This Is What Makes Us Girls

The Aesthetic Delights and Disappointments of Priscilla

Discussed: Priscilla, sad girls, girlhood, Sofia Coppola, Lana Del Rey, Euphoria, Yellowjackets

The most iconic scenes from Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla feature the protagonist looking daintily beautiful, her big eyes being made up with false lashes, her toe nails painted bright red against the backdrop of a soft shag carpet. Cailee Spaeny’s subtle performance is filled with raw emotion: through small gestures and glances, we see moments of genuine joy, as well as profound loneliness. Priscilla may look small and vulnerable next to Elvis, but she is never reduced to a victim and my favorite scenes from Priscilla were ones where she herself is holding a camera. Each time, the gaze feels deliberately restricted. In one scene, she rolls about in bed with Elvis as the two take turns photographing each other. In another, she uses a camcorder by the pool, but we see her being embraced by Elvis, rather than lingering with what she actually sees through her own lens.

Though the film is concerned with Priscilla’s interior world, Coppola’s vision of Priscilla Beaulieu feels like a tapestry of girlhood tropes, rather than a vivid look at a specific woman and her journey. Watching Priscilla reminded me of Lana Del Rey’s music video for “Video Games” the song that catapulted her to fame and which is also interested in the interior life of a girl who wants nothing more than to hang around the boy she loves.

Both Coppola and Del Rey offer a vision of femininity that is compelling precisely because it isn’t interested in selling us a plastic empowerment narrative. And yet, we are still being sold something: an aesthetic of “sad femininity” that has become so popularized that it has led to a rise of a veritable “sad girl” marketplace, one which has no doubt been buttressed by the evolution of social media, but also appears to be constructed by someone in a boardroom.

When I write this, it feels like a betrayal, perhaps of a younger version of myself who was hungry for complex female characters and found the “sad girl” to be an interesting reclaiming of the damsel in distress trope, even if her behaviors weren’t particularly admirable. The “sad girl” is the gentlest of antiheroes, smart enough to see the bullshit of this world, but too delicate to ultimately do anything about it. The “sad girl” protagonist isn’t just sad: she’s often masochistic, self-deprecating, occasionally cruel. Like Cassie from Euphoria, she yearns to be loved, but all she knows is how to pout and primp. Her tears may be genuine, but they don’t get her anywhere.

If the “sad girl” has the potential for complexity precisely because we are invited to her messy inner world, the sad girl aesthetic, which is currently being used to sell everything from long and wispy hairstyles to eye makeup to look like you’ve been softly crying, implies the opposite. It claims that sad girls are all basically the same. Do Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation actually have much in common aside from a narrator who struggles with mental illness? Are artists like Fiona Apple, Olivia Rodrigo, and Billie Eilish really cut from the same melancholy cloth? I’ve yet to see someone describe a “sad boy” aesthetic in the months and years since Bo Burnham’s Inside came out. Even when he is collapsed on the floor, Burnham is perceived as an active artist rather than someone coasting on a vibe. 

I’m not the only one frustrated with the commodification of female sadness. In a 2023 essay for The New York Times, film critic Emily Yoshida discusses Coppola’s “enormous influence on the iconography of feminine melancholy,” citing both her meticulous skill as an auteur, as well as the limits to her obsession with the “sad girl” motifs that typify her films:

Granted access to the privileged confines of Ms. Coppola’s films — be it the Park Hyatt, Versailles or Graceland — there isn’t much asked of us, the audience: We’re simply invited to participate in the glamorous inertia. The sharper moments of potential darkness are typically buffered by the naïveté of our young protagonists and the glints of beauty they can find in a cruel and confusing world. And they inevitably, in turn, become glints of beauty for us to screen-grab and add to our personal mood boards.

For me, the “sad girl” disappoints not just because she’s been flattened into an aesthetic, but because she has simply become a foil to the “girl boss” who came before her. On the one hand, as someone who loves books and films about women’s lives and experiences, it’s exciting to watch directors like Coppola grapple with girlhood as a complex subject worthy of examination. But her evolution as a strictly aesthetic icon also doesn’t feel like a feminist victory.

In her essay, Yoshida goes on to argue that what would elevate the sad girl is change, “Real change, spiritual change, not just a costume change.” I would argue the “sad girl” doesn’t necessarily need to transform, but she does need to grow up. By the end of Priscilla, our heroine looks more mature and resolute as she gets into her own car and drives outside the gates of Graceland, but the screen cuts to black before we get to see her out in the world and on her own. Coppola chooses to leaves a more fully actualized Priscilla to the viewer’s imagination.

The same week I watched Priscilla, I began to watch Yellowjackets, a TV series that is also interested in depictions of girlhood, though the teenage girls who get lost in the woods are not at all soft and alluring. They are bloody and angry and filled with rage and regret. The women who do make it out are too, trapped in their own version of a perpetual girlhood where they are defined by the tragedy that changed the trajectory of their lives.

In one scene, Shauna, a Yellowjacket who survived long enough in the wilderness to be rescued, attempts to cover up a crime that she herself has committed. In the process, she ends up discovering an art studio filled with paintings of her. Most of them look pensive and beautiful, but there is one that looks downright feral, a brutal snarl of color and texture that she’s drawn to perhaps because it reflects her true self and all her unromantic longings.