Priscilla · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A girl sits by a pool in a house that isn't hers, in a state she has never lived in, waiting. Somewhere in California a man is shooting a movie. The phone will ring or it won't. The camera doesn't cut to him. It stays in the sun with her, and it stays a beat longer than you expect.

That beat is the film.

The standard complaint about Priscilla is that nothing happens in it: that Coppola took the loudest life in American popular music and made it becalmed. That's a fair description. It's a bad reason to dismiss the film, and Deleuze is useful here for one specific reason. He gives you a way to say what the stillness is doing instead of apologizing for it.

Deleuze split cinema in two. Most films run a simple circuit: someone perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the cutting exists to carry that current. He called this the movement-image. Then he described films where the circuit breaks. The character still perceives, often with terrible clarity, but nothing they perceive converts into an act they're permitted to take. What's left is someone who looks and endures. Deleuze called that figure the voyant, the seer.

Priscilla Beaulieu is a seer for fourteen years. She sees everything: the other women, the pills, the locked hours, the entourage that is always in the room. None of it becomes something she can do. Deleuze's name for a scene that offers only looking and listening is an opsign or sonsign, a pure optical or sound situation, and Coppola builds the whole picture out of them. The sound design is mostly hush and ambient dead air, rooms where the loudest event is a phone not ringing. Sarah Flack, cutting for Coppola since Lost in Translation, holds those stretches past the point of usefulness. Temps mort, dead time: film where nothing advances and the everyday is simply held open. Years compress into a dissolve; a single afternoon of waiting gets its full length. That inversion is the argument.

Coppola's actual invention is genre-level. The biopic is the last pure movement-image machine in the studio system, running on the career montage and the triumphant performance, and she removed the engine while keeping the chassis. She did it a year after Luhrmann's Elvis, the same story at maximum velocity, and the two films now read each other. Where Luhrmann centers the performer's genius, Coppola pushes Elvis to the edge of his own frame and keeps him there. He is never a legend in this film. He is weather in someone else's house.

The most-quoted thing about Priscilla is a casting fact turned into a staging principle: Spaeny is small, Elordi is very tall, and Coppola and Philippe Le Sourd compose so that he towers. No line of dialogue has to explain the power arrangement. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, calls this the gest: a posture that makes a social relation visible, as opposed to a gesture that expresses a private feeling. The height is the marriage. Related, and rarer: Spaeny ages from fourteen to her mid-twenties with almost no prosthetic help, through carriage, voice and stillness. Deleuze's "cinema of the body" describes exactly this substitution. When action drains away, time has to pass through the body's attitudes instead. The Volpi Cup was for that.

The two performances are built on opposite face-logics, which Deleuze also separates. There is the reflecting face, a smooth contour holding one quality steady, and the intensive face, a face of features where micro-movements gather toward a threshold. Elordi's Elvis is the second kind, tender then punishing, a face you learn to read for early warning. Spaeny's is the first, the surface his weather registers on. His expansiveness, her containment, calibrated shot by shot.

Then the constraint that made the film. Elvis Presley Enterprises wasn't a partner, so Coppola could not license a single Elvis recording. Deleuze distinguishes two kinds of out-of-field: the relative one, the room next door you could walk into, and the absolute one, something the frame opens onto that can't be located in space at all. Elvis's voice becomes the absolute out-of-field of this movie. Every person watching already carries it. Coppola doesn't need to play it; she plays around the hole, and the hole keeps the star permanently offscreen even when he's onscreen. Phoenix score the interior instead, in Coppola's usual affective, sometimes anachronistic register. The departure down the drive goes to Dolly Parton's "I Will Always Love You," which quietly transfers the authorship of the goodbye to a woman.

Graceland itself is the film's other great invention. Deleuze's espace quelconque is a space that has stopped functioning as a setting for action; usually he means rubble or wasteland. Here it's shag carpet and gilt, recreated on Toronto soundstages rather than shot in Memphis, which is fitting, since Graceland was already a stage set. It is a place where nothing can be done. But it's also something more specific. Deleuze took from Visconti the crystal of decomposition: an ordered, luxurious, aristocratic world discovered in the act of rotting from inside. A court, a king, a retinue, pills, an heiress-by-marriage who arrives young and watches the rot advance. Those worlds sometimes have a fissure, a line by which someone gets out, and Stacey Battat's costumes tell you where it opens. Schoolgirl, then the beehive-and-eyeliner Priscilla molded to his taste, then a plainer look nobody chose for her. She leaves in the crack.

Coppola has been building this instrument for twenty-five years. The Virgin Suicides gave her the hazy, diffused watching of confined girls and the elliptical montage of half-remembered domestic time. Marie Antoinette is the direct template: a pop-scored costume biopic organized around a girl's interior experience of an institution rather than around historical incident, and Graceland is Versailles in Memphis. Somewhere found the figure marooned in luxury interiors with the action drained off. Le Sourd brought his candle-soft, shallow-focus hothouse photography over from The Beguiled, Flack brought the mood-first cut from Lost in Translation. What's new is the target. She pointed the instrument at an American founding myth.

What it seeds is a working form, not a school: the life told from the waiting room, the famous man rendered only as one person's climate. Anyone who wants to film a life from the side of the person who wasn't allowed to act now has the grammar.

One open question, and it's the film's best. Priscilla Presley is an executive producer. The memoir is hers, the endorsement is hers, and so this is also a woman composing the image of her own girlhood decades after a myth had fixed it for her. Deleuze's word for that is fabulation: a subject caught in the act of legending herself. It isn't a flaw in the film's honesty. It's the film's subject. Watch it again for the waiting. Then notice how many movies about famous men contain a room where someone else was sitting, out of frame, the whole time.