Sofia Coppola Sanitizes Elvis’ Cruelty Towards His Young Bride in ‘Priscilla’

To her credit, Coppola shrewdly lays a lot of the facts bare, allowing us to draw our own conclusions. There are whispers about Priscilla’s age when she first starts hanging out with Elvis, who was 10 years her senior. The King himself, played competently by Euphoria’s Jacob Elordi, seems taken aback and tickled when he learns of her age: “Ninth grade? You’re just a baby.” The scene in the soda shop in which a friend of Elvis’ approaches a young Priscilla to invite her to a party at Elvis’—which to some in less sensitive times may have come off as one of those lucky moments of being discovered in public (à la Lana Turner)—is presented matter of factly so that we can see it for what it is: grooming. In contrast to Baz Luhrmann’s hagiographic Elvis from last year, there’s no mistaking Elvis for anything but flawed and exploitative. The characterization is striking enough that it prompted the New York Times to write, upon its Venice Film Festival premiere, “This is no puff piece: It’s a warts-and-all portrayal of a charismatic man who pulled a young girl into his orbit and then wouldn’t let her out.”

But Priscilla simply does not have all the warts—not all that were included in Presley’s memoir, which itself contained an ambivalence that made its writer’s own handle on her situation hard to grasp. While Presley wrote that “living the way I had for so long [with Elvis] was very unnatural and detrimental to my well-being,” she also ended the book lauding the “the magic, sensitivity, vulnerability, charm, generosity, and greatness of this man who influenced and contributed so much to our culture through his art and music.” She maintained that they didn’t consummate their relationship until their wedding night in 1967, with a huge asterisk—that all depends on how one defines sex. Of a visit to him in Los Angeles in 1962, at age 16, she wrote, “Elvis wasn’t going to let me go home without my taking a little of him with me. He didn’t enter me; he didn’t have to. He fulfilled my every desire.” When she was 17, “he began teaching me other means of pleasing him. We had a strong connection, much of it sexual. The two of us created some exciting and wild times.” There’s no sense of this underage sexual contact in the movie, which certainly would have underlined the extent to which the situation was fucked up.

Similarly sanitized is a scene in Las Vegas, just before Priscilla leaves Elvis for good. In the book, Presley wrote about visiting the gambling mecca to see her husband’s live show. Once there, she was invited up to his hotel room, and about the scene that unfolds, she wrote:

I went upstairs, filled with curiosity, and when I arrived in the suite I found Elvis lying in bed, obviously waiting for me. He grabbed me and forcefully made love to me. It was uncomfortable and unlike any other time he’d ever made love to me before, and he explained, “This is how a real man makes love to his woman.” This was not the gentle, understanding man that I grew to love. He was under the influence, and with my personal growth and new realities he had become a stranger to me. I wept in silence as Elvis got up to dress for the show. In order for our marriage to survive, Elvis would have had to take down all the artificial barriers restricting our life as a couple.

In Coppola’s movie, though, we see him lunge at her on the bed, saying, “I’ll show you how a real man makes love to his woman.” “Stop,” she says. After some struggling, he gets up and we hear him offscreen in the bathroom. The camera stays trained on a crumpled Priscilla. The screen fades to black. The wariness filmmakers feel about putting rape onscreen (especially women filmmakers) is understandable. But in this case, in addition to respecting the sensitivities of the audience and avoiding the risk of entertaining people with depictions of sexual assault, Coppola’s decision serves Elvis himself, who comes off looking, well, not like a rapist.

That scene aside, there’s another half-portrayal of one that Presley described in her book. She had been listening with her husband to some demos of songs for him to potentially record. When she said she didn’t like one, “To my horror, a chair came hurtling toward me. I moved out of the way just in time, but there were stacks of records piled on it and one flew off and hit me in the face.” We see this play out in the movie sans the flying record—it’s merely a close call without injury.

These changes suggest a muddled objective—Priscilla is gritty but not too gritty. It wants to show you the truth behind the legend but is ultimately uncomfortable with all that entails. Perhaps it’s in line with Presley’s own apparent ambivalence. In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Presley described meeting with Spaeny, and of the actor who was to play her onscreen, she recalled: “She asked what I could tell her, and I said, ‘Just be sensitive to him.’” Coppola, it seems, got the memo.