Of all the movies released in the past year to end up offering a prequel and a sequel, X seemed among the least likely. After all, one initially reads it as “just” another A24 horror special. Unique in its singular brand of fucked-upness. But Ti West and Mia Goth clearly thought, as Lestat (Tom Cruise) in Interview With the Vampire did of a certain dead old woman, “There’s still life in the old lady yet!” And the old lady in question here is Pearl (Goth), whose moniker the latest installment in the X “saga” is named after (complete with the subtitle: An X-traordinary Origin Story). Because, clearly, there was a root to what caused this evil, nymphomaniacal old woman to be that way. Starting with the curse of “daring” to have a noticeable sexual appetite in the year 1918, where the Pearl narrative unfolds on the very same farm in X.
It doesn’t take long to realize that, in addition to being burdened with sexual desires that a girl isn’t “supposed to” have, Pearl is also the daughter of German immigrants, living in rural Texas at a time of peak anti-German sentiment as the end of World War I came to a close (soon to set the stage for the Germans inciting World War II in retaliation for their raw deal in the Treaty of Versailles). Blaming the “krauts” for the entire war, discrimination ensued during this period, and Pearl’s parents are no exception. Plus, with Pearl’s father (Matthew Sunderland) paralyzed and incapable of speech or caring for himself, the responsibility has become even harder on her mother, Ruth (Tandi Wright), as a woman trying to “run things” without additional prejudice.
So it is that she’s harder on Pearl than perhaps she ought to be. Expecting her to pick up the slack despite knowing she’s a lazy dreamer of a girl. A characteristic we see from the first moments of the film, opening on a scene of Pearl playing dress up in her mother’s finer clothes and posing in the mirror—something about it very much reminding well-versed viewers of the deranged “Baby” Jane (Bette Davis) in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Indeed, Pearl feels like a spawn of that particular “psycho biddy” progenitor. And yes, just the same as Future Pearl, a large part of Jane’s bitter rage stemmed from no longer being seen as desirable by men. A quality that goes hand in hand with making it in show business. Even still, but most especially at the outset of cinema (and through the “Golden Age” of Hollywood). Which Pearl had the great misfortune of seeing unfold. One says “misfortune” because, perhaps if she had been born before the dawn of silent film, her head wouldn’t have been so filled with “big dreams” and her narcissism wouldn’t have had a place to be channeled. Perhaps she would’ve suppressed it like the rest of the masses.
But no, she is as taken with “the movies” as so many in America were, starting from the inception of phenomena like nickelodeons. Ironically, the upper classes were the ones who turned their noses up at newsreels and “actualities” shown to the public in such venues, viewing it as cheap and vulgar fare. Not for the “elite.” Of course, the so-called elite would go on to make their money off the hoi polloi’s love of cinema eventually. After working-class immigrants such as Adolph Zukor (who produced one of the U.S.’ first feature-length movies in 1913, The Prisoner of Zenda), Samuel Goldwyn and Carl Laemmle (himself a German like Pearl’s parents) already saw the opportunity to do so long before anyone else. That Pearl should exist at a moment in time like this, during the “excitement” and the “hustle and bustle” of an industry so new, was to her detriment rather than her advantage. For it gave her the false hope that she might be capable of having “more.”
Her obsessive delusions with escaping the drudgery of farm life are manifest in every little act she does. Even something as simple as feeding the animals in the barn. “Y’all see me for who I really am!” she shouts to the perplexed “audience” as she runs up to mount a pile of hay bales and conclude, “A star!” With a pitchfork over her head, the image is ominous, to say the least, and foreshadows the fate of the innocent goose that walks up to see what all that fanfare is in the barn. Needless to say, Pearl doesn’t care for such “interlopers.” And, in keeping with the pattern of most standard-issue serial killers, it’s no surprise that Pearl should start with animals and work her way up to humans.
Just as she plans to work her way up the show biz ladder, even if it’s by starting with something as middling as a touring church troupe (this is, after all, Texas). Plus, with the influenza pandemic “winding down” (though it wouldn’t really do so until 1920, it was assumed “safe” to start gallivanting again—even if most of the “background people” in Pearl are seen wearing masks, an all too eerie and resonant vision for the “COVID enduring” audience watching the familiar sight and dialogue. Including Pearl’s sister-in-law, Mitsy (Emma Jenkins-Purro), noting to Pearl, “All this isolation has been enough to make one mad.” This after she and her mother bring a pig to the farm as an offering of goodwill. Ruth only sees it as unwanted charity and leaves it on the porch. But before Howard’s (played by Stephen Ure in X and Alistair Sewell in Pearl) family departs, Mitsy gives Pearl the “hot tip” about a dance audition for the church’s Christmas chorus line “to bring merriment to folks throughout the state during the holidays.” Mitsy ought to have known better than to tell Pearl anything about it, for she instantly puts all her eggs in that basket, running up to the cow, Charlie, kissing him on the mouth and saying, “This could be it!”
Alas, because it’s supposed to be 1918, it wouldn’t be appropriate to use Eminem’s signature song from 8 Mile, “Lose Yourself,” as part of the soundtrack. And yet, that’s exactly what one can hear going on in Pearl’s mind as she refuses to let anything or anyone stand in her way as she prepares for her “big” audition. The thing she sees as her sole ticket—apart from living in her fantasy world—out of the homestead. Much as Dorothy Gale (Judy Garland) only had literal dreaming to escape from her own dreary, black-and-white location.
Although The Wizard of Oz was a demarcation of Hollywood’s Golden Age, Pearl, despite taking place in the heyday of chorus lines and silent movies, is awash in that “flavor.” Albeit with an extremely perverse, macabre slant—right down to “our Dorothy,” Pearl, dancing around with a scarecrow and then fucking it as she imagines it to be the projectionist (David Corenswet) she just met in town. The one who eventually shows her a notorious stag movie of the day (called A Free Ride) when she returns to the theater after-hours. This obviously being another nod to Maxine Minx’s (also played by Goth) own future in the porn industry, which we’ll soon see further unfold in MaXXXine.
The fact that Pearl herself isn’t scandalized by the images (which would have been extremely shocking to any garden-variety woman back in the day) is yet another testament to her “off” nature—as well as her parallel with Maxine. Hell, if Pearl could become a star based on these kinds of films, she would do it. But such a “genre” was still too much, too soon for a repressed America only just getting accustomed to normal “sinful” movies that eventually prompted the conservative “moral majority” to invoke the Hays code. A stifling barrage of film limitations that Pearl will never have to worry about, for she’ll never hit the big time. A revelation that slowly creeps into her mind as she states during what is sure to become ranked among one of cinema’s greatest monologues, “Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night and fear washes over me ‘cause what if this is it? What if this is right where I belong?”
Of course, she knows deep down that this is it, she’ll be condemned to the farm forever. And it has nothing to do with how she only tried at being in “show business” once and failed, and everything to do with the arcane awareness that those born into a certain family and class will never be able to escape the curse of that station.
As many stories before Pearl have proffered as a moral: all sources of pain and suffering can be traced to attempts at “reaching for the stars.” In other words, trying to extricate oneself from their circumstance of birth. Something that Ruth warns Pearl not to bother with when she says, “One day you’ll understand that getting what you want isn’t what’s important. Making the most of what you have is. Life rarely turns out how you expect. You need to be prepared for that if you ever want to be happy.”
But Pearl can’t be told such things. Like most, she’s inclined to learn the hard way. Building up the pressure in her mind with the internal mantra, “Look, if you had one shot/Or one opportunity/To seize everything you ever wanted/In one moment/Would you capture it/Or just let it slip?/You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow/This opportunity comes once in a lifetime.” For Pearl, the lifetime that follows after that “one opportunity” is an existence of bleak, vengeful despair. But clearly, she at least has Howard, who returns home from the war to find her with a plastered-on smile, to accept her for what she is: a monster. Turned that way as a lot of ordinary people are when they realize life just ain’t how it is in the movies.
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