Priscilla Presley was 14 when she met Elvis

The pretty/ugliness of Sofia Coppola's Priscilla

I recently watched Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla on a plane and have spent the last few days reading any and all coverage I can find. And now I’m writing about it as a way to understand why it has so firmly wedged itself into my imagination.

Sofia Coppola tends to be a polarizing figure and I understand why. Nepotism, a prioritization of privileged, white narratives, and Coppola’s continued interest in a very specific type of girlhood are all very good reasons to critique her work. In a profile of Coppola, Rachel Syme quotes the critic Angela Jade Bastién as saying, “‘What Coppola does best is also her greatest weakness: she creates fables about modern white femininity.’ She went on, ‘Art is political whether the artist wants it to be or not.’”

As is true with all art, one’s reaction and interpretation often says more about oneself than it does about the work itself. For instance, when I first saw Virgin Suicides, I was 17 and deeply entrenched in my commitment to becoming the very best manic pixie dreamgirl I could become. While Kirsten Dunst’s Lux Lisbon is not a classic manic pixie dreamgirl, she is definitively a dreamgirl. And I wanted nothing more at that time than to be someone’s muse, someone’s object of adoration. So when I watched Dunst shot by Coppola in ethereal, golden light, I didn’t understand that Coppola was commenting on our culture’s tendency to erase girls’ individuality while simultaneously worshipping them as signifiers. I viewed shots like this the way the boys of the movie viewed them, except I wanted to be Kirsten Dunst, not fuck her. I was also (like Dunst) a white blonde girl (I was also a bow girl!) which means that I was the type of girl to whom Coppola’s rendition of girlhood (and girlhood aesthetics) was likely to appeal.

So I get why Virgin Suicides captured me so completely at age 17, but I am really struggling to understand why I can’t get Priscilla out of my head, particularly since the
love story of Elvis and Priscilla is predicated on what most contemporary viewers would recognize as a grooming scenario.

Elvis met Priscilla when she was 14 and he was 24. She moved to Graceland when she was a senior in high school. It’s impossibly fucked up. And yet.