Last year I saw the movie Elvis, directed by Baz Luhrmann and starring Austin Butler as Elvis Presley. I haven’t seen many of Baz’s other movies, like his remake of The Great Gatsby or Moulin Rouge!, so I wasn’t as familiar with his directing style as I was with someone like Yorgos Lanthimos or Greta Gerwig. Elvis is a movie full of flashy cinematography that brings to life Elvis as the superstar that he was. In the film, there are a few scenes where we see his wife, Priscilla Presley, observing him as he flirts with screaming horny women at his shows while he gyrates to the music. We see him slap her ass affectionately before they head to bed. And we see him crying on the steps in their mansion in Graceland as she grabs her suitcase and leaves him (and their marriage) because she won’t put up with him anymore. But the film mainly shows Elvis’s toxic and tumultuous relationship with his manager, Tom Parker, and it presents a very extroverted version that brings the King of Rock n Roll to life. The focus was on Elvis’s life and not the woman who he was married to.
Don’t get me wrong. I absolutely loved Elvis. It was a very well-directed movie, and I loved Austin Butler’s acting. The music was incredible. But I was glad when they came out with a biopic about Priscilla Presley because up until then I really didn’t know much about her life and most of the musical biopics that I have watched about famous male musicians are focused on the men and their wives (and oftentimes mistresses) are supporting characters. (Also, it was an A24 distributed film, and I just couldn’t refuse.) The film Priscilla delved more into the relationship between Priscilla and Elvis, and how he actually treated her behind closed doors. This film is about how she meets Elvis and how she ends up finding her freedom and leaving a marriage that left her unhappy and disillusioned. I haven’t seen many of Cailee Spaeny’s previous films, but she was an incredible actress in this movie. Priscilla doesn’t speak much but even with her eyes she communicates so much about what she is feeling. Jacob Elordi also did an incredible job as Elvis Presley, and the film shows him in those private moments when he is with Priscilla. It doesn’t focus on his shows and his tour like Elvis did; instead, it focuses on how Elvis’s constant touring impacted his relationship with Priscilla and how she navigated being married to a famous person. It’s based on a memoir that Priscilla Presley published called Elvis and Me, and I haven’t read it yet but now I want to.
The movie begins in 1959 at the US Air Force Base in West Germany, where Priscilla Beaulieu, who is fourteen years old, is sitting at a bar doing her homework. Priscilla is from Austin, Texas, but she goes to Germany because her father is stationed there. She meets a young man named Terry West, who has a connection with Elvis Presley. He offers to take her to meet him because he, too, is in Germany, and she agrees to meet with him. When she meets Elvis at a party, she is taken in by his charm and his good looks. He is ten years older than her, but she catches his eye, and he starts to ask to see her more often. At first, Priscilla has to tell him that she has to ask her parents’ permission first, and her parents aren’t keen on Elvis because he is much older than Priscilla. However, Elvis is lonely, and his mom passed away, so he wants a woman to keep him company. Priscilla starts to feel bad for him, and she start to hang out with him more. Priscilla becomes Elvis’s girlfriend, and she starts hanging out with him more, and he becomes the sole focus of her life. She daydreams about Elvis in class, she goes through the halls of school feeling lovesick. And then, as their relationship deepens, Elvis has Priscilla gradually change the way she dresses and the way she looks. She starts wearing mascara, she does her hair a different style and she starts to dress in more stylish clothes. He enrolls her in a Catholic school and makes sure that she does her homework and passes her classes while they are in a relationship. The girls at school start to notice that she is in a relationship with Elvis, and they start gossiping about Priscilla. He also gives her drugs and sleeping pills, which end up knocking her out for two days at one point. She wants to have sex with him, but he constantly tells her to hold off on it. He controls every aspect of Priscilla’s life and doesn’t seem to care about what she wants or needs from the relationship. Priscilla graduates from high school and with her parents’ permission, she marries Elvis. However, she soon realizes that her marriage is far from the fairytale she expected it to be, because while Elvis is on tour, she stays at home and waits for him to come back. Meanwhile, she reads that he is having affairs with numerous women, and when she is pregnant with their first child, she finds out that he is having an affair with Nancy Sinatra. Even though she confronts him about his affairs, he tries to beat around the bush and tell her that he loves her. Eventually, she gets fed up and she decides to take taekwondo and find her own friend group, and she starts a new relationship. Even though it is tough to leave him, she realizes that she is not being treated with the respect that she deserves in her marriage to Elvis, and she leaves Graceland.
Honestly, this movie reminded me of season 3 and 4 of The Crown. Prince Charles falls in love with Diana Spencer, even though he is in a relationship with her sister Sarah. Diana is 16 at the time and Charles is older than her, but he is smitten by her when they first meet. They start to want to see each other more often and eventually they get married. However, Diana soon realizes that her marriage to Charles isn’t the fairytale marriage she imagined, as he is emotionally abusive and cheats on her with another woman. In one of the episodes, “Fairytale” Diana is seen rollerblading around Buckingham Palace by herself while everyone else has left the palace and she becomes increasingly lonely. She develops bulimia and is basically living a nightmare where no one respects or values her, including the man she is married to. This reminded me of the scenes in Priscilla where Priscilla has to be in the house all day while her husband is on his tour sleeping with other women. Elvis, like Charles, is controlling and wants control of his wife’s life. When Priscilla asks him about his affairs, he tells her “Oh, it’s nothing. I love you” even when it’s splashed across the papers that he’s sleeping with various women. I think that’s why the last few scenes were a relief, because I was like, Girl, this man does not love you. You need to get out and she finally left Graceland because she realized she wanted to be happy, and she wasn’t happy being with this man. I also thought about the movie Spencer with Kristen Stewart because that film shows how Charles’ affair with Camila affects Diana psychologically and emotionally, and how she finds her freedom and leaves the confines of Buckingham Palace to become her own person. Spencer shows how Diana struggles with bulimia and being confined in the walls of the palace, having to follow all these rules and restrictions and then finally realizing she deserves to be free (sadly, in real life, Diana died in a car crash, which is why it was so emotionally hard for me to watch this last season of The Crown because it shows the events leading up to the car crash and it just made me think, Wow, I really wish I could have met Diana. I was only four when she died, and as a kid I didn’t know much about her, but after watching Spencer and The Crown, I felt sad that I never got to meet her.)
There was one scene in the movie that reminded me of another movie I saw a while ago. In Priscilla, Elvis is listening to his records, and he is frustrated with the quality of the records, and Priscilla is just standing there quietly in this room with Elvis and these record executives, and Elvis asks her what she thinks about the records. When she shyly shares her honest opinion about one song and how it’s not that great, he throws a chair at her, narrowly missing her. He then proceeds to hug her and tell her “Baby, sorry I lost my temper. I love you so much.” He wanted to be told that he was a great musician, and when his wife didn’t tell him that, he took out his anger on her. It reminded me of this movie I saw called The Wife, which is about a man named Joe who receives the Nobel Prize and his wife, Joan, is excited for him, but as the movie progresses, it becomes more apparent that Joan was the one writing the stories for him and he was taking credit for all of her work. There is a flashback to when Joan and Joe are first married, and he is trying to become a writer so that he doesn’t have to keep his job as a college professor. When she reads his story manuscript, he wants her honest opinion, and she tells him that it’s not that good. When she gives her honest opinion, he gets upset with her and tells her that if she doesn’t provide him reassurance that he is a good writer, that he will leave her and their marriage. Joan doesn’t want him to leave, so she puts herself down by saying that she will never be as good a writer as he is. Throughout the movie, Joan, like Priscilla, navigates life as a quiet and private person, while her husband Joe, is more extroverted and networks at parties while putting down his son, David’s, dreams of becoming a writer. However, it’s clear that Joan is the one who should be getting all the credit, not her husband, who didn’t write the books himself but forced her to spend hours and hours a day away from their kid so that she could write the books for him and have them published under his name. Even though a biographer named Nathaniel wants to publish all these private details about her marriage to Joe, Joan refuses because she is a private person and wants to remain confidential about her life. Of course, that doesn’t mean she doesn’t harbor a lot of hurt and anger towards her husband; she totally does. But she just doesn’t want all the publicity and she is also aware that Nathaniel could get so many details of her personal life incorrect and provide an inaccurate portrayal of her marriage to Joe.
The dynamic between Priscilla and Elvis sort of reminded me of another movie called Lovelace. Lovelace is about Linda Lovelace, who fell in love with a man named Chuck Traynor and was coerced into the pornography industry. The film doesn’t focus on Linda’s films; it focuses on the sexual abuse and trauma she suffered in her marriage to Chuck. When Linda first meets Chuck, she is trying to escape her home life. She got pregnant in her early 20s and she has to live at home with her parents, who she doesn’t have a good relationship with. When she and her friend are out at a party, Linda finds people watching a pornographic movie and a much older man named Chuck finds her attractive and leads her into the pornography business, where she becomes a celebrity and films a movie called Deep Throat. Chuck starts off being charming, and even though he is older than Linda, Linda sees Chuck as the only way out of her unhappy home life, so she starts spending time with him. As she becomes more involved in the pornography business, her parents start to become concerned. In one scene, she excitedly tells her parents that she got to meet Sammy Davis, Jr., but her parents realize that their daughter has changed and even though she achieved this fame, it’s in an industry that doesn’t have a great reputation. However, as Linda and Chuck continue their marriage, he becomes abusive and hits her several times and forces her to have sex with him. Even though she achieved star status, it came at a huge cost where she was disrespected and abused. She finally has to get the help of someone who gets a bunch of guys to beat up Chuck, and she leaves the pornography industry. She ends up in a loving marriage with a child, and became a born-again Christian, speaking out about the abuse she suffered at the hands of Chuck.
Watching Priscilla and seeing how Priscilla transformed through the course of her marriage to Elvis reminded me of this part in the book Discussions on Youth that I read. There is a chapter called “What is Love?” and in the chapter, Daisaku Ikeda talks about how it’s important to find happiness within our own lives and that happiness is not something that someone, like a lover, can hand to us. I have little experience being in relationships to be honest, but a few years ago I fell in love with someone who was quite charming, and I had kindled a crush on this person in the distant past, but I found myself escaping into fantasies and daydreams of me and this person being together, raising a family and growing old together. This crush pretty much took over my life, and I thought, One day, we are going to marry and be happy together. It’s why when I was watching Priscilla, I really resonated with the scenes where Priscilla is daydreaming about Elvis in class and how her relationship with Elvis starts to impact her performance in school because her love for Elvis starts to consume her daily life. I let my crush on this person consume me to the point where even hearing his voice was enough to make me melt into a puddle. I remember in junior year of college filling my journal with entries about his looks, his charm, the way he flirted with me. I was so lovesick after we fell in love that I couldn’t even eat breakfast and would leave many a plate of perfectly good, scrambled tofu unfinished as I daydreamed about him in the dining hall, during class, during my summer break.
However, I wasn’t willing to accept the fact that he had a girlfriend already and continued to live in a fantasy world with me and my dream husband being happy together. It took him proposing to his girlfriend for me to snap out of my fantasy and realize that this person was happy in his current relationship and that I needed to move on and not idealize our relationship just because we had feelings for each other in the past. I fell into a pit of despair, and honestly it took a lot of therapy and Buddhist chanting for me to ease my way out of the hellhole of emotional pain I was in. I think what helped during this time was reading a passage from Daisaku Ikeda’s book Discussions on Youth, because in this chapter he says “happiness is not something that someone else, like a lover, can give to us. We have to achieve it for ourselves. And the only way to do so is by developing our character and capacity as human beings–by fully maximizing our potential.” (Discussions on Youth, page 64) After reading this and chanting about it, I have gradually begun to see that I was seeking happiness outside myself. I was depending on this young man to give me happiness, and I finally understood after three years of really digging into my Buddhist practice and seeking therapy that I had to become happy whether I ended up with him or not. My self-worth had become so tied up in wanting to be with this person that I lost sight of myself, my goals and my dreams. It was painful to confront the fact that I had been crushing on someone who was with someone else, and that love would forever go unrequited. But I am also realizing that there are other great people out there and that I have the potential to attract someone great in my life. I also realize I deserve a relationship filled with love and mutual respect. It’s not easy to believe this every day but it’s something I want to keep telling myself more often.
Anyway, I need to wrap this review up because it’s gotten really long, and I am starting to ramble at this point. Thank you for reading and to close, I recommend Priscilla because it is a really good movie. Also, the soundtrack for the movie is incredible. I went on YouTube and listened to many of the songs because I love old hits.
Priscilla. 2023. Directed by Sofia Coppola. Rated R For drug use and some language.
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