PicoBlog

Business first: I wrote about this fall’s bumper crop of supermodel documentaries for the New York Times Magazine! The big idea on my mind was impermanence, because modeling is a business where careers are short and notions of who is considered “beautiful” and “aspirational” are forever shifting along with the tides of fashion and culture. I hope you’ll read it. The documentaries are also worth your time if you’re so inclined.

Next up, I wrote something for you about the work of Sofia Coppola. In a way, it’s a continuation of last month’s newsletter, which didn’t mention Coppola but should have, since it went hard on the aesthetics of girlhood. This essay gets into Coppola’s new movie, Priscilla, so if you haven’t seen it and don’t want anything spoiled, see ya! But I’m going to be honest, I don’t think this movie is very spoilable.

Off we go.

When Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette came out in October 2006, I was ready. I had spent the last days of summer vacation absorbing every detail of the September issue of Vogue, which featured the movie’s star, Kirsten Dunst, on the cover. I try not to throw around the word iconic, but that’s what that photoshoot was: Annie Leibovitz shot Dunst at Versailles, in costumes from the film as well as couture gowns “made just for Vogue.” I understood that Coppola had made Marie Antoinette just for me — for all aspiring fashion girls — and more than excitement, I remember feeling a sense of quiet pride and duty when I went to see it with a friend from sophomore chemistry class.

My first scathing review of a movie: I hated it. After an hour of gorgeous gowns and cake and raspberries floating in champagne, I got bored. It was too beautiful? It had no plot? It felt like one long perfume ad — which, as I’m thinking about it now, may be a retroactive assessment based on later fragrance ads that were probably riffing on Coppola’s aesthetic. I can’t watch the scene where Marie Antoinette rambles through tall grasses in a white dress without seeing an ad for Marc Jacobs Daisy, which debuted in 2007 and owes a pretty clear debt to Coppola’s work. (Pre-Marie Antoinette, Coppola herself appeared in a Marc Jacobs perfume ad. In 2014, she shot some videos for the Daisy fragrance.)

But in the same way that you might find yourself compelled to take another bite of a dish with a funky flavor that you don’t quite understand, I returned to Marie Antoinette every few years. I kept feeling like I’d missed something. If I was the right demographic to appreciate Coppola’s work, why didn’t I like this movie? Was it me, or was it her?

Turns out it was me. I revisited Marie Antoinette again a few weeks ago, and something finally clicked into place. I’m older, and I have more patience. But also, I had just gone to a screening of Priscilla, Coppola’s new movie about Priscilla Presley, which gave me a greater appreciation for the earlier film.

If you’ve read anything about Coppola, you know that girlhood is her central concern as a director. Priscilla shares DNA with many of Coppola’s movies, but Marie Antoinette is its most obvious analog. Two teenage girls relocate to a faraway mansion — Graceland and Versailles, respectively, with The King and the soon-to-be king— and struggle with the isolation, pressure, and scrutiny that their pampered new lives entail. There’s violence and darkness: Marie Antoinette’s bad ending lurks just out of view, while Elvis’s temper and abusive behavior cast a shadow over Priscilla’s life at Graceland.

I recommend watching the two on successive nights, because you’ll notice the many small details that they share — like a murmured comment, from older women at court and in Elvis’s circle, about how young Marie Antoinette and Priscilla look. Certain shots are near duplicates, my favorite being Elvis and Louis XVI resolutely reading in bed as their wives try and fail to get them to have sex. It’s exciting to spot these similarities. They feel like Coppola circling an idea, testing and refining it in different contexts.

But Priscilla zags in one way that I can’t stop thinking about, and that is the heroine’s relationship to fashion. Clothes are a little fraught at the start of Marie Antoinette — at the royal handoff, the bride-to-be is stripped of her Austrian attire and outfitted in a French gown and hairstyle — but pretty soon the dauphine takes charge, pushing the limits of style and extravagance with delight. Fashion is a way to let loose and rebel against the fussiness and protocol of court, and it’s a bandage when things go wrong. I had forgotten this, but the movie’s big, delicious shopping montage begins right after Marie Antoinette has a breakdown over her failure to get pregnant. It’s clear that she dresses for herself and her friends — not for her distant husband, with whom she shares an awkward dynamic that eventually mellows into a sweet friendship.

Priscilla, on the other hand, is a movie about the suffocating project of dressing for a man. After Priscilla moves to Graceland to live with Elvis while finishing high school, he tells her to dye her hair black, put on heavier eye makeup, and wear solids rather than prints. He’s both a controlling boyfriend and a manager-slash-stylist, crafting her image to complement his own. There’s a shopping montage in Priscilla, but this one has an airless quality, as Priscilla emerges in different outfits to receive Elvis’s verdict. Sometimes she bristles at his micro-management, but she executes his wishes — putting on her eyeliner, going to the hair salon, and wearing the clothes he likes even when he’s away shooting a movie. It’s not hard to see why. Priscilla has no friends, Elvis won’t let her get an after-school job, and she’s isolated from anyone who isn’t him, his family, or his posse. She’s terrified of losing his interest because he has become her entire life.

Coppola really knows how to capture the highs of dressing for one’s own pleasure and the lows of dressing for someone else’s approval. These experiences aren’t specific to young women, but young women do get a tough version of them, since our culture gives girls license to play with fashion while also dictating how they’re expected to look. Watching Priscilla made me think about how difficult it can be to trust your own motivations when it comes to getting dressed — that is, to figure out how much your outfit choices are about your own taste and self-conception, and how much they’re about satisfying some external party, especially when that party is a man whose attention you want.

Have you ever tried to do that mental calculation? It’s a confusing rabbit hole. Occasionally I try to untangle whether I actually liked the party outfits I wore in college — the going-out tops, the chandelier earrings — or whether I was just costuming myself as someone who was cute and dateable. The latter would be kind of a bummer, but is it disempowering? College was when I started developing an awareness of how other people saw me. Maybe I needed to experiment with manipulating my image more than I needed to express my truest self through fashion. Isn’t experimentation how you discover who your truest self even is? And isn’t it comforting that I was able to spend this phase of life with friends who were trying on clothes in the next room and inching closer to their wonderful future selves, too?

Priscilla’s situation is far more lonely, extreme, and troubling than that. (Duh. I was dressing for a general idea of the collegiate male gaze, not for a single powerful and opinionated person.) But watching her apply her false eyelashes and pad around the carpeted floors of Graceland in her high heels, I felt protective of her in the way that I sometimes feel protective of my younger self. You can see that she has to go through it in order to get to the other side. She’s in the murk now, but she won’t be forever. I can feel that tenderness in Coppola’s filmmaking, too.

As for rewatching Marie Antoinette after seeing Priscilla, getting dressed never looked like such a joy. And it has a remarkable payoff. After more than an hour and a half of ball gowns, diamonds, and towering wigs, the final minutes of the movie are a jarring tone shift: As the people of France march on Versailles armed with pitchforks and torches, the mood at the palace grows sober and tense. One of the last shots is of Marie Antoinette’s bedroom in ruin, gilt doors off their hinges and a chandelier smashed on the floor. It’s unnerving in a way that would not have been possible had Coppola not given us so much time to luxuriate in the beauty and excess of this world.

My terrible take at age 15 was that the visual glories of Marie Antoinette were pointless. With all love and gentleness to my teenage self: you idiot!

Don’t everyone rush out to buy me the Sofia Coppola book for Christmas,
Eliza

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