Priscilla & Me: The Sweet Sadness of Codependency
“I wanted to put
My mouth on you
And draw out whatever toxin…
—but I understand. There are limits
To love.”
—Kim Addonizio, You with the Crack Running Through You
Priscilla reminds me of two things which are, in the shadow of a story as big as hers, completely inconsequential: the boy in a friend’s band who I spent a summer fanatically caught up in, and coming to grips with cutting off my lifelong best friend. The film tells the story of Priscilla Beaulieu and the rise and fall of her relationship with Elvis Presley, from its quiet, naive beginnings in West Germany to its sweeping ending in the vast halls of Graceland. Isolated from the age of fourteen outside of contact with arguably the most famous musician living at the time, splitting her time between trying to graduate Catholic school and taking pills and trips to Vegas; Priscilla lived a life essentially incomprehensible to the average person. Yet, under Sofia Coppola’s beautifully understated direction, the madness unfolds into making perfect sense. The circumstances were unimaginable. But I’ve been her. The devotion is universal.
The boy I would’ve died over was by most accounts, an idiot. He only spoke to me when drunk and it always meant nothing. But when he did he’d get really close, like he had a delicious secret and I was the luckiest girl in the room. I had been unhinged for him long before we met. Spent nights laying on my kitchen floor listening to his record on repeat, giggling and staring at the light. By the time our paths crossed outside of my own spectatorship, it had been months of this, and when he introduced himself to me I was left whirling, dizzy. Like, do you know me? Do you want to? I know you. Of course, he was no one, but for those months he was tall and impossible to quite crack and everyone loved him but no one could look him in the eyes. To me, he was Elvis. Larger than life.
Priscilla is the face of this feeling—half-smiling and nervous, he’s her favourite song and he knows it. When she’s at a dinner party and Elvis breaks mid-conversation to move to the piano and play a song, I realized Sofia Coppola had achieved exactly what she set out to with the telling of a story like this: she turned Elvis, the icon, into Elvis, a guy. From the theatre downtown on a cold winter night I was instantly snapped back into that early summer evening sitting outside my friend’s garage, smiling in the shimmer of a warm breeze, hands shaking around the neck of a beer watching my crush of forever look at me for the first time. With a stupid smile I would come to know so well. I drew a connection between one of the most iconic men in music history and a twenty-something guitarist whose band plays frat house basements because under this light, they’re all the same. Priscilla was fourteen in mansions and getting photographed with the nation’s dream man. I was smoking discount cigarettes on the back porch of a local band member’s house. When you’re a young girl in love, it takes something you can’t have in that moment to tell the difference. I would’ve done anything he asked of me. I wasn’t alone—it’s in the black hair dye Priscilla washes out in the sink, the hesitation in a friendly laugh, in her slow walk away. Elvis may have been larger than life, but he was too small for the two of them.
What may be the most heart-wrenching part of the story is that it’s that simple. He was always this way. The two began dating when Elvis was twenty-four and Priscilla was fourteen. Elvis allegedly told friend Rex Mansfield, “Priscilla is young enough so that I can train her any way I want.” Train her he did, guiding her in the clothes she bought, the way she did her makeup and hair, and even her values and beliefs. While he had other women at his feet around every corner, Priscilla was the one he believed he could always count on to come and go as he pleased. Cailee Spaeny and Jacob Elordi’s performances lay onto this with a subtle yet resounding dynamic. In one case, when Priscilla is scolded for wearing a dress he deems unflattering, she lashes out at him, cursing. Despite the fact that she has done nothing like it up to that point, Elvis is absolutely unshaken. The pair’s body language emphasizes their imbalance, both in age and power: as Spaeny adamantly storms off, Elordi lays back in bed laughing, his figure a towering presence even in recline. In his eyes, any emotion in an attempt to object to his is nothing more than a joke. Whether she was in ninth grade standing by the phone or married and pregnant with Elvis’ child, Priscilla was sustained in a state of perpetual waiting. Hair teased and dressed in his favourite colours: made in his image. Of this conditioning, she is quoted as saying, “Over the years, he became my father, husband, and very nearly God.”
This brings me back to the second relationship in my life brought to mind by Priscilla. Just a couple weeks before I saw the film, I broke away from a friendship I had maintained for the past eighteen years of my life. Having known each other for as long as either can remember and often being the other’s only friend, we grew into each other, rather than simply alongside. I’ll call her Sophie. Sophie and I were a creature with two heads. From the age of twelve, we had broken into a routine: on weekdays, as soon as I finished the last of my schoolwork, I would call her and we would talk for hours. When her mother limited us to two per day we were outraged. Every Friday night she would come over, every Sunday night she would go home. Then, repeat. This carried on for many years. Apart from her, I was a quiet girl. She was all I knew. When Sophie and I graduated high school, she moved out of the country and our schedule showed its first signs of losing steam. Our sprawling daily calls turned to near-daily, to a handful of times a week, and in half-hour increments. When she returned I tried to fall back into her, but something irrevocable had shifted. A lifetime of the we’ve-never-fought brag fell through. We made other friends, boyfriends, and she no longer wanted to talk on the phone. Being thrown into the adult years of my life headfirst alone sent me reeling. I began to realize a truth I had pushed back against the whole time: I knew nothing of who I was without her.
To compare the loss of a pairing akin to sisterhood to the highs and lows of Elvis and Priscilla’s romance may seem absurd, but as soon as the thought clicked into my head, I couldn’t shake it. Coppola does a near-perfect job of encapsulating all the minute, quiet terrors of codependency. At one point, Elvis tells Priscilla that he thinks they should take a break in the midst of her pregnancy (presumably so he can focus on the affair he’s having,) to which she simply nods and says she’ll go whenever he tells her to. As she’s walking out the door, he yells for her to wait. He calls out for her. He doesn’t really want her to leave. When Sophie dodges any attempts at communication until the day she calls me because she needs a place to crash for a few nights, I buy her groceries and make her the best bed I can. Priscilla and I walk the same tightrope: we are trying to be loved.
In one of the film’s final scenes, when Priscilla finally voices that she needs to divorce Elvis, she says something that is both her biggest breakthrough and perhaps the movie’s most defining quote: “I have to go. If I stay, I’ll never leave.” There is a clinging to both that which feels exciting and that which feels safe in the pattern of addiction. Such is also true with the pattern of love. Where I felt the former in the throes of obsession with the boy I shaped into a star, I felt the latter with the best friend I would’ve trusted with my life, but couldn’t quite trust not to bail on plans last minute. Priscilla felt both with Elvis: her first young love, her groomer, her husband, her closest friend. When I dropped the final box of my friend’s things left at my apartment back to her, we stood in silence for a long time. She finally cut through and said, “I don’t know what to say. There’s nothing I can do to change your mind.” It was the five year anniversary of the day we made an oath to be together forever. It had rained that day every year since. I replied, “No. This time, there’s not.” Silence. Then, “I love you.” She immediately reciprocated. In Priscilla’s ending moments, she puts her daughter into her car and puts on Dolly Parton’s I Will Always Love You. The film cuts to black as she drives away to a destination unknown. On the day I end the friendship I have with Sophie, the endlessness of that love rests with me the same. Priscilla and I are hurtling toward nothing. We are hurtling toward the rest of the world. At the end of it all, toward a life of our own.
Taya Grace is a freelance writer, film critic, and columnist for Delude Magazine.