On movie choices and being grown in a female-gaze pod

Spending hours bartering over which film to watch? It could be that you're coming at the arts from completely different angles

Last summer, G and I went to see the movie Elvis. It was okay. I like Baz Luhrmann in general, and it was certainly entertaining; I learnt a little more about The King and admired the bold style of it. It was big, brash and glitzy, but not earth-shaking. This week I went alone to see the movie Priscilla. If you haven’t read about it, it’s Priscilla Beaulieu Presley’s account of meeting Elvis when she was 14, their marriage when she was 21, and the surreal experience of being courted by the world’s biggest star.

I enjoyed Priscilla more than Elvis. In true S.Coppola style it feels soft, pastel and dreamy ‒ there are lots of Angora sweaters and sexy Polaroids. The details of teenage-girl life in the Sixties, from hairspray and Noxzema cleanser to babydoll nightgowns, Cleopatra-sharp eyeliner and camp fan magazines, are almost palpable. Pool parties and barbecues are seen through a Super-8-style home video filter.

It’s seductive and fun without shying away from the grooming undertones of their relationship, not to mention what a difficult and sometimes abusive partner he could be. I was intrigued by how Priscilla also portrays him as an aesthete, dictating what she wore from colours to prints and encouraging her to dye her hair black, plump up the beehive and wear more eye make-up. Coppola is bold in making her visibly childlike and mousy around the time of their first meetings. Throughout, you feel her impostor syndrome: why me?

I felt oddly annoyed that G wasn’t bothered about seeing Priscilla. For one thing, it’s also directed by an acclaimed auteur ‒ Sofia Coppola ‒ whose projects I have always enjoyed (but I suspect he hasn’t seen). Was it true that he was just shruggy about the press around the film, or wanted to do something else that night? Or was it a larger dismissal of the female perspective on this iconic moment?

“I felt oddly annoyed that G wasn’t bothered about seeing Priscilla. Was it a larger dismissal of the female perspective on this iconic moment?”

G gets defensive when I tell people we have completely different taste in films, but we do. Or more precisely, the overlap in our film-taste Venn diagram is a small, crescent-moon sliver. It’s no reflection on him or me, or our respective upbringings. But the reasons, to me, are clear: I grew up almost 100% immersed in the female experience, whereas he came to the arts from more of a mainstream, male-gaze perspective. He grew up with a brother to choose videos with and a mum who was reasonably laid back about genre, whereas I grew up with two sisters and parents who loved books and musicals. G and his brother will have developed their little square eyes to the blockbusters of the 80s and 90s ‒ from Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park to Toy Story and Back to the Future. One of his favourite films of all time is Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

I… did not get this film. You can’t win ’em all

I’ve lost count of the silver screen classics G is baffled that I hadn’t seen well into my thirties ‒ Jaws and Rain Man, Stand By Me and Die Hard. What was I doing for the entire end of the 20th century? Well, for one, my sisters and I were soaking up the golden-era Disney years: The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, The Lion King. Then musicals: Joseph and his Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat and Cats on VHS, The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins; later, Evita and West Side Story. And we made time for the literary watches: the Winona Ryder Little Women, the BBC Pride and Prejudice. Some mega-films made it through the jazz-hands barrier despite our best efforts: The Sixth Sense and Forrest Gump, for example.

Still, film taste is the most “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” our relationship ever gets ‒ our formative little moviegoer brains were grown in completely different pods, resulting in chalk-and-cheese values and tastes. It’s fascinating to me. What was I doing between 1990 and 2005, you ask? Why, romanticising my life, weeping at Titanic, writing flurries of breathless, Jane-Austen-inspired gossip in my diaries and having confusing feelings about Captain Von Trapp during that waltz scene on the patio.

When this was your sexual awakening, red-blooded mafia movies just feel too heavy-handed

I barely watched anything featuring a gun (West Side Story excluded, and the jazz hands really outweigh the revolver action in that one), let alone explosions and hostage situations. This means that I have a very low threshold for violence and gore on screen. Past the after-school years, G moved on to the white male canon ‒ The Godfather, Saving Private Ryan, Pulp Fiction ‒ while I moved on to chick flicks, whimsical indie films and anything I could find with a female director or writer. I loved Juno, Carol, Hidden Figures. I loved LGBT+ movies (Pride is an all-time favourite). I only got around to The Godfather last year, at his insistence (in his defence, he traded me for Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which I still reckon is better).

“What was I doing between 1990 and 2005? Romanticising my life, weeping at Titanic, writing flurries of breathless, Jane-Austen-inspired gossip in my diaries and having confusing feelings about Captain Von Trapp during that waltz scene on the patio”

If, at this point, you’re relating to my side of things, you must go and follow the podcast Sentimental Garbage. With the tagline “About the culture we love that society can sometimes make us feel ashamed of”, it originally started discussing and debating so-called chick lit novels, but then moved on to music, movies, artists… there’s a whole episode dedicated to Alanis Morrisette’s Jagged Little Pill and another to underrated classic Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion. For viewers of a certain age and a certain female- or queer-gaze perspective, it’s pure nostalgia.

One thing we’ve had to get past is being mean-spirited or dismissive of each other’s favourites. I’ll give all of the Spielbergs and Scorceses a chance, he’ll watch a fluffy Marilyn Monroe musical and a queer Victorian drama for me. Slowly, we are finding some common ground. We both like a surreal, camp period drama (thank god for Yorgos Lanthimos). We both like a gritty real-life story à la Spotlight or A Few Good Men (though, tellingly, I’m the only one who went to see Maria Schrader’s She Said). We’re certainly expanding each other’s tastes, even reading more authors of the opposite sex thanks to our combined bookshelves.

In the end, there are many reasons why someone might be dismissive of Priscilla’s story. It’s been less than a year than her famous spouse’s big biopic and all the buzz that surrounded it; he was undeniably the talent, the icon, while she is arguably most famous for who she married. But her story is nevertheless true, notable and extraordinary. I’m glad Coppola picked it up. It was a thrilling, chaotic era to live through, and she seems to have done so with a clearer head and more wide-eyed wonder than her husband. She also has less of a public image to preserve or portray in the telling of it. To me, that’s the more interesting story. But what do I know? I’m just a chick flick fan.

Three culture fixes for an unapologetic female gaze:

FILM Promising Young Woman (2020) I watched Saltburn, the divisive film of this festive season, and was disappointed. Mainly because I loved this debut from director and screenwriter Emerald Fennell (despite it being heavy-handed or far-fetched in parts), but also because it swung wildly between queasy-making shock tactics and mundanity. PYW is a much better watch, as Carey Mulligan’s wronged twenty-something conducts her own brand of vigilante justice on predatory men. A great soundtrack, too.

BOOK Animal, Lisa Taddeo From the first couple of pages of her debut Three Women, I knew I was going to fall in love with Lisa Taddeo, and it’s partly because she doesn’t care a fig for attracting the male reader. Her protagonist in the follow-up novel Animal is prickly, damaged and angry; she goes on depraved road trip after witnessing a violent death. There’s plenty of sex and death and menstrual blood. This is one where your boyfriend might stop reading after seven pages because the narrator is so unlikeable; and that’s exactly why you should read on.

ALBUM In These Silent Days, Brandi Carlile There’s nothing less preoccupied with the patriarchy than a rock’n’roll-tinged album by a lesbian singer-songwriter, and this 2021 release is one of Carlile’s best. On its release, she told Rolling Stone that male producers have accused her of being “too emotional” in the studio. “Emotional and loud can look a lot like the same thing. If I’m going to get emotional, I’m going to get loud, and some guys can’t handle that.” From guttural, howling Americana (Broken Horses) to Joni Mitchell homages (You and Me On the Rock), ITSD has got broad appeal with country, rock, folk and Beatles-influenced piano ballads to tuck into. This is our road-trip album and I highly recommend it.