Priscilla and the Plight of Women('s Biopics)

I have a podcast called rehash I co-host it with my best friend Hannah and it's all about recent social media phenomenons that get us all up in arms only to forget about them within a week so we rehash them as they say we just finished our third season which looks at Paradigm shifts on the internet moments that change the way we do things for Better or For Worse we cover everything from by sister to Depp V herd to the end of Vine go check it out a few weeks ago I sat down to watch the hours you know that 2002 multi-link semi-fictional biopic with Merill stre and Julianne Moore and also Nicole kimman is Virginia wolf in this really weird prosthetic nose latex schn aside though kimman delivers are really great in varied performance all of the actresses do obviously yet as someone familiar enough with Wolf's life story I felt like her characterization in the hours was a bit odd Virginia wolf struggled a great deal with her mental health during her lifetime but she was also a very talented woman who led a very formidable life she ran a printing press with her husband was an early proponent of women's rights and an active leading figure of the modernist movement so it was a bit odd to see Virginia with no context given to her achievements other than the occasional mumbling to herself about her book be characterized as a kept woman or rather as Richard shle put it in his review a hapless ditherer she did dither but may I reminded myself this is a film about women's PL and it's something I reminded myself again leaving the theater after watching Sophia cop's [Music] [Music] Priscilla okay Priscilla is a formally good film I think it casts both Priscilla and Elvis as sympathetic characters while still managing to place them within a wider cultural lens tackling nuances of their relationship which reflect the gender dynamics of mid-century America more broadly for example Priscilla is a kept woman of graceand and the film's evolution of her wardrobe as she moves away from the relationship effectively speaks to an evolution into a more liberated Society for women less structured garments less quaffed hair less makeup pants one of Priscilla's strongest elements is also its casting the physical difference between the real couple was less dramatic but the visual imbalance of a 411 babyfaced Kaylee spany next to the very physically imposing Jacob Lordi who stands at 6'5 and whose sharp features give him a bit of a menacing Edge really drives home the age gap between the two lovers whenever Elvis is kissing Priscilla in the film or ordering her to dress up in fancy clothes were forced to remember that for a long period of their relationship she was still very much a teenager yet the film never feels like it's trying to lecture us because ultimately it's an extremely faithful adaptation of Priscilla Presley's 1985 Memoir Elvis and me which begins with Elvis's death and which states from the outset that Priscilla still loves her late ex-husband what Priscilla gives us is yes a depiction of Elvis and Priscilla's relationship that does not absolve him of grooming a minor but also a depiction of a very complicated relationship and according to Priscilla herself romance between the two very tragic figures in the moment where Elvis tells Priscilla in a different time in a different place you can't help but consider that the power disparity of Elvis's celebrity cast such a shadow over them that he cannot see Priscilla as anything more than just utility which then becomes an analogy for the domestication of women during that time if anything the film is actually a subtle indictment of the Madonna horror dichotomy so often fixed onto women by the men in their their lives like in the Memoir it's clear that Priscilla and Elvis both adopt parental roles for one another one day he was the dominant one and would treat me like a child often scolding me for an incidental action on other days I was the stronger one looking after him like a doting mother making sure that he ate everything on his plate took all his vitamins and didn't miss any of his favorite TV shows when Elvis first meets Priscilla in Germany he's grieving over the loss of his mother and seeks a nurturance and chasteness in Priscilla that only a mother would give him in one part of the book that didn't make it into the movie Priscilla actually stumbles upon a closet in the Attic of Graceland and puts on some of glattus Presley's old clothing but when watching a biopic we're likely aware of the wider real life story of the subject and our knowledge of Elvis's story tells us that Elvis is someone who has very little control over his own life especially within his predatory managerial partnership with the colonel Priscilla however is someone he can control so living away from her own parents and under the authority of a much older and domineering boyfriend Priscilla comes to see Elvis as a father figure he taught me everything how to dress how to walk how to apply makeup and wear my hair how to behave how to return love his way over the years he became my father husband and very nearly God there are many shots in the film which do a great job of establishing this for example in one the two are partying at a casino in Vegas and the camera closes in on Elvis's hand as it distributes pills when suddenly Priscilla's little hand comes into the frame from the side asking for some herself his hand twitches and hesitates and then pops a couple into hers here Elvis has all the keys to Priscilla's life in this case her actual state of sobriety or Consciousness another is a scene where Priscilla and Elvis POS for a photo with Lisa Marie a photograph we're very familiar with now but seeing it from a wider angle as the nanny takes Lisa away and Priscilla kneels next to the king King as he sits in his throne you can't help but wonder why a wife would be relegated to the floor when in a typical family portrait the woman is sitting surrounded by her husband and children it creates a really powerful illusion to the fact that the marriage could never be a true marriage between equals because on top of the age Gap Elvis's Larger than Life celebrity presides over every single aspect of his life and by extension priscillas I was sad for them both when I watched this film ultimately though Elvis gets to leave Rand and Priscilla doesn't throw out this film and you come away from the movie ruminating about how Priscilla in her age gender and Circumstance is a supporting character in her own life Nicholas Barber agrees in his review he says Copa has sketched a cool non-judgmental portrait of someone who is a passive Observer of her own [Music] existence the idea of woman as passive Observer is not new it goes all the way back to the beginnings of feminist thought when Simone deir wrote In The Second Sex about the differences between Transcendence and imminence of transcendence she writes man marries today to obtain an Anchorage in imminence but not to be himself confined therein he wants to have Hearth and Home while being free to escape there from he settles down but often remains a vagabond at heart he is not contemptuous of domestic Felicity but he does not make of it an end itself repetition bores him he seeks after novelty risk opposition to overcome Companions and friends who take him away from a Solitude ad for deovir men get to be Transcendent they get to reach for greater in life beyond their gender women on the other hand are bound by imminence which is a necessity of life but as deore puts it every time Transcendence falls back into imminence stagnation there is a degradation of existence into the ensa the brutish life of subjection to given conditions and of Liberty into constraint and contingence Priscilla is commenting on this the film is set almost entirely inside the Gilded walls of graceand which operates as a home for Elvis and a prison for Priscilla Elvis is a moving agent always leaving Never Letting Priscilla come with him unlike Bas lurman Elvis were never privy to his performances not even his songs instead we learn about him the way Priscilla did through tabloids and headlines Priscilla is bound by and Coba is showing us that but maybe we should stop and consider that the movie might be doing its own binding [Music] job we have to ask ourselves why did Copa make this movie well for one there's the age Gap conversation which I've said the movie tackles quite effectively there's also Aesthetics in my Sophia Copa video I defend her against accusations of her films being vapid that they're all style and no substance I argue that these films are intentionally stylized to paint an intimate portrait of a subject living during times of social or political unrest her heavily visual storytelling is meant to convey mood not plot but unlike her other films especially Marie an tette Priscilla feels very stylistically understated the makeup and hair hair and soft muted lighting and even the sets although they're very beautiful failed to reflect the kitch and godess of that era it just didn't push far enough to be memorable or to really lean into the atmosphere of a time period it so badly wants to depict and then there's the fact that Copa made this movie to give Priscilla Presley the voice that baserman Elvis had robbed her of but does it do that in her phenomenal essay pure heroins G talentino invokes di ofor Theory to build an incredible investigation into the way that female protagonists in literature disappear as they come into adulthood in children's literature she says young female characters are self-evidently important and their traumas whatever they may be are secondary in adult fiction if a girl is important to the narrative trauma always comes first for tantino teenage heroins are often desired and tragic and once they reach adulthood they die either literally or spiritually it's what my researcher Sarah calls the Foreclosure of adulthood back in 2005 when Sophia Copa made Mar Antoinette feminist retellings were few and far between in the biopic genre with Mar Antoinette Copa a tour of the Gilded cage pushed the boundaries of feminine filmmaking her emotionally restrained gentle and anachronistic approach to the much maligned historical figure was extremely provocative Maran twnet is a great movie I myself G about it extensively in the video I made a few years back but since then and especially in the past few years a whole number of feminist biopics have spawned in its wake each one of them more restrictive of its female heroin than the last take Spencer for example but if I don't say it out loud they read it on my face they can all see into me Spencer is considered a success in the sad girl film category and yet I Harbor a very strong dislike for it if Virginia wolf was a Hess ditherer in the hours Spencer's Lady Diana is a whimpering fool the entire film felt like a lady d hobbyist had watched Black Swan and was like trying to test something out there because Princess Diana a woman whose widely documented philanthropic achievements and explosive extremely complicated personality should at least match her ill- fated marriage to Prince Charles is rendered in this film as a delicate blithering woman on the verge of psychosis for the entire film Diana suffers through cartoonishly poor treatment from the royal family from her eating disorder and through manic very obvious Illusions to her own entrapment a pheasant about to be shot a pearl noose and Bolin what I hated about Spencer was not its technical elements but the fact that the only reprieve Diana is given the only time we see her smile is that the end of the film as she drives away into Freedom before the credits roll and we never see her again unlike Spencer I did not hate Priscilla I think it is more sensitive to its heroine ultimately Sophia Copa is the perfect person to tackle the idea of a kept school girl she does it well and unlike Bas lurman she consulted the real Priscilla Presley in the making of the film Priscilla actually executive produced it but after Spencer and Andrew Dominic's 2022 disgrace Blonde by the time Priscilla came around despite the fact that it was made by the woman who invented the Cinematic gilded cage it felt as though the film repeated a very popular Trend this trend being an onslaught of Sadir biopics which revisit the plate of famous female figures but in doing so trap those figures within the very gilded cage they set out to critique what we know about Priscilla is that she was Elvis's stylish underaged wife and the film being as faithful as it can to a book about not Priscilla but Elvis and Priscilla isn't really interested in changing our minds about that when you read Elvis and Me you do get a sense of Priscilla's personality she has an abundance of confidence she's sprightly and at times defiant but we're never shown that side of Priscilla in the film not even in moments where Elvis isn't around cop's Priscilla is again a passive Observer things just happened to her for the most part we just watch her kind of walk around the house and react to stuff of course the real Priscilla was kept by Elvis but again I find myself asking why we bothering with a featurelength biopic about a person we still barely know by the time the film ends and it's not like no one could ever really know the real prisilla because the movie was made with direct consultation from the woman herself once again Priscilla's first true foray into freedom is in the car like Diana driving away and smiling right before the credits roll once these women leave their guilted cage their story ends the filmic Foreclosure of adulthood an adult life or a free one is a life that no longer has meaning at least to the women's biopic What's Happening Here is that maligned female figures are having their moment especially as we reconsider the moral failings of their male counterparts and even the figures themselves if they're still alive are coming to these realizations alongside the culture as Katie Rich for Vanity Fair puts it by the time she was writing the book in 1985 Priscilla seemed aware of how this controlling deeply power imbalanced relationship was damaging to her but the story would undeniably be received differently today given the current conversation about consent and grooming minors which is one of the many reasons to be fascinated by the arrival of cop's Priscilla and maybe that's it Priscilla presly is fixed to a contemporary cultural narrative and so she must become a retrospective icon of it in all these films our historical sad girls our heroins become Martyrs for this current cultural uprising unlike many of our sad girls Priscilla Presley is still alive and what did Priscilla do after the credits ruled well she went on to have a starring role in the hit show Dallas as well as the Naked Gun franchise and a number of other smaller Productions she became a Scientologist which cool she's engaged in a lot of philanthropic Endeavors she's the grandmother of Riley kog a very successful actress and producer in her own right she's had many interesting romantic Partners we're in the main hall away the first thing that you see when you enter the front door this and everything else in the house has been restored to its original condition wherever possible but most prevailing of her legacies is the fact that she manages Elvis's estate having turned Grace land into a lucrative tourist attraction so it would be difficult to argue that her celebrity has necessarily eclipsed her relationship to Elvis as Molly Fisher for the New Yorker notes the film ends with Priscilla behind the wheel driving away like a te need's vision of freedom in practice she never fully left though she pursued other relationships and show business projects after their divorce her largest Endeavor was guiding The Fortunes of her ex-husband's estate cop's final musical cue plain of an apt is Dolly Parton's rendition of I will always love you which ironically is a reference to not Priscilla but Elvis and him telling Dolly Parton to give him her song because apparently a woman couldn't make a hit in his opinion so ultimately Priscilla Presley isn't Virginia wolf or even Diana Spencer her life and Legacy are still entwined and overshadowed by her late ex-husband but if she's so different from them and is also someone who has lived a long life where they did not why does the same filmic fate befall her maybe the issue isn't that Priscilla couldn't Eclipse her relationship with Elvis maybe it's that she couldn't Eclipse her own [Music] image [Music] all these post Maran tet movies being made about female figures are fixated on the iconography of these women each one relishing in the hair the makeup the dress these women are widely blogged and shared on Tumblr and Instagram and Pinterest they look so recognizable that you could isolate the hair the clothes the makeup and accessories take away the face and still know who they are Priscilla the film literally begins with her manicured toes stepping onto a shag carpet and then a close cropped shot of her doing her signature winged eyeliner it delivers the iconography before we even meet her through these movies we languish in the Aesthetics of suffering watching these women lie about PRS to Perfection a single tear rolling down their cheeks why in an exploration of the relationship between gay men and Judy Garland Richard Dyer discusses how easy it was to detect the pain lying just below the surface of Garland's extravagant facade this double life between public extravagance and private suffering that Garland lived is for dire the reason gay men have so often felt attached to her image so often emulated it he says looking at listening to Garland may get us inside how gay men have lived their experience and situation have made sense of them we feel that sense in the intangible and the ineffable the warmth of the voice the ress of the humor the edgy Vigor of the St but they mean a lot because they are made expressive of what it has been to be gay in the past half century emulating her through performance is therapeutic and unifying Judy is also someone heralded for her ability to rise all on her own above her odds Dyer argues that gay love for Judy Garland began during her staris born era when Judy's Life further echoed her on-screen roles and when she became understood by the public as damaged goods Judy like so many other gay IC cons was a Survivor but idolatry of these female figures in gay communities has its own fraud history in his indictment of gay St culture Brian olyn writes that Queens would come into a Judy Garland concert and then scream at her when she was too drunk to finish it on top of that while the camp impersonations of these women are hilarious self-referential and cathartic they also stretch the feminine traits of these characters to caricaturist degrees for our entertainment sometimes making them hysterical and shrill and ultimately lcking them within restrictive gender rules this is of course the entire purpose of drag which is a playful commentary on gender that has its own layered history but what this shows is that empathetic idolatry for sad girls can sometimes also exploit them you have to ask who exactly these iconographic biopics are serving is it the figure is it the audience what gaze do they cast on these real life women I would argue that it's not a particularly empowering ing one of course I'll be the first to say that not all depictions of women have to be empowering of course not but it's impossible not to notice this trend within the biopic genre in focusing solely on their suffering to give Credence to a larger cultural conversation we don't allow these women already stifled by their own images to live and breathe defeating the very purpose of the biopic genre Sophia Copa may have been the perfect person to direct a sad girl biopic but she also may have been the perfect person to lock the cage who is Priscilla Presley she is a woman who executive produced a film about her story and her story the one she wrote begins but also ends with the death of Elvis and in choosing to be faithful to that story and actually even stripping it down Copa forecloses Priscilla before we even get a chance to meet her with drag catharus comes with being able to find levity in tragedy finding humor in the pain these s girl movies are kind of like drag with the restrictive gender rules but without any of the levity instead these movies fetishize their pain and what does this tell audiences maybe that trapped in their featurelength running time cut off by the Fate to BL the only way out is death by credits then there are filmmakers who let their characters live and breathe maybe a little too much my new series taboo on screen is all about that tab taboos are meant to be shunned they represent everything offensive socially deviant and morally repugnant about our world they threaten our value systems and make us uncomfortable and so we hide them away but sometimes discomfort is necessary you can find taboo on screen exclusively on nebula nebula is a streaming service that's Creator founded and Creator L which means we get a ton of creative control over the videos we make by subscribing to nebula you're directly supporting us the creators and you also get access to an insanely wide catalog of videos from the best of the best like princess weeks Be Kind Rewind and magy may fish right now you can see my past videos at free on nebula and you can even watch nebula videos offline with their app taboo on screen is a series I've been wanting to make for a long time now but I've never been able to put it on YouTube because of their strict Community guidelines luckily nebula allows me to talk about more challenging subject matter without restrictions in Tabo on screen scen we'll be talking about whether we should get rid of schmeck scenes the films of Todd salons Brook Shields and the controversy around pretty baby and the Wacky World of John Waters the first episode is out now if you're interested in watching Taboo you can sign up using the link below and you can support me directly and get nebula for a 40% off annual plans as little as over 250 a month then there's lifetime memberships which cost $300 and last you forever no tricks no gimmicks just you me and Eternity baby go do it you won't regret it special thank you to Lou osta Sayad Hassan Mel pery Morgan Cooper Stimson Nadia C Nick Jenny Eller J Frost mcfinnigan Gabriel M thez Daniel Connor O'Keefe Sharma Daniel sardonis Jenia Scott Barnett Julia compana Alexis nafis Bullock Carrie Gavin RSS free je Holstrom Alex short and Kelly wolf for supporting this channel

Channel: Broey Deschanel

Views: 286,535

Keywords: priscilla, sofia coppola, jacob elordi, kristen stewart, spencer, blonde, ana de armas, cailee spaeny

Id: 6luYdaNCbkk

Length: 23min 55sec (1435 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 29 2023