What “Priscilla” Has to Say About Girlhood
Priscilla 2023 is awkward, solemn, and uncomfortable— and it really struck a chord with me. I personally thought that Coppola successfully captured the true nature of Priscilla and Elvis’s dynamic. It’s not a surprise that this man’s reputation to this day supersedes him preying on a teenager in the public’s eye, as it happens all the time. This does not make it all any less infuriating, so I commend Coppola on this retelling of what exactly happened between the Presleys. It made me furious, saddened; and I’m a little shocked to say that I found myself relating to Priscilla in many ways.
The way her youth, her… lack of experience, her naïveté was so tokenized not only by Elvis, but by almost everyone around her, made me bittersweet about my teenage years. I started to think about all the ways the culture surrounding Priscilla victimized her and encouraged Elvis’s predation on her. Everyone let her down. None of the adults did what they needed to do. She was 14. It wasn’t enough to be “a little creeped out” by what Elvis was doing. They failed her.
But it would be ignorant and short-sighted to focus on the plight of girlhood specifically as it pertains to Priscilla— more importantly, women like Priscilla. Women tokenized for their white girlhood. See, the story of Priscilla’s stolen teenage years and beyond that, Elvis’s mythos as a whole, reveal the need to take a different approach to how not only how we teach about sex, race, and class, but how we view it entirely. The people of Priscilla’s time, the time before her, and the time now, continue to fail all of us.
At first, I only wanted to focus on grooming. (I say “only” as if it is a straightforward issue, when it is anything but that). I wouldn’t say this is because I intended to take a birds-eye view of these topics, but rather an instinctive and ingrained attraction to retreating to a reformist view of sex and gender as it pertains to Elvis and Priscilla. I assumed, like many others attempting to find explanations for oppression whilst feeling like these explanations have gone nowhere in changing anything, that analyzing Priscilla’s life with a sociological and political lense meant finding a way to stop grooming as it happens in heteronormative frameworks. That it meant we could stop it within the margins of our broader societies. But we can’t. As long as the systems we have in place still exist, the rate at which our culture preys on many teenage girls in many different ways will not decrease.
