Sophia Coppola’s 2006 film Marie Antoinette begins with a stripping. Relinquished of her past and dreaming of love, the teenaged Austrian enters Versailles to find an awkward, impotent husband and life in isolation.

For the last 25 years, Sofia Coppola has dissected the psyche of women and their dependence on men. This year’s Priscilla, starring Cailee Spaeny as Priscilla and Jacob Elordi as Elvis Presley, is a testament to this exploration—a meditative and restrained portrait of a woman in the shadow of a Great Man. Even now, Priscilla Presley’s legacy is enmeshed with her former husband’s. She is forever known as Priscilla of Graceland, tethered to a man she chose before she was old enough to vote.

Adapted from Presley’s memoir Elvis and Me (1985), the film begins when Priscilla is 14 years old, freshly relocated from Texas to Germany, where her father was positioned as a high-ranking officer. Priscilla meets Elvis at an arranged get-together and the courting process begins almost at once. After two years of infrequent phone calls and one-sided love letters, Priscilla leaves her parents’ home to take permanent residence in Graceland—Elvis’ palatial estate in Memphis.

While living in Graceland, Priscilla attends school but makes no friends her age, rarely venturing outside the estate. She doesn’t study, paint or clean. Mostly, she waits, fixed and unchanging, for him to return. With so little concept of self, Priscilla happily tries on the dresses Elvis chooses, allowing him to make up her face and dye her hair black to match his own. She finds herself in the long-standing position as ‘The Girlfriend.’ 

Life as The Girlfriend is presented as a second childhood, a regression to an idyllic past free from responsibility or work. For some, this vision is appealing, bringing to mind scenes of tanning poolside, luncheons with friends, and a white Escalade. The Girlfriend narrative evokes a rose-coloured version of 1950s gender roles—one in which women recline in splendour, liberated from the capitalistic rat race. (In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir describes this phenomenon as “the temptation to forgo liberty and become a thing.”)

The Girlfriend, in exchange for unwavering devotion, is usually paid in rent, expensive dinners, clothes, grooming upkeep, or social capital. If she plays her cards right, she can weaponise dependence early on, save money like a well-set child-star, and invest in the ‘right man'. Ideally, she receives a ring and a fairy tale ending. If he misbehaves, there is alimony and perhaps name recognition (as was the case for the real-life Priscilla Presley).

She must be in love to avoid being called a gold digger, or worse, ‘starfucker'. It is no accident that in Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet began to reconsider Mr. Darcy’s proposal after “first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.” Her mother, Mrs. Bennet, is seen as an object of ridicule for being so marriage-minded, but with no way to earn a living, a rich husband is the only way the family can retain their livelihood. The strictures are twofold and contradictory: The Girlfriend chooses a rich man for love.

Many young women have, at one time or another, been at the behest of their romantic partners (often older and more powerful). These women were once referred to as the ‘Muse’ or ‘Art Wife,’ but with long-term partnerships being more common than marriage, these labels have fused and evolved. Now, she might be arm candy at a fundraising dinner, a skater’s hanger-on, a band groupie turned romantic partner or a future football wife. Aesthetics vary but the power dynamic remains.

The Girlfriend might be an artist, paring down their partner’s work when it runs rampant or lending insight for the revisions. Male musicians frequently cast their attractive girlfriends in music videos or name-drop them in songs. The novelist’s partner often gets a first pass on his manuscript, and the photographer lovingly frames her face in the gallery, but credit lives tucked in the acknowledgements along with the agents and dogs. In graduating her devotion, The Girlfriend is sidelined for the very thing purported to be her life’s purpose.

Charis Wilson, wife of photographer Edward Weston, was 20 when she met her 48-year-old, then-married partner and collaborator. His early portraits of her are intimate and unnerving; she looks startlingly young, posed nude and clothed, reclining on sofas or straddling chairs. Their creative relationship, at first of muse and photographer, deepened as her writing appeared more and more in his work. Eventually, his books, solely accredited to him, were fully co-authored. They divorced when she was 32.

The Girlfriend must strip off her youth (the very thing he chose her for) and adopt an adult persona to fit into his universe. Consider what Leo Tolstoy’s wife Sophie said of the early days of their marriage: “An atmosphere of old age surrounds me, everyone around is old. I force myself to repress every youthful urge, so out of place does it seem in this restrained environment.”

Coppola has explored these dynamics throughout her oeuvre. In the case of Lost In Translation (2003), it is a loveless marriage to a hot shot director (drawing on Coppola’s marriage to Spike Jonze); in The Virgin Suicides (1999), it is a strict puritanical family; and in The Beguiled (2017), an attractive Union soldier upends a Virginian girls school during the Civil War. Coppola’s characters live in pastel visions of isolation, luxurious but crushingly restrictive. It is no surprise that the Coppola Girl is bored as well as misunderstood.

A Coppola Girl is no master of her fate, an antithesis to Joseph Campell’s dashingly active hero. Blank affectation masks a seemingly inexhaustible pain—a beautiful girl drifting from beautiful room to beautiful room. Her forced passivity is the point. We watch things happen to a Coppola Girl, much like Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970), Coppola’s grimier, more Cassevetes-esque predecessor. 

Shot in cinema vérité style and mostly improvised, Wanda was Loden’s first and only directorial work. Loden’s Wanda (who she also plays) is an unhappy drifter—girlish and slightly dumb. She moves from situation to situation with mean and often abusive men, emanating childlike helplessness. One bad deal transfers to another, but through it all, Wanda remains apathetic, recalling the quiet inaccessibility of Coppola’s leading women. 

Unlike Coppola’s girls, Wanda has no access to monetary privilege, recalling Loden’s working-class origins in the Appalachian Mountains. Her then-husband Elia Kazan once reflected, “Loden understood this character very, very well because when she was young she was a bit like that, she would go here and there. She once told me a very sad thing; she told me: ‘I have always needed a man to protect me.’ I will say that most women in our society are familiar with this, understand this, need this, but are not honest enough to say it.”

For women like Wanda, survival is parasitic. The Girlfriend’s work is absorption: absorption of self (looks are key here) and absorption of others. Internalising blows like a professional punching bag, she reforms again and again un-dented. The monologue never rises. She doesn't speak, only holds. Her helplessness emboldens him, provoking protection or abuse. What is ‘agency’ to women who have been taught their only contribution to the world is their body? Would a woman like Wanda pick up the sword and nobly impale her captor? Self-sufficiency might only bring her loss. When freedom refuses to feel free, one’s cage might at least be the one chosen.

Reflecting on Loden's directional aspirations in his autobiography, Elia Kazan writes: “After Wanda she no longer wore clothes that dramatised her lure, no longer came on as a frail, uncertain woman who depended on men who had the power … I realised I was losing her, but I was also losing interest in her struggle … She was careless about managing the house, let it fall apart, and I am an old-fashioned man.” I cannot help but think this is why, after Loden died from breast cancer in 1980, Kazan claimed to have written the Wanda screenplay.

In 2012, Kazan’s granddaughter, Zoe Kazan, wrote and starred in the indie rom-com Ruby Sparks. Paul Dano (her now-partner) plays Calvin, a former wunderkind whose fictional dream girl (Kazan) appears in his apartment as a living, breathing girl. A Pygmalion tale for Los Angeles hipsters, Calvin makes revisions on his typewriter, moulding her to fit his whims. She’s alternately devoted, cool, relentlessly happy, in love with his genius.

Eventually, Calvin sets Ruby into the wild. When he stops creating her, her memory of their relationship is wiped clean. At the end of the film, we see him at a reading for his new novel entitled ‘The Girlfriend’. Ironically, it is Loden, not Elia, whom Zoe Kazan resembles in the story. The reflection repeats itself.

When The Girlfriend emerges from the shadows, she seizes autonomy, perhaps selfhood. It is in this vein that Priscilla drives away from Graceland at the end of film, finally out from under Elvis’ control. In this closing montage, Dolly Parton’s ‘I Will Always Love You’ plays. The song was written by Parton as a farewell to her mentor Porter Wagoner and a plea to release her from her contract.

When Priscilla tells Elvis she’s leaving him, he assumes it is for another man. She looks at him and gently says, “You’re losing me to a life of my own.”