PRISCILLA and the violence of male silence
sofia coppola's newest film understands the wound of words unspoken
I know this story.
Looking at the phone, over and over. Willing its ignition. For his name to appear. All I ever ask is for easy validation—a word, maybe two. Confirmation of existence. That our time together meant something. That I mean something. That he’s out there, somewhere, thinking of me, even impressionistically, phantasmically.
No stakes. No commitment. Just a few little words.
Why is that so hard?
I’ve grown used to the silence. I wonder sometimes if it’s my only intimacy: self and obmutescence. Waiting waiting waiting—then a steady dispossession. How much time has been robbed from me? How much soul has died in the vacuum of this form of neglect, the kind tainted by abandoned solicitation? Texts unanswered, moments unacknowledged, and bits of myself shredded in the process. The cost of wanting more, I’ve learned, is constant deflation.
I think often of the casualness of male cruelty. How they don’t even mean it half the time, but oh… what a sting. The love bombing; the fragrant, melodic, compliments; and the abrupt fall-off once they get what they want: your body and your torment.
Do they keep it all somewhere? The strands of you they’ve occupied and discarded? Like baby teeth in a pillbox.
Do they know—really know—the dim quiet of my life? The throbbing silence that sets when they go? Even days filled with friends end in vacancy. An apartment that echoes like a cathedral. Dinners in bed. TV on mute while I will something, anything, to just happen already, even if it hurts.
They don’t know the power they have and the shadow they cast. How they come in big, leave in a cloud of smoke, and abandon me in the aftermath to figure it out, a little less myself than before.
And I wonder: who will love a ghost?
…
Priscilla hit me somewhere deep. It took a few days and a Sunday full of obtrusive self-loathing for that recognition to take root, but when it did… what a balm. This is why I love movies: not for the desire to watch, catalog, and move along, but to simmer and stew in that languorous cinematic prose.
Sofia Coppola brews are something special. How many hours have I spent under the spell of Air’s Virgin Suicides score, my conscience a collage of rosary beads and ribbons of blood in a bathtub? How often do I spot a grassy lawn and see Marie Antoinette sprawled along it, the creamy fabric of her dress caught between blades? Sofia is a weaver of things both dreamy and dainty, ordinary and exceptional—a confluence of details that together stitch a life.
Her newest film follows the eponymous girl—and girl is an important word here. She’s 14 in the opening scenes, a tiny thing plopped at a diner table, the adult world bubbling around her. She’s nervous, eyes dotting. When you are young like that you have no camouflage—and there are wolves everywhere.
She learns this before there’s time to adapt, hand-selected by a grown man to come to Elvis’s house because she’s the type of girl he might like: pretty, polite.
But actually: maidenly, malleable.
Before she knows it, she’s in the orbit of celebrity. Elvis, there in the living room, an organism of great magnitude: tall and handsome, yes, but… normal in these conditions, in the browns and tans of everyday home furnishings. She sees what he attracts, the people who flank and fellate him. A great, burning ego that necessitates devotion. She’s victim to it immediately. He swoops in, tickles her lips, mythologizes her before she’s even a full person, before her own will has been set. Moments into their first meeting and he’s already all of her.
She barely speaks—doesn’t have the vocabulary. That’s the thing with girlhood: we aren’t trained to tackle, aren’t afforded free confidence. Instead, we are let loose to trained teeth, our integrity a flesh to rip open, consume, drain.
…
I see my own Elvises like carnival ducks in a shooting gallery. Lined up shoulder-to-shoulder, faces grinning, tempting a bullet. But I never strike. Where would I get such artillery? They teach you to flatter and flaunt. That’s how you get them: smile, say nothing. Let them know you and you’re done for. (Too bad I can’t help it—my mouth is my menace.)
There is irony to the silence expected of you—because they’re the ones who don’t talk. And there’s violence in male silence. Those long, passive droughts—hours, days, weeks where they could just tell you where the fuck they were, what was on their mind, and don’t—like a genetic condition, one that keeps them stupid and beautiful.
You couldn’t believe what it’s done to me. Driven me downright mad. That’s the violence—what we might do to ourselves with the words unspoken. Might fill the space with poison.
But the parts I don’t have access to sometimes make their own whole. I can stitch from so little. A fragment here, a photo there, a comment lingering in the dredges of a long-buried social media post. I will lure those details from the ether and Frankenstein a man.
Still, isn’t it amazing: the lexis they’ll unleash when they want something, and how immediately those words run dry once it’s theirs? Against your own will, even. They appear from perdition and hunt you. Text, sext, flatter, fawn—pushing your boundaries until you relent, until you let the fantasy in, the one you never even asked for. A steady diet of attention you digest through gritted teeth, but then it’s there in the stomach, an assiduous garden. Spuds then tendrils that slink back to him instinctively, wrapping at his ankles. He planted and fed you, and now you’ll serve him.
(He made you sound so great you even started believing it.)
But like clockwork, the garden rots with neglect. He forgets you. A repetitive song stuck in the craw. Even the “good ones” go this way. Lose interest. Have another girl on the line before you’re even out of their bed. And they’ll give them the attention they never gave you. They’ll get the Instagram likes, the grid photos, the family dinners.
You were just gasoline they burned through on their way to a homestead.
…
What Elvis does to Priscilla… it’s worse than infidelity. Worse than more intentional negligence. He cages her—an amorous incision. Traps her in a Memphis mausoleum so no one else might see her, touch her, know she exists at all.
I have heard criticisms of the film. That Priscilla lacks interiority. And it’s true, she does, but that’s the whole thing. She never had a chance. What do you think about when there’s a parasite in your brain, digesting your resolution? What is there to do when there’s no air left to breathe?
I felt sick at so many moments. The intangible manipulation. Elvis keeping Priscilla in his bed but never fucking her, a nasty little moral code he whips out and feigns belief in, like a good ol’ fashioned Christian hypocrite. Elvis whisking Priscilla away from her family, assigning her babysitters, then flying off to fuck Ann-Margret. Elvis whipping a chair at Priscilla when she misinterprets his fishing for compliments, inches from crushing her face. Elvis shoving Priscilla’s clothes in a suitcase, shouting for someone to book her a plane ticket to her parents so he can have space in the mansion he’s enshrined her in, a place she never cared to be and can only leave as furious punishment.
There is something odd and broken inside of Elvis, but he won’t communicate or fix it, will only turn it inside out and against the child he makes his bride. And it’s here that Sofia’s soft touch is so assuredly and fascinatingly precise, where the abusive details catch light and shine for anyone who knows this kind of pitiless sorrow. It’s marrow-deep and binding—the thread between victim and python.
Worst of all is the quiet. Sofia gets this, too. The cacophony of absence. She knows what girls dream of in the spaces between. What they derive. We see Priscilla’s feet on carpet, the gentle satin of her bedclothes, the curl of her perfume. We watch her tiptoe through her own home as if a heel in moquette might fissure this dreamworld, drop her to Erebus. So she moves like a mouse would, heedful and powerless.
Silence is as silence does.
…
It is funny where our paths diverge. Priscilla’s and mine. Her film ends with fanfare, Dolly Parton’s reclaimed anthem, “I Will Always Love You,” snatched back from Elvis’s clutches, announcing her absolution. I felt a swell of cautious joy as she fled her confines, the Tennessee sky curling open before her, ripe with fruits of liberation and relief.
I understand why she stayed so long. I can’t say I’d have done it different. Because the pain of suffocation means this: that there’s someone there to do the suffocating. And what a horrid thing to think. That even suffering might be worth it just to fill the time with something, someone—even a fleeting someone.
We all just want to be loved. And we’ll let it kill us.
I wasn’t a little girl whisked away like Priscilla, but a girl who felt forgotten. Told words by adults that were harsh to swallow, that made me feel unloveable. Words that repeat like an Elvis jukebox tune every time I try to forge forward, to let someone in. Words that have shattered my heart in a way I fear is irreparable. Words told to girls who dare to bite back. Who don’t want to grin and bear a life of control, pageantry, performance. Not so different than Priscilla—a different flavor of the same maligning. She was offered no option, I was shunned for wanting one. We were punished the same.
But that doesn’t dampen the dream, urge, need to be loved. It never stops pulling, tugging, pleading: Love me, want me, see me. Please, please, please.
I deserve it, I swear.
I can’t seem to quench it. Seem destined to keep falling for Elvises. Men who collect and abandon. Who keep me tucked away. Who grow bored. Who force me into stasis, turn me into a girl who deflects just to survive, who worries constantly that she said the wrong things, looks the wrong way, because why else do they do this to me? What have I done to deserve their great, hulking, bitter silence?
What have any of us done—us girls? I swear we were made to be maligned. To be the fated recipient of some brackish cosmic experiment. Lab mice for male tampering and morale. Do nothing, take the blame. Do something, take it harder.
That’s the great theme of Sofia’s work, too: that observation won’t acquit you in a world where men prowl. You are always theirs to take, fetishize, berate, degrade, ignore. It’s your patience for it that decides where you fall in the hierarchy. If you survive or die by noose, blade, or pill in your childhood home. If you leave or are trapped in the aura of a cheating, buffoonish liar. If you keep your head or lose it to the French.
If you make it to the grid or stay in the DMs.
Priscilla escapes, bathed in light, Dolly steering her onward. But where is she headed? Some might call it a happy ending. I just saw an ellipsis. A caveat of joy until the next masculine snare.
And I wonder: who will love us when we all start screaming?
simply astounding, Lindsey. thank you so much for your writing -- it always inspires me.