What ‘Priscilla’ (2023) Reveals About The Biopic

Elvis (Baz Luhrmann, 2022)¹Luhrmann, Baz, director. Elvis. Warner Bros, 2022., a biopic depicting Elvis Presley, was released last year. Directed by Baz Luhrmann, it was bright, wild, and dramatic, showing Elvis’s fast life of fame and drugs. But recently, Priscilla (Sofia Coppola, 2023)²Coppola, Sofia, director. Priscilla. A24, 2023.³ was released.

This biopic about Elvis’s wife, Priscilla Presley, displays a very different version of the same man. In Priscilla, Priscilla waits around at Graceland (Elvis’s mansion) for Elvis to return home from touring or filming. Elvis is still just as charismatic, but also a manipulative, controlling husband. How can two movies about the same man depict such wildly different personalities and lifestyles? Let’s take a look at both films, and a few other examples of biopics, to find out.

What Is A Biopic?

“Biopic,” short for biographical film, is a film that is based on the real-life of a famous person. Biopics vary with how truthful or fictional they are, but they generally waver somewhere in between; staying truthful about big aspects but possibly altering small details.

There are many debates about the ethics of biopics: whether or not it’s okay to alter the details of real people’s lives, whether or not it’s okay to make real bad people more sympathetic in order to improve their characters in a film, even whether or not it’s morally acceptable to make biopics at all.

While not fully truthful and most definitely dramatized, Elvis is generally accurate to most aspects of his life — except for his relationship with Priscilla. We will see the gaps in the truth of that aspect in Elvis, as well as how Priscilla fills them in.

Elvis (2022)

Elvis depicts a good man whose life was ruined by fame, drugs, and his management. The movie shows Elvis growing up poor, being authentically inspired by music, and taking good care of his mother. Then we are thrust into Elvis’s fast-paced, crazy life with Baz Luhrmann’s signature colorful and whimsical story-telling style.

We follow Elvis as he rises to fame under Tom Parker’s controlling management, and we feel sympathetic to Elvis as his addiction takes over. This directing style can make us feel overwhelmed and swept up by the lavishness of his life, as though everyone at Elvis’s level of fame would have fallen to the same fate and made the same choices.

Because of this, the movie does display some of the bad habits his addiction causes — but it generously affords him a certain level of distance from his actions. He consistently cheats on his wife because, as Tom Parker puts it, Priscilla “could never compete with the love he felt for you.”⁴Luhrmann, Baz, director. Elvis. Warner Bros, 2022. The “you,” in this case, being his fans. This wording makes it seem like Elvis’s infidelity was inevitable, but obviously, this is not the case. Even though he was struggling considerably, he still had agency over at least some things in his life; his marriage being one of them.

The movie also does depict Elvis yelling and being aggressive, though rarely with Priscilla. The Elvis we see in this movie is a good person who would have been a calm, faithful, loving husband if not for the fame.

Priscilla (2023)

Priscilla is wildly different. Instead of Baz Luhrman’s exaggerated and wild opulence, Priscilla is muted. Priscilla spends most of the movie waiting for Elvis to call her, waiting for Elvis to come home, waiting for Elvis to want her at all. We see everything that happens to Elvis through Priscilla’s perspective — his affairs, his addiction, his fame — we only get the glimpses of it that Priscilla sees. And Priscilla’s view of Elvis is quite different.

Firstly, he pursued her when she was only fourteen, just starting her freshman of high school. This is different from what was displayed in Elvis, as their age difference in that movie was largely glossed over. It is only quietly acknowledged in one throw-away line: “Priscilla, the pretty teenage daughter of a United States Air Force officer.”⁵Luhrmann, Baz, director. Elvis. Warner Bros, 2022. Not only is it never addressed again after this, but using the word “teenage” really diminishes the situation. “Teenage” can imply Priscilla is eighteen or nineteen, but Priscilla had just turned fourteen when the two of them met. That is a very big difference that the movie never really addresses.

In addition, Elvis is extremely controlling and manipulative. He tells Priscilla how to dress, how to act, what to say — and she spends her most formative years being shaped by him. Not only this, but Elvis doesn’t just cheat with a few random fans — he continuously has long-term, seemingly serious relationships with other women. When Priscilla brings this up and gets upset with him, Elvis yells and even tells her to leave Graceland and go home to her parents.

Priscilla‘s Elvis is distant, frustrating, and abusive. His intoxicating charisma is what Priscilla and many others fall in love with him for, but it is also why he is able to manipulate her.

Navigating Biopics About People Who Have Passed

Making a movie about a still-living person is difficult because we do not want to offend them with a less-than-savory portrayal. But when they’ve passed, we also don’t want to portray them badly because we just simply don’t like to speak ill of the dead. Biopics will often glamorize the person they are portraying, especially if they’ve passed.

With people like Elvis, our culture widely appreciates his artistic contributions to the music industry. He was extremely famous at the time and still maintains cultural relevance to this day. Biopics want to honor that contribution, and they don’t want to portray a dead man who cannot defend himself as a bad person. This is most likely why a lot of Elvis’s more abusive behavior was not originally addressed.

Different Perspectives On The Same Person

Another example of a person who has made a huge contribution to society is Steve Jobs. Two biopics were made about Steve Jobs after he passed, Jobs (Joshua Michael Stern, 2013)⁶Stern, Joshua Michael, director. Jobs. Open Road Films, 2013. and Steve Jobs (Danny Boyle, 2015).⁷Boyle, Danny, director. Steve Jobs. Universal Pictures, 2015. Similarly, both movies display the same man in wildly different ways.

An important difference between the movies is Steve Jobs’s relationship with his daughter Lisa. He denied Lisa was his daughter at all for many years even though the paternity test proved he was; claiming that paternity tests have a 5% margin of error and he was most definitely not the father. He stuck to this claim strongly for many years, refusing to pay almost any child support or to see his daughter.⁸“The daughter Steve Jobs denied: ‘Clearly I was not compelling enough for my father’.” The Guardian, 2018. Accessed 15 December 2023. This is arguably the most deplorable aspect of Steve Jobs as a person, akin to Elvis’s treatment of Priscilla.

In Jobs, this issue is a small plot point in the rest of Steve Jobs’s long life, depicted in scenes of Jobs in college and working at Apple. However, in Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs, Jobs’s relationship with his daughter is a large emotional beat of the film. It is brought up many times, and the movie even ends with a final, heartfelt, and emotional conversation between the two of them. It addresses this poor aspect of his character head-on, not afraid to bury it in inspirational scenes of Jobs creating Apple.

Depicting A Full Person

The reason these movies, Elvis and Priscilla, Jobs and Steve Jobs, are so different, is that they use real-life accounts of the people who knew these influential personalities the best. Priscilla directly references Priscilla Presley’s autobiographical book Elvis and Me⁹Presley, Priscilla. Elvis and Me. Berkley, 1986., as well as her personal accounts on set.

The writer of Steve Jobs, Aaron Sorkin, spoke to multiple important people in Steve Jobs’s life before writing the movie, most closely, his daughter Lisa Jobs. An Elvis biopic from the perspective of Elvis’s mother, or a Steve Jobs biopic from the perspective of one of his competitors, would also be wildly different from the biopics we have now because everyone sees people differently.

These insider accounts from people who were close to Elvis and Steve Jobs might make them look like technically “worse” people, but they make them look so much more human and therefore improve the movies tenfold. Portraying people from the perspective of those who knew them closest, or at the very least consulting them and adding their knowledge to the movie, makes a better, more full picture of a human being.

References

• 1
  Luhrmann, Baz, director. Elvis. Warner Bros, 2022.
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  Luhrmann, Baz, director. Elvis. Warner Bros, 2022.
• 5
  Luhrmann, Baz, director. Elvis. Warner Bros, 2022.
• 6
  Stern, Joshua Michael, director. Jobs. Open Road Films, 2013.
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  Boyle, Danny, director. Steve Jobs. Universal Pictures, 2015.
• 8
  “The daughter Steve Jobs denied: ‘Clearly I was not compelling enough for my father’.” The Guardian, 2018. Accessed 15 December 2023.
• 9
  Presley, Priscilla. Elvis and Me. Berkley, 1986.