The Eyes Are The Window To The Suffering: Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla
Trigger warning for grooming and violence.
Interrupted girlhood has occupied a lot of space in pop culture lately, first with the recent publication of Britney Spears’ memoir The Woman In Me, and this week with Priscilla, the newly-released Sofia Coppola movie based on Priscilla Beaulieu Presley’s 1985 memoir Elvis and Me, written with Sandra Harmon. While not as wildly confessional as Spears’ autobiography — indeed, at many points reading The Woman In Me, my jaw was on the ground — Priscilla the movie adheres closely to the sometimes shocking source material of Elvis and Me and quietly manages to devastate the viewer in the space of two hours. It’s a shattering postmortem of what some have characterized as one of the legendary rock and roll love stories.
While the young Priscilla Beaulieu was not under a conservatorship like Spears, she might as well have been because virtually everything she wore, did, and uttered to existence was controlled by a man — and the man was her own long-time “boyfriend” (it feels weird to call him that since he was senior to Priscilla by ten years) and husband, the King of Rock and Roll, Elvis Presley. Note: movie spoilers are ahead.
When we first meet Priscilla in Coppola’s vision of Elvis and Me, the titular character is 14 years old and far away…
