for the movie hits, the audience is already able to identify the sheer amount of control that Elvis holds over Priscilla. For many of us, this is a scene seen all too well. Maureen Lee Lenker in her review from Entertainment Weekly describes it effectively.
“Slowly but surely, Elvis seeks to eliminate any original thought she might have,” Lenker writes. “He builds her a gilded cage constructed out of hairspray, eyeliner, and amphetamines.”
To the audience of mainly teenagers who have never seen Elvis as anything but a rock icon, this is jarring. For many girls, especially in the audience, who have experienced, one way or another, the effects of male dominance, this is familiar. Elvis, dripping head to toe in his Southern charm, is familiar. The way he switches from a starry-eyed boy just seeking companionship to a domineering, apathetic abuser.
It’s a tale told all too often. A teenage girl loves to love. Everything the movies show, everything the books write about, the emotion of it all, and the out-of-body adoration is everything a girl is molded into wanting. Often, people find themselves loving just for the sake of loving. They ignore all the warning signs, the child-like behavior, just to cling to that small shred of romance. It’s a position every girl has found herself in: desperation.
Priscilla was just a girl who fell head over heels for a man simply for the prospective experience of loving him, then faced the harsh reality of that man without the rose-tinted glasses. A tale so often experienced by every girl watching the film. Margot Harrison from Seven Days writes it’s “perhaps an all too common phenomenon: A girl surrenders herself completely to the man of her dreams and then grows up enough to see him with the painful clarity of daylight.” Painful clarity indeed.
And it’s not as if the daylight comes in brightly, with a certain shine that uncovers the truth or the true reality that forces someone to pack their bags and book a one-way ticket. The daylight comes in sickeningly slow, topped with a chunk of foolhardiness that convinces a person to fight for love, fight for what once was. Priscilla stayed with Elvis for six years, a majority of which she was locked away in Graceland, pressured to live under the rusted cage Elvis had built for her, alongside the dim companionship of the past.
Often, normal teenage girls don’t have 6 years to give. But just as we saw in the film, the love that encompasses even just the duration of a couple months has the capability to define the entire trajectory of someone’s life. What the movie also showed us, however, was an individual’s capability to move on from this love, embrace it, remember it, and then pack it away.
Normally, any sort of recollection or reminiscent piece of fiction about Elvis Presley frames his wife in a lovesick, puppy-dog sort of way. They dilute the large, full-of-life character she may have been and pack her into a small box defined only by her love for another person. Coppola made it a point in her film to represent that Priscilla was more than her love for Elvis, more than her teenage adoration.
“I think the moment I started realizing that I was in this lifestyle that really wasn’t realistic, was when I started meeting other people, and started to realize that a woman did have a voice,” Priscilla Presley writes in her biography. “And she could say what she wanted and didn’t want.”
Was Priscilla head over heels obsessed with Elvis? Yes. Had she spent her entire teenage life shifting her life around, forgoing her dreams for the survival of that love? Yes. But did she manage to find her own person again and rediscover the world beyond that relationship? Also yes.
As teenagers, we often feel like the little lives we experience in these years have the ability to define us as a whole. The love that we give and receive is shoved into such a short time that it feels as if it’s enough emotion to last a whole lifetime. We feel everything more deeply, more intensely because time is limited, and high school seems identical to a ticking clock. We forget that the experiences we share now are simply a small part of the vast life we have yet to live.
Priscilla was a reminder that no matter how massive and important a love may seem, all that remains in the end is our own being. Every girl in the audience understood that no matter how different or similar Elvis and Priscilla’s relationship was to the one they may have experienced, love has always put us all in a near-identical position: head-on mindless. They also understood that, just as Priscilla did, our ability to rediscover ourselves after a mind-consuming relationship is always whole and near to us.
Head-on love was a commonality within the audience of Priscilla. TikTok user, Michelle (@corps3fl0wers), describes how she saw it.
“At the end of the movie, a group of older women who sat in front of me were crying,” Michelle said. “Makes me so sad to think of how many relate to her.” It seems as if, no matter the age, many understood Priscilla’s story, and on a more personal spectrum, many women resonated with it.
Film, in recent years, has lacked the ability to connect to an entire mass population on such a deep level in the way Priscilla managed to. Sofia Coppola, with her magnificent direction, excelled at not only avoiding presenting Priscilla’s love story in a condescending or judgemental manner, but also in the manner that it was experienced, without regret. Not only did the film impeccably deliver a raw, thorough narration of Priscilla Presley’s life, but it also created a deep connection with every girl in the audience watching. The tale of blind, honest love and how the effects of that love follow a girl as she navigates life was something any woman could relate to. And on a more intimate level, how often the initial rose-tinted love with a man more often than not leads to a harsh wake-up call that reminds us all to love without limit but have full faith in our ability to remember ourselves beyond that love.
