Yes, the Elvis-Priscilla couple is the definitive manual of the toxic relationship (and Sofia Coppola’s film tells it well)

Great love or toxic relationship par excellence? You can read the story of Priscillathe film by Sofia Coppola presented at Venice Film Festivalin opposite ways. For the real Priscilla Presley, who burst into tears at the press conference, the one with Elvis he was “the great love of my life”, so much so that the separation arose from “lifestyles no longer compatible”, with her who “continued to love him to the end”. In our times in which sensitivity for the violent, unhealthy aspects, in a word for the toxicity of a relationship is at very high levels, the Priscilla-Elvis couple seems to offer a little manual of toxic love. There is everything: submission, psychological violence, syndrome of the holy woman or whore, betrayal, manipulation, abuse, control, machismo, imposition of everything, including aesthetic models. As unacceptable for today’s culture, as absolutely normal for the times in which the two loved each other.

The beginning of the love story already contains the seed of unease for us viewers. They meet in 1959 at a party in Wiesbaden, West Germany, where Elvis was then a soldier in the US Army and where Priscilla’s family had been transferred following her stepfather, an officer in the United States Air Force. She was 14, he was 24. “But you’re a child,” he tells her. She is a little girl, yes, and also a super fan of Elvis for a few years, the biggest rock star of the moment. To stay together, Elvis convinces her parents of her good intentions and in the end the two even manage to get her, still a minor, to move to graceland, under the guardianship of Presley’s father, where he will finish high school. All socially unacceptable today, for current cultural parameters. Certainly, a relationship that is born under the sign of imbalance: he is a star, a grown man, she is an ordinary girl dazzled by the myth of Elvis. «At that time he was still mourning the death of his mother and I was able to listen to him deeply: this is where the relationship came from, from listening. There was no sex, there never was much,” Priscilla explained at the press conference.

Elvis locks her in the golden cage of Graceland, while he is around for concerts, and in the film Sofia Coppola perfectly conveys the sense of imprisonment and isolation, in the same way she had told the young Marie Antoinette prisoner of Versailles in Marie Antoinette. The rooms with ultra kitsch furnishings, the garden where it’s better not to be seen by photographers, the luxury and silence and solitude. But Priscilla is just a little girl who is living the dream, even if the idyll is starting to show its first cracks. He molds her according to her wishes and her aesthetic canons: darker hair, more eye makeup, sexier clothes. The imposition is accepted, Priscilla transforms into the woman he desires. Nothing sex for many, very long years: Elvis wants the angelic woman, she must remain a virgin until marriage. Another male imposition which, combined with the rock star’s series of betrayals that punctuate the relationship, bring to the surface Elvis’ true nature: that of a deeply macho man.

After the wedding, Priscilla soon becomes pregnant with their only child, Lisa Marie. During her pregnancy, he leaves her for a short while. Then they get back together, but things don’t improve: as she said in hers autobiography Elvis and me of 1985 and as Sofia Coppola’s film shows, Elvis almost eliminated sex from marriage. Priscilla would later write: «I was starting to have doubts about my sexuality. My physical and emotional needs were not met.” Finally, in 1972, after 13 years of relationship, Priscilla takes the only possible decision: to leave Elvis. This is where Sofia Coppola’s film ends, the coming-of-age story is over: the young woman has become an adult and she wants to go in search of her identity. The emancipation from the toxic man, the beginning of an independent life, the awareness. Sofia Coppola has denied that she has a feminist intention in recounting the growth of a woman who finally manages to get rid of an abusive husband: “It is a story of human beings”. But the feminist happy ending is confirmed by the words of Priscilla Presley who, to those who asked her what she identified most in the film, she replied: “The ending”. The perfect conclusion to the toxic relationship handbook.