When I call I need to know you’ll be home

I'm very happy to have Rax King back to write about Sofia Coppola's new film Priscilla. Read more from Rax in Hell World on Lana Del Rey's Born to Die, an excerpt from her book Tacky on the band Creed.

And speaking of Sofia Coppola’s girls you might also read this short story from my recent collection A Creature Wanting Form featuring Kirsten Dunst the singular Sofia Coppola girl.

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This Priscilla is all interiority

by Rax King

Sofia Coppola’s girls want, but do not get. Her films are about the muffled-scream agony of young, romantic women trying really hard to want less. They are heterosexual in a way that feels important to point out, because everything Coppola’s girls want, they want from men. They snuff out every desire they have and then wait patiently for the men they love to meet the needs that remain. The men stay put and all that’s left is for Coppola’s girls to compress even tighter. They have about one square foot of life to move around in.

They never seem resentful, Coppola’s girls, which frustrated me for a long time. Their lovers’ casual cruelty causes them pain, but they digest that pain serenely. Why didn’t Lux Lisbon shove Trip Fontaine into a locker for abandoning her on that football field? Why didn’t Marie Antoinette give Louis XVI a swirlie after he spent all those months refusing to even discuss consummating their marriage? It seemed Coppola’s girls could always take more shit, and for years this turned me off. Still I gobbled down her films until they made me sick. I may not have liked them, exactly, but clearly they contained some enzyme I was hungry for.

Then I watched Priscilla, Coppola’s 2023 biopic about the relationship between Priscilla and Elvis Presley, and damned if I didn’t have an epiphany. It happened early on, when a 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny) is sitting on a sofa next to 24-year-old Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi). The two are leaning into one another without making contact. Electricity crackles between their faces. Then, Elvis touches the tip of Priscilla’s finger with his.

I fell. I plummeted through the foundation of the movie theater, away from my 32-year-old woman’s life, which is as close to my dream life as most people ever get. I landed with a shock in my fifteenth year, when life was even better than my dream life, because nothing had happened yet and that meant anything could happen. And I relived, for the first time in over a decade, that glorious moment when my twenty-something boyfriend’s hand finally, finally traversed the ruthless tundra of distance between us so that our pinkies — and only our pinkies — were touching.