The Best Movies of the Year: Priscilla and the Exorcism of Elvis Nostalgia

“You know, I’ve always loved Elvis,” my great aunt reminded me during one of our recent phone calls. She was sitting in the basement of her Grafton, West Virginia home—presumably in the recliner chair that holds court in front of a wall-to-floor shelf covered in memorabilia of the Graceland king, memorabilia acquired feverishly across the 45+ years since his passing in August 1977. Pez dispensers, commemorative ceramic plates, teddy bears dressed in white, bedazzled jumpsuits that say “love me tender” on the back—it’s all there, collecting dust but so beautifully positioned. It’s the kind of commercial plundering that most Silent Generation babies made into an art form at the turn of the Carter years. I used to marvel at the trinkets, at the money spent on a slice of Elvis’ life after he was no longer living it. But there’s one thing I only recently realized: I’ve never heard my aunt listen to a single Elvis song in my entire life.

Elvis’ songs are absent in Sofia Coppola’s new film Priscilla, too—because Elvis Presley Enterprises denied her and A24 usage rights. Going into my first viewing of the flick, I was initially hesitant about that fact, and perhaps that is largely because Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis completely reconfigured the King’s sonic legacy barely a year ago.

Now, I’m not here to go to bat for the deranged inclusion of Doja Cat’s horrendous “Hound Dog”-interpolated “Vegas.” God, no. But the way Luhrmann took Elvis’ greatest musical feats and made them an art form within a cinematographic masterpiece—such a choice completely rewrote the book on Elvis’ work altogether, injecting it with a new lease on contemporary life. After all, how can you have an Elvis movie without the music itself? The answer, however, became immediately and preciously simple: Without the music, Elvis is no more larger-than-life than the mooching Memphis Mafia cronies who worshipped the very ground he walked on. And, in Coppola’s world, that is wholly the point (and we get beautiful needledrops of the Ramones’ “Baby, I Love You,” Tommy James & The Shondells’ “Crimson & Clover” and The Righteous Brothers’ “(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons”).

Priscilla is the antithesis to Elvis but, oddly enough, neither film is actually about Elvis. The former is a triumphant and challenging look into the tragic formative years of the King’s chosen wife, while the latter curtails the manipulative, corrupt practices of Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks)—a con-man whose sole motivation was to capitalize on Elvis’ (Austin Butler) performative talents and limitless charm, a greedy decision that, depending on who you ask and when, likely was one of the greatest factors in Elvis’ death at the age of 42. The truth about Elvis is probably lost on some, especially because it’s marketed as a biopic about Elvis’ life—his shot-out-of-a-cannon rise to fame from the streets of Tupelo to Sun Records to Hollywood to a Vegas residency with no end in sight. But the truth of Priscilla is unmissable: The life of Elvis’ wife and the mother of their child, Lisa Marie, was, so very quickly, stripped away from her in the name of detrimental spousal servitude. Both Priscilla and Elvis are tragedies and, to that extent, opposite sides of the spectrum that compliment each other perfectly.

In Elvis, Priscilla Presley (Olivia DeJonge) is a footnote in the film’s plot. She’s an accessory to a greater story. We see vignettes of her and Elvis meeting in Germany, her divorcing him and, most emotionally, her being by his side late in his life—when he admits that he is terrified of being forgotten after death. It’s not necessarily new territory for the wife of a biopic lead to be relegated to prop status, and Luhrmann’s disinterest in making her a more focal part of Elvis speaks to how largely forgotten Priscilla Presley has always been in conversations around Elvis as a man, a musician and a name.

Coppola opts to rewrite Luhrmann’s shortcomings by adapting Priscilla’s 1985 memoir Elvis and Me directly. The easy choice would be to frame Priscilla (Cailee Spaeny) as not a heroine, but a fallen starlet—a woman whose marriage to the most popular entertainer of all time overshadowed her right to live on her own terms. And, I suppose, part of that is what Coppola did. But Priscilla is much, much more than that. The film is a hard two hours to watch, especially if age-gap relationships and abuses of power are triggering circumstances. Coppola has no interest in turning Priscilla into someone she’s not, and that’s largely due to her never getting to truly become who she was meant to be—not while she was married to Elvis (Jacob Elordi), at least.

This is where the tragedy of Priscilla is the most stirring. We see, over the course of 10 years or so, a 14-year-old girl stripped of her life in order to fulfill the dreams of a man who has everything he could ever want in the world. When Priscilla and Elvis have a conversation about “what the kids are listening to” in 1959, he already knows the answer—yet he pulls her into a position of admitting that her favorite song of his is “Heartbreak Hotel.” It’s the kind of self-serving manipulation that is passed off as just another music star starving for acceptance, filtered through the fear that, while he’s away in Germany, the rock ‘n’ roll world of America has passed him by. Both Priscilla and Elvis offer up the same question: Why was Elvis so afraid of being forgotten? Neither film dares to give a clear answer. But, in Priscilla’s case, the answer doesn’t really matter. Elvis kept his wife holed up at Graceland for years for no reason other than always requiring an outlet to be ready at the drop of a hat to make sure somebody, somewhere, would remember who he is. Priscilla is who must stay behind to “keep the home fires burning.” She isn’t allowed to play with her dog close to the Graceland gates while paparazzi stand idly waiting for a shot of rock ‘n’ roll’s dashing monarch. The world never stopped loving Elvis, but he never gave the world a chance to love Priscilla.

Leading up to Priscilla’s release, the word spreading around online was that it was an anti-Elvis movie. I’m an Elvis fan, but I am also considerably aware of how complicated a person he was and, ultimately, how his legacy is the product of white-washing Black music. The critiques his work has continued to garner for the last 40 years are valid ones. I suppose, though, that it’s easy for internet parasites to see a film being made about the woman who, inevitably, left Elvis as being a portrayal of negativity towards the man himself. It would explain why the composite Google user review score of Priscilla sits at a 2.2 out of 5.

But Priscilla is not an anti-Elvis movie. And it’s not a divorce epic like Kramer vs. Kramer, either. No, it’s a haunting portrayal of a relationship built on the precipice of awe-striking fame and fawning, then mangled by the brutality of abusive control. It’s an exorcism of Elvis nostalgia, an embroidered take on why The King’s life is remembered numerically and cosmetically and how, somewhere within all of that, there is a glimpse of love that grows stale with distance, bitterness and possession. Priscilla is our star, yet every step she makes, every penny she spends and every thought she utters is dictated, critiqued and dismissed by a man 10 years her senior who could have any woman in the world—and he flaunts that truth, both spiritually and emotionally, for the entirety of their marriage. Plus, there are good stretches of the film where Elvis isn’t even present at all—only heard over the phone or seen on the front pages of newspaper tabloids.

Priscilla is a film that only works if the audience watching it is open to the idea that Elvis is a villain. Folks were reporting on there being a mixed—though equally insufferable—batch of people in attendance at showings across the country; a middle ground somewhere between older women swooning over Elordi’s portrayal of The King and Zoomers and cusp-Millennials fawning over the “girlboss” aesthetics of Priscilla as an empowered character. When I am on the phone with my aunt and listening to her gab about loving Elvis, I do not tell her to go see Priscilla—because she does not have the capacity to consider her hero as anything but someone massive enough to be put on a collectible piece of china.

But Elvis is the villain of this movie. When he and Priscilla are making out and, presumably, on a fast-track to having sex for the first time, he tells her “You gotta let me decide when we take this moment, this is very sacred to me.” For years and years, he infantilizes Priscilla, to the point where, after she gives birth to Lisa Marie, he grows despondent to her. Priscilla, after her pregnancy, attempts to be intimate with her husband, but Elvis refutes her advances by expressing his fears of “hurting her”—as if the innocence he coveted in her is now tarnished, as if his shiny, perfect toy is now broken. None of this is explicitly said, but you can see it in the way these two characters orbit each other: the disdain, the repulsion, the confusion.

Spaeny delivers a masterclass, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Elordi plays Elvis with the subtle menace that was non-existent in Butler’s performance The way he plays Elvis is so dynamic that I was convinced, for a second, that him wanting to dictate his and Priscilla’s sex life was some sort of admiral feat from a guy who could, if he wanted to, fuck anybody within shouting distance. It’s slimy, Machiavellian and disarmingly lucid. In a recent Actors on Actors conversation with Colman Domingo, Elordi explained that he immersed himself in Elvis’ tragedy, particularly that of his twin sibling in his mother’s womb being stillborn. There’s clearly something there worth examining, especially how the destiny of Elvis’ life, his desire to become something worth remembering, and him wanting to preserve Priscilla’s innocence might have stemmed from being born immediately surrounded by profound, unshakeable loss.

But I can’t help but go back to that scene between Elvis and Priscilla early in the movie, when he asks her what the kids in the U.S. are listening to in 1959. To him, girlhood is measured by the screams thrown at him while he’s onstage. It’s measured by Billboard chart positions and divine materialism. If Elvis’ world is no longer quantifiable by tangible success, then his life is nothing. And so quickly, Priscilla’s life becomes defined by that extravagance and that finite sense of stardom, too. Elvis buys her new clothes and instructs her to dye her hair jet black to make her eyes pop. When she goes into labor five years later, she puts on fake lashes before being taken to the hospital. Priscilla is living on his terms or, at the very least, living under the shadow of what a rock star might demand from her if she does not embody these things on her own.

When I revisit Elvis, it’s sometimes hard to look beyond the sensationalism and commercialization of Luhrmann’s big-budget montages and cinematographic fireworks. There’s an entire scene dedicated to talking about buttons that say “I Hate Elvis” on them. It’s a money-minded production that mirrors the Colonel’s obsession with making his beautiful boy accessible in every sense of the world, no matter the cost. Good luck spotting a piece of Elvis merch in Priscilla. The iconic shots are, instead, of Priscilla wandering the halls of the Graceland alone, ensconced by lavish furniture and beautiful wallpaper. Alone. She has a closet full of exquisite attire, yet she can only put her wardrobe on display when Elvis takes her someplace. Graceland is a big, royal property, yet we see about three rooms of it: the living room with the big, white piano, Elvis and Priscilla’s bedroom, and Elvis’ office. Coppola, somehow, manages to make rock ‘n’ roll’s Xanadu look like a studio apartment. It’s claustrophobic and hypnotic, evidence that Priscilla lived a compartmentalized life between walls.

There’s one other scene in Priscilla that sticks with me: When Elvis takes Priscilla to Las Vegas with his boys for the first time, they spend the night drinking, drugging and gambling. But, when the glitz of the Nevada bright lights and slot machine cha-chings fade away, there’s a shot of Elvis and Priscilla in a booth together, sharing looks that—for maybe only a second—begin to chip away at why Priscilla loves this man who has everything. Elvis picked her, which is a problematic and complicated fact, yet we never really understand why. But it’s in these in-between moments, when Elvis is not a superstar and is just, simply, a person, that you can see that, perhaps once upon a time, he loved her. These, too, are the moments where Coppola’s storytelling has always shined. She makes movies about women who are trapped and tragic, yet beautiful and misunderstood—and Priscilla is all of those things. She is a teenager in a glamorous casino with the greatest showman on Earth. And he is looking at her and, just briefly, she (and we, too) forgets about all of that. It’s so difficult to write a persuasive, stunning scene without any character uttering a single line of dialogue. Coppola has that trick mastered.

Coppola could not write an entire movie about Priscilla without delivering empathy to Elvis, too. But, impressively enough, such an inevitability does not squander what the story aims to achieve. In fact, when we do feel bad for Elvis, it’s when Priscilla has finally worked up the courage to say, “No, I am not going to nurture what haunts you any longer.” When Spaeny and Elordi share the film’s most gutting call-and-response together—“Have I lost you to another man?” “You’re losing me to a life of my own”—it is a well-worn ending for the two doomed spouses. Elvis posits that Priscilla has everything a woman could ever want; Priscilla immediately makes note that, if she continues to stay, she’ll never leave him. Even during the final moment of their marriage, Elvis can’t help but fail to understand how someone he gave a home and a last name to could still be unhappy. He’s unable to see how his slow march towards death on-stage, while his wife is home raising their daughter, is antagonistic, adverse. It’s truly damning to watch such a scene unfold, this idea that contentment can be bought and sold—that it’s okay to steer somebody else’s life if you can afford to do so and they shouldn’t think, even for a second, that there’s a better alternative.

Likewise, Priscilla is a portrait—a character study—of the one part of Elvis’ legacy that was never commodified or sold on merchandise. It’s an affecting take on how the man of your dreams loving you—or loving the thought of you—back can be a long, drawn-out curse that only ends in grief. Priscilla’s story ends with her riding off into freedom after divorcing Elvis, and there’s that brief glint of joy as she cruises through the Graceland gates (the same ones she wasn’t allowed to be near). It is a triumphant finale of liberation. But, if Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” playing in the background bears any truth, Priscilla was never going to be totally free from Elvis’ clutches.

There’s a scene where, as Elvis is about to board a plane back to the U.S. from Germany when his service time is up, we see Priscilla—in just an instant—go from sitting by his side in his personal car to becoming just another face in the crowd waving goodbye to him upon his departure. For so long, that is how the world looked at Priscilla Presley, too—as a prop, as the wife Elvis left at home while tabloids drummed up headlines about him courting Nancy Sinatra. But Sofia Coppola wasn’t going to let that be how we remember her. No, Priscilla was never just going to be a schoolgirl left to wither in a mansion in Memphis. Was her life a fairytale? Maybe at first.

But there are no pictures of Priscilla on any of the memorabilia in my aunt’s house. It was never going to be that way. Elvis was sold to the public as a sex symbol who wiggled his hips with devilish grace, as a charming spokesman of music’s big, extraordinary existence. He was not sold to his fans as a husband or a father; no one in his life would dare to let that happen, anyway. Not even Priscilla dares to argue that, maybe in another place at another time, Elvis and Priscilla make it out of all of this alive, happy and together. But, if we are to take any cues from Coppola, it’s knowing that there is wonder in teenage dreaming and grief in a fantasy turned to tragic rot—but even the most unbelievable and torturous dreams are built for us to awaken.

Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.