Are we all trapped in Priscilla's dollhouse with her?

When female-led films are put into production, the one term I often come across is the “female gaze.” Sofia Coppola used this feminist theory to highlight the tale of the 1980s American icon Priscilla Presley, building her film around the architecture of loneliness. Her themes are usually brought to life through her decisions regarding production design, costume, and spatial scale, instead of dumping a ton of exposition on us through dialogue. In Priscilla (2023), she takes this auteur approach to a whole new level. Drawing heavily from Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir Elvis and Me, Coppola uses every camera setup not just to show us a famous couple, but to build a visual map of a young girl getting totally isolated from the rest of the world.

What makes Priscilla such a cool example of the female gaze is how Coppola deliberately structures her directorial choices around subjective scale and sensory texture. Coppola shot the film using vintage lenses and a technique called pull-processing overexposing the film stock slightly to crush the contrast and desaturate the colors. This creates a soft, hazy look that initially feels like a warm nostalgia trip, but eventually turns cold and sterile.

Instead of treating the setting like a neutral background, Coppola turns Graceland itself into an active character. She deliberately manipulates physical scale on set to reflect Priscilla’s internal powerlessness. At 5’1”, lead actress Cailee Spaeny is framed against towering furniture, massive doorways, and an enormous Jacob Elordi (who stands at 6’5”). In the early Germany scenes, Coppola dresses Priscilla in oversized, baggy clothes that make her look like a child wearing someone else’s closet. But once she moves into Graceland, Coppola shifts her costume direction dramatically: Priscilla is squeezed into stiff, high-collared dresses, towering beehive wigs, and heavy black eyeliner dictated entirely by Elvis. The camera lingers on close-ups of eyelash glue, hairspray cans, and fabric textures, turning her daily routine into a ritual of being physically constructed by someone else.

Coppola’s editing and sound design choices are just as intentional. Biopics usually run on high-energy montage sequences and loud musical cues. But because the Elvis Presley estate famously denied Coppola the rights to use his original music, she turned that constraint into her greatest asset. She replaces loud rock-and-roll tracks with long stretches of eerie ambient silence, punctuated only by mundane household sounds:a ticking clock, the hum of an amplifier, or the heavy click of a front door locking. The editing tempo slows down to a crawl. We sit through long, static takes where literally “nothing happens,” watching Priscilla paint her nails or sit by a silent telephone in giant, empty rooms. By forcing the audience to sit in that mundane stillness, Coppola makes us feel the sheer boredom and isolation of her life in real time.

In his review for the National Review, critic Armond White pointed out how Coppola turns the typical music biopic inside out by ignoring stadium concerts almost completely. Instead, Coppola locks us inside the pastel walls of Graceland, stripping Elvis of his larger-than-life pop icon status and showing him for what he actually was to her: an unpredictable figure who treated her more like a living dress-up doll than a partner.

Esmé Fenick highlights a similar point in ERA Journal, analyzing the film as a super sensitive look at what it’s like to grow up in the shadow of a massive celebrity. Coppola takes a legendary story that people spent decades viewing through Elvis’s eyes, and uses every directorial tool, from lens choice and sound design to costume scale as a tool for empathy, giving the frame back to the girl who was trapped inside it the whole time.

Articles & Inspirations

• Armond White — “Priscilla Perfects the Female Gaze” (National Review, 2023)

• Esmé Fenick — “Priscilla (2023): A Sensitive and Subtle Exploration of Girlhood in the Shadow of Elvis” (ERA Journal, 2023)

• Laura Mulvey — “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”(Foundational scholarship on male gaze theory)

Thoughts Arising From This Article:

During my research and intensive study toward understanding the representation of the female gaze in this film, I acknowledged the fact that Coppola was denied the rights to Elvis’s music catalog. This often raises a question that makes me wonder: Does this rejection actually improve Coppola’s message to her audience, allowing them to be trapped in Priscilla’s isolation and forced silence?