Priscilla and How We Talk About Elvis
Spoilers for Priscilla, which is honestly based on a real story so how much of a spoiler warning does it require?
On November 2nd, 2023, Variety published a pair of e-mails sent from Lisa Marie Presley to Soffia Coppola, asking her to reconsider the depiction of Elvis in Priscilla. She claimed in the e-mails that Sofia’s depiction of Elvis was cruel and vengeful, a caricature that made him come across as a manipulative predator. She is saying, as best I can tell (and tragically Lisa is no longer with us to clarify) that they failed to capture the love between Elvis and Priscilla.
In an early scene of the film, after Elvis and Priscilla have been dating for a few months (despite the fact that she’s 14 and he’s 24), Priscilla comments that going out late nights with him has been interfering with her going to high school the next morning. And he decides to offer her something his commanding officers have been giving out to help soldiers with their night missions. He is, to be clear, a 24 year old man giving his 14 year old girlfriend amphetamines.
I dunno, it’s hard for me to see the love there.
I’ve been considering how biopics, especially music biopics, approach their subject and what they wind up saying about them, for a little while now. The day before I saw Priscilla was the 5 year anniversary of the release of Bohemian Rhapsody, a movie that is unspeakably cruel about its supposed subject on a script level, but also so incompetently directed and edited that it can’t even communicate that cruelty coherently. And that’s a shame, because its massive gross means that it will likely be the only version of Freddy Mercury’s story most people absorb. I’ve already seen people talking about lies told in that deeply inaccurate, weirdly homophobic film as if they were historical fact.
Elvis is not an artist who has that issue. In fact, he may be the most over-covered solo musician in human history. I’m not a huge Elvis fan, I barely listen to his music or watch his movies, and I still feel like I’ve seen dozens of depictions of him in every kind of media that exists. Everyone from Baz Luhrmann, to Chris Columbus to John fucking Carpenter has taken a swing at a movie about Elvis. There have been documentaries, books, tv shows, concert films, movies where an elderly Elvis fights a mummy, a Twilight Zone episode written by George RR Martin. The King may be dead, but he lives in our collective imagination.
So where does that leave Priscilla, Sofia Coppola’s film seems to ask. How do you take a human as monumental in our cultural imagination as Elvis, and talk about the time he groomed a 14 year old girl? How can you tell the story of Elvis without including his wife?
Most films seem content to lightly brush past it. Luhrumann’s film from last year softened the age gap, suggesting that it was perhaps not great, but only a little skeevy, not outright wrong. Many films simply cut out their courtship entirely, skipping right to the part where they’re married. A brave handful of films simply ignore the issue, present their relationship as Elvis would have depicted it, and pray that no one looks up their birthdates and does the math.
Priscilla is uninterested in hiding what’s going on, in running defense for the King. Elvis’ interest in Priscilla is spelled out directly, Priscilla’s status as a 14 year old girl being hit on by a 24 year old, unspeakably famous, fabulously wealthy, rock star made explicit from their first conversation in West Germany. Even as her parents fret and debate how to handle this and Elvis swears up and down he has nothing but honorable intentions toward her, everything about the film reminds us over and over that this is not okay.
This doesn’t reduce when Priscilla moves in with Elvis; The house is cavernous and Priscilla, who is already towered over by Elvis, appears small and lost within it. She is functionally a prisoner within it, not permitted out front, not allowed to leave, forbidden from many parts of the house. In one memorable scene, she is informed that she has to curtail her activities outside the house, because she needs to be by the phone in case Elvis needs her emotional support. Even when he’s not there, he’s controlling her. By the time they get married, Elvis has control over the way she styles her hair, her makeup, the way she dresses, everywhere she goes, while he wanders around the country, openly cheating on her. The only time this control begins to loosen is when the marriage is in the process of falling apart.
On Twitter (no I will not call it X), I made a crack that Priscilla is a horror movie, but that was me being flippant, Priscilla does not depict Elvis purely cruelly. The film is rigidly fixed to Priscilla’s perspective (The total time spent outside it is less than a minute), and that means understanding both why Priscilla fell in love with him and why she had to leave him. Elvis is handsome, charming, vulnerable when he’s alone with Priscilla (occasionally strategically, but often apparently sincerely, at least from her point of view). When she is trapped on a military base in a foreign country, with no friends he represents not just the memories of her home but the promise of an escape from Germany, a return to the United States. Glamor and wealth follow with her relationship with Elvis, she becomes famous when she ceases to be Priscilla Wagner and becomes Priscilla Presley.
None of that really fixes the problems with Elvis though, and indeed one of the scripts’ better tricks is showing how each of the reasons Priscilla loved him becomes a reason why she has to leave him. His good looks and easily deployed charm are used to allow him to casually cheat. His vulnerability is deployed cruelly, in moments where he explodes when challenged or simply criticized. These explosions of anger are often followed by moments of tenderness, him venting his personal pain, in a way that feels, as stated above, somewhat strategic, a way of skipping over the part where he would apologize for exploding. Elvis is a whole person with Priscilla, not an icon, but that means that he can be at various times caring and cruel, and the film locks us into her POV to make us experience that.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that Lisa Marie Presley piece a lot, because no, the film is not kind to Elvis. It’s honest, it’s raw, in a way that likely required careful studying of the memoir its based on, if not active participation by Priscilla herself (who was an executive producer). But is it cruel to him? Is it vengeful?
Well let me answer it this way. I mentioned earlier that there are dozens of pieces of media about Elvis. If you look up media about him on wikipedia, you’ll find a small portion of it. Most are relentlessly fond of him. Some are fictionalized, and no doubt some are cruel, but there is an ocean of films eager to make Elvis look the best he can.
If you look up pieces of media about Priscilla Presley, you’ll find only a few. An unauthorized biography from 97. This film. The memoir this film was based on.
Maybe that disparity means that Elvis can endure a little honesty, if only for an hour and fifty minutes.
