Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla wants us to know that its protagonist is very, very young. This idea is not subtextually imparted, but an essential, repeated throughline of the film. One of the first things Priscilla (Cailee Spaney) shares with Elvis (Jacob Elordi) is the fact that she’s in ninth grade—something that startles him as a man ten years her senior, but doesn’t stop him from kissing Priscilla shortly afterward. A few years into their relationship, when Priscilla has crested sixteen years of age, a woman in Elvis’ Graceland entourage murmurs that Priscilla “looks like a little girl.”
Just because Priscilla has been swept into perhaps the most common (and, as Priscilla reveals, unhealthy and unsustainable) adolescent fantasy does not make her any less of a teenage girl. Priscilla refuses to let us be lulled into false assurances about Priscilla being especially mature for her age or capable in the face of her unique life circumstances and relationship. She sighs over her math textbook in her rock star husband’s bed. She’s gleeful about the puppy Elvis buys her as a housewarming gift when she moves into Graceland, a move only permitted by her parents when Elvis promises them that Priscilla will be enrolled in the best Catholic school Tennessee has to offer. She is bewildered by Elvis’ unwillingness to have sex with her and longs to be desired in ways that she has not yet had the opportunity to in her adolescence.
(Whether the real life Priscilla’s insistence that Elvis didn’t have sex with her until they were married and she was of age is a myth to protect her mythically famous husband or a sign of some perverse desire on Elvis’ part to keep his young wife as a tiny, untouched, virginal doll while he fooled around freely during his ample time on the road, is irrelevant to reading Priscilla. Priscilla was swallowed whole by Elvis and his world, compelled to be the person he wanted her to be at a time when you are meant to be discovering yourself on your own terms. Whether or not Priscilla’s subjugation was maintained through sexuality by Elvis changes little).
Some have critiqued Priscilla for feeling one-dimensional, stating that they feel isolated from the protagonist’s inner workings. But I see Priscilla’s interior distance from us as viewers not as a failure, but as evidence of the autonomy and normal adolescent growth she was denied. Spaeney plays Priscilla with a halting softness—averted eyes, pleasant nodding, determined diffusing at the sign of any conflict. Her deferential nature is elevated by Elordi’s Elvis, who worries less about playing an icon and more about playing a flawed human—someone entitled and volatile (and, in more empathetic moments, tragically and permanently out of touch with normalcy).
Priscilla’s most pivotal years of selfhood were handed over to a man who could give her “everything”, as long as it was on his terms. Priscilla’s closed-off, often restrained personality feels reflective of what can happen when someone is asked to develop their sense of self under the observation and direction of another. Priscilla can have all the dresses she likes, as long as Elvis likes them. Priscilla can have the puppy, but isn’t permitted to play with it on the front lawn, lest fans see her. Priscilla can come to Vegas and call his friends her own, but cannot invite any of the other girls over from school or have her own job.
Priscilla begins the film as someone young and impressionable—a fact repeated again and again, with increasingly tragic implications, as she becomes involved with a man who is not just older, but holds an excessive amount of power over her. A man who has the ability to mold Priscilla into his vision of her ideal self (with no regard of what her vision of her ideal self may be). But Priscilla does not stay young and impressionable. She discovers, perhaps later than she deserves to, that there is more to the world outside of her husband’s circle—friends to be made who know her for her, interests to be maintained simply because they bring her joy.
As the latter half of Priscilla suggests, while we deserve to discover ourselves in our youth and are often denied that right, it is never too late to listen to that voice inside that knows what and who you are truly meant to be—beneath the blue dresses and dark eyeliner and big houses you’ve been told you’re meant to be grateful for and define yourself by.
