Priscilla (2023)

directed by Sofia Coppola

Taylor Hunsberger

The bedroom of a teenage girl is a religious sanctuary—a conglomeration of objects and decor collected from the nooks and crannies of her life—displayed as an altar for her worship alone. But if we examine the walls plastered with posters, photographs, and odes to her deepest desires, we can learn a lot about her. I was a teenage girl and have lived in that bedroom—and in many ways I still do.

Growing up, my grandmother got me a subscription to Popstar Magazine, a scholarly journal of Disney Channel stars, quizzes that would tell me which Jonas Brother I would marry, and easily removable posters that I collected like Pokemon cards. These posters ended up on the walls of my bedroom as a shrine to all of the young celebrities that I longed to be and to date. As I grew older, the posters came down, but a bulletin board went up that remains there to this day. On the board I kept tickets to concerts, gifts from friends, little cute things I found and loved. My wall was a scrapbook of my inner life—a practice that is extremely common for teenagers, but particularly teenage girls.

I grew up in an environment that was not necessarily supportive of my interests, and my bedroom walls were a way that I was able to express the whimsy of my brain in a space that was uniquely mine. I wouldn’t say that room was a true safe space, as it was still within the family home, but I was allowed to be alone in there and dream of a better life in secret.

As an adult, this practice is something I still partake in. The bedroom walls of my Brooklyn apartment are covered in artwork, letters, posters, tickets, press passes from film festivals, etc. When I first moved to New York City, I didn’t have the money to buy actual decor for the space, so I made my own with what I had. Prior to 2020, I worked at an after school arts program and had collected drawings my students gave me, which were the first additions to the wall. During the lockdown I learned how to properly dry out flowers, and have since made an entire wall that showcases dried flowers that I’ve made, some that I bought for myself, and some that were given to me by friends and family. Next to my bed I host a wall of treasures that I’ve collected related to my film career. I have the ticket from the first press screening I attended, a professionally printed ticket I was given at a press event for Evil Dead Rise, and my press passes from the two Brooklyn Horror Fests I’ve attended.

In a big way, keeping these things taped to my wall serves as an inverse function of the posters of my teenage bedroom. I now live in my own place and my walls contain markers of the things I’ve accomplished and of the friends that I’ve made and kept post-college. They are not showcases of the things I desire—they are showcases of the progress I have made. Now my walls are indicative of the life I have built to fulfill the fantasies of my teenage self. Though she never became a popstar, she became an independent person who is living on her own terms surrounded by people who want to be there.

One director who knows how to capture the feelings of the fraught but hopeful teenage girl in her bedroom is Sofia Coppola. If you watch her collection of teen girl films, you will start to notice that she really loves the inclusion of a noticeable amount of stuff—especially in the girls’ rooms. The sets of her films, particularly those that depict teen girlhood, are very specifically and highly decorated with props. Coppola is particularly attuned to the ways in which consumerism and materialism are connected to the experience of being a teen girl. She understands the ways that her characters are taught to consume, and then are subsequently shamed or punished for their consumption. But what she also understands is how the objects of consumption can further explore her characters. The living spaces of her characters are not littered with stuff just to be littered with stuff—the objects in these spaces tell us about the inner lives of Coppola’s women. In the case of The Virgin Suicides, the spaces in the Lisbon household hold an accumulation of the objects collected by the girls that represent them after their deaths. In contrast, Priscilla works in conversation with the Lisbon household. Graceland is a notably empty space that is devoid of stuff. The decoration of a bedroom for a teen girl is something that can be so personal, and in Sofia’s worlds, they definitely are.

The Lisbon sisters haunt the screen of The Virgin Suicides as they haunt the memories of the boys telling their story. The Lisbon home is equally haunted by the things the girls leave behind. The halls of the suburban Michigan home are plastered with the remnants of a group of girls forever frozen in their girlhood. The story itself is partially told through objects as the boys who narrate the story go through a collection of the girls’ things that they’ve kept—objects that they refer to as souvenirs. As we learn the stories of the sisters, the boys weave in and out of their narrative, each remembering the girls by the souvenirs they hold, or the objects that they interacted with while inside the Lisbon home.

Sofia makes a point to include the girls’ personal spaces as a way of being able to showcase their inner lives while keeping up with the narrative point of view of the boys telling the story. The most notable spaces are the girls’ bedrooms, as well as their shared bathroom—these are the only private spaces for them to express themselves among parents who are strangling them with their disapproval. The spaces act as time capsules after their deaths, and since the sisters are described as being so wildly misunderstood and unknowable by the boys, the only way to imagine their thoughts and feelings is by studying the artifacts they kept in their spaces.

Cecelia, the youngest daughter, makes the first suicide attempt of the movie. After being taken to a psychiatrist, it is recommended that the girls socialize with boys outside of school, so the Lisbon parents invite a classmate over for dinner. This boy is Peter (Chris Hale) and he functions as a tour guide of the Lisbon household. He walks upstairs to use the bathroom that is accessible through Cecelia’s room. The camera lingers on Cecelia’s door as dramatic music plays and Peter slowly opens the door. The attention to this scene makes it feel like a museum exhibit—a chance for one of the boys to really see inside the life of one of these girls that they are so obsessed with. The door to the room has Cecelia’s name, a handprint made in paint on a black piece of paper, a print of the virgin Mary, a drawing of Mary, a greeting card, and various small warning signs to proceed with caution.

What lies inside her room includes zodiac signs hanging from the ceiling, a bust of the virgin Mary, candles, a crucifix, teddy bears, a pair of underwear, mini tea cups, tarot cards, a drawing of a woman, a sandal, and a statue of a turtle. The objects are spread out among the tables in her room while others are lying on the floor next to her bed. What can be seen here is a mix of religious paraphernalia and objects that can be attributed to the particular representation of girlhood that Sofia is working to capture. The Lisbon family is highly religious, a fact that contributes to the sisters killing themselves. The conservative expectations of the girls literally watch them from within their rooms in the form of the religious fixtures. Coppola juxtaposes these objects with the tarot cards and zodiac signs. It’s clear that Cecelia owns religious regalia to please her parents, but she is perhaps more interested in alternative forms of spirituality—a curiosity that makes sense for the ‘70s setting. The camera specifically points out all of these things as they tell us more about Cecelia that we as the audience, and most certainly the boys, will ever know actually know about them.

After the camera pans over Cecelia’s floor, it follows Peter into the bathroom. He explores the contents of every shelf, closet, and the bathroom sink by poking and prodding at the girls’ things. He plays with multiple perfume bottles and then opens a cabinet where he finds a massive amount of tampons. He walks to the sink, picks up a lipstick tube, and smells it. This is when sensual music begins to play and we see a dreamy sequence of Lux (Kirsten Dunst)—the middle sister—moving her head among lens flares, making flirtatious faces inside Peter’s mind. The illusion is shattered when Lux knocks on the door and asks to get something out of the bathroom. Peter stands watching her and she asks, “Do you mind?” as she encourages him to excuse himself so she can take what she needs in private. While Peter is interacting with the objects that he finds, they become imbued with meaning in his own mind, meaning that is never actually confirmed or denied by anyone, except for Lux. When she interrupts his fantasy, the scene is brought back down to reality with a scene of melodramatic dreamscape. The objects simply become objects again—something that Lux needs to use.

Both of these scenes, as well as the boys’ collection of souvenirs, suggest two different, yet simultaneous readings. As stated before, there is a clear intention that Sofia uses to explore the inner lives of the Lisbon sisters within the walls of their bedrooms and bathroom, something that is important for the audience to note. We are aware that the narrators are unreliable, but Sofia also wants us to know that these girls are real people and both she and the audience should understand this. There are clear signs that we can gather throughout the film that show us what drives the girls to suicide—part of the reason being the the fundamental inability of the people around them to listen to them or to understand their needs. To showcase a living space that is cluttered in both symbols of the conservative values used to oppress them, as well as symbols of activities they genuinely enjoy (books, toys, journals, tarot cards, etc.) gives the audience a better idea that there existed a way to understand them if someone simply cared enough to look.

On the other hand, there are objects that the boys interact with that cause them to further misimagine and misunderstand the girls. When Peter sniffs the lipstick, not only is he violating their personal belongings, he begins to fantasize about Lux until she shows up in the flesh and that bubble is popped. The audience is given the information to interpret Peter’s fantasy as not remotely rooted in reality and we are told that in the end, that lipstick is just lipstick. Lux is probably walking into the bathroom to get a tampon and did not ask for a strange boy to sexualize her over a tube of lipstick on her bathroom sink. The boys violate both the girls and the objects that they take from them. In calling their collection of the Lisbon sisters’ things “souvenirs,” they are positioning the girls as an event that they experienced. It could even be said that the most deadly issue of them all is that the people of Grosse Pointe, Michigan view the Lisbon sisters as objects themselves. If they can touch their things and sniff their lipstick to bring them to life in their minds, were they ever fully realized humans in the first place?

In a notable contrast to The Virgin Suicides, Priscilla (2023) exemplifies a lack of stuff, or at least stuff that is tied to who Priscilla is as a character. The film opens on Priscilla Presley (Cailee Spaeny) applying winged eyeliner and eyelashes as the camera cuts to shots panning over the tchotchkes that adorn the living room of Graceland. There are intermittent shots of Priscilla’s feet with toenails painted walking across the carpet of the room. These are all adornments Priscilla has acquired since joining lives with Elvis (Jacob Elordi). We will later learn that Priscilla’s signature makeup comes at the suggestion of her husband, so though all of these objects are assigned to Priscilla and the way she presents herself, they are also things that Elvis has given her in order for her to become the person he wants her to be.

At the beginning of the film, we find a young Priscilla Beaulieu before she meets Elvis Presley. Her teen bedroom is decorated with a bulletin board that includes photos from her life as well as magazine cutouts. This is a representation of a typical bedroom of a middle-class teen girl during this time period, and it signifies to the viewer that this particular teen has a sense of herself. She decorates the area above her desk with things that are important to her—as teenage girls often do, and as the Lisbon sisters do in The Virgin Suicides. Prior to moving into Graceland, we see her paint her toenails, a nail polish that makes its way into her new home. The first thing that we see Priscilla unpack in Graceland is her small collection of cosmetics that she places on the bathroom sink. Other than that, the house is devoid of her things.

One of the biggest takeaways from Priscilla is that once Priscilla the teen becomes entwined with Elvis, she is stripped of her own identity and becomes the image of the object Elvis projects onto her. Graceland is depicted as a desolate prison for her—an isolated location away from friends and family—and all that is left for her to think about is Elvis. She also does not have a room of her own in the house. The only space she has is the room that she shares with Elvis, so he controls the contents of the room. When he leaves on various occasions, he keeps up with her by sending cards, records, and photos. The progression of these objects signifies the passing of time as they also signal what they want her to be consuming: himself. She is no longer in possession of anything that belongs to her. When Elvis eventually takes her shopping, he dictates what she can and cannot buy based on his preferences and ends the day by suggesting that she dye her hair black and use more eye makeup. The look Priscilla becomes most known for is the result of Elvis’ purchases of the life he wants her to live. He also buys her a gun and teaches her how to shoot it, which leads to her owning multiple guns—one to match each of her outfits.

In what I find to be the most devastating scene in the film, Priscilla is about to leave for the hospital to give birth to her daughter when she stops to put on false eyelashes. This sequence happens after she cries to Elvis expressing anxiety about her pregnancy. She asks about the future of their life together and the plans for adventure they had. He brushes off her worries and assures her that despite her young age, it is the right time for a baby. This decision is clearly made out of his own desire and without consideration of her position. By taking this moment to dress up before the birth of the baby Priscilla is not ready for, we see that even in this moment, she has the instinct to take the extra time to make herself presentable in her husband’s eyes. This makeup is used as a weapon against her, one that she must use even in a moment of immense pain in order to please Elvis. It’s a symbol of status, but it’s not one that ever benefits her.

Though the inclusion of a messy teenager’s room is inherent to a coming-of-age feature, Sofia Coppola has created a visual language in her films that draws great importance to what is or is not found inside the living spaces of her characters. In a world where women are taught from a young age that they are meant to be consumers, as well as objects of consumption, it makes sense to align her teen girl protagonists with the physical props in their worlds. Sofia knows that the objects on the floor of a bedroom or on the bathroom sink can say so much more about a girl than what can be told through dialogue, especially if the girl is not so easily allowed to speak.

Taylor Hunsberger (she/her) is a children's librarian, culture writer, recipe developer, and poet living in Brooklyn. She regularly writes for Hear Us Scream and In Their Own League. When she isn't doing one of her many jobs, she enjoys walking around her neighborhood, watching copious amounts of reality tv, and making a Big Salad. You can find her work on her website https://taylorhunsberger.wordpress.com/, through her newsletter at https://gocrispgirl.substack.com/, and on all social media @tayparade.