What is Pearl: An X-traordinary Origin Story about?
Pearl joins movies like Sunset Boulevard, Mulholland Drive, and Babylon in demonstrating how crushing the Hollywood dream can be. Pearl’s relationship with movies is similar to the relationship many have with social media. It’s a means of escapism that becomes an obsession. If you’re unhappy with your life, you’re susceptible to the impossible dream Hollywood and social media present.
Ti West uses The Projectionist character as a voice of reason that reminds us “You can make changes to your life. You don’t have to listen to what others tell you.” As much as this applies to Pearl, it also relates to filmmaking and introduces a talking point about independent cinema as an antidote to the toxicity of Hollywood. A concept West and Goth further explore in X.
Cast
- Pearl – Mia Goth
- Ruth, Pearl’s mother – Tandi Wright
- Pearl’s father – Matthew Sunderland
- The Projectionist – David Corenswet
- Mitsy Pratt – Emma Jenkins-Purro
- Howard – Alistair Sewell
- Written by – Ti West | Mia Goth
- Directed by – Ti West
Pearl and the Hollywood Dream
Movies about the Hollywood Dream abound. Sunset Boulevard was amongst the first and most famous. But they range from heightened reality like La La Land and Babylon to surreal epics like Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. In almost every instance, the story involves the tension between someone’s hope for success versus the reality of how things go.
Pearl is similar but it stands out in how it formally calls back to Hollywood’s early days when Technicolor ruled supreme. That starts with the font and style of the opening credits and follows quickly with the swinging barn doors revealing an idyllic farm at sunrise. And the tension between dream and reality is expressed right away: Pearl visualizes herself dancing but that vision terminates when her mom enters the room and demands Pearl go do barn chores. Even the farm recalls the legendary Old Hollywood classic The Wizard of Oz, perhaps the most influential movie of all-time.
Pearl is, like Dorothy, someone who wants to leave home for a world far more enchanting. Both get a taste of freedom, realize it’s not what they had hoped, then return home. Pearl’s similarity to Dororthy actually accentuates the differences. Where Dorothy is a charming, upbeat character, Pearl is horrifying and murderous. In the former, it’s not the girl who was bad but the external world. However, something is wrong with Pearl. And she uses the Hollywood dream, her belief that “I’m a star”, as a means of escapism rather than confronting the terrible truth about her perception of self.
Pretty much every story about the Hollywood dream condemns Hollywood, even when bittersweet about it like Babylon. Pearl is pretty damning. First, the newsreel that plays before Pearl watches Palace Follies shows explicit violence from World War 1 that includes the burnt-off face of a soldier. That’s immediately contrasted by the wholesomeness of Palace Follies (a fictional movie). Later, when Pearl returns to the theater, what does The Projectionist show her? A Free Ride, a pornographic film (reportedly made by D.W. Griffith). And the theater’s marquee showed Cleopatra was playing. Not the 1963 movie but the 1917 one that was censored all over the country because many cities and states found the film so sexualizing. It was legitimately banned for being “too obscene”.
The sex and violence Pearl sees on screen and the dream she has of being part of that world directly inspire her actions back at home. Like her pleasuring herself via a scarecrow or the urge to kill her parents. Those feelings were already there, but Pearl’s time at the movies fans the flames of her eccentricities and descent into madness.
Pearl accepts reality, sort of.
In Wizard of Oz, Dorothy clicks her heels and wakes up back in Kansas and celebrates. Without a hint of irony, she proclaims, “There’s no place like home.”
Pearl has a similar moment. Having failed to make the church dance troupe, she returns to the farm and admits her mother was right, quoting, “It’s not what I want anymore, Mitsy, it’s about making the best of what I have.” She hopes if she can turn the farm into a home then everything will be okay. She talks herself into a simple life where it’s only her and Howard and that his love, rather than that from the masses, will be enough for her. Just like Dorothy, Pearl comes to terms with and has a newfound appreciation for her domestic reality.
We see Pearl make what is, for her, a valiant effort. She cleans not only the house but also the corpses of her parents before staging them at the dinner table. When Howard returns, everything appears, upon first glance, rather pleasant. Until he notices the rotten skin and mold-covered feast. Then there’s Pearl, done up like a proper housewife, even holding a pitcher of lemonade. It’s superficially idyllic. And we end with her smile. Except the camera lingers on her face, as we watch her attempted joy melt into an expression of pain and fear.
Pearl’s ending gets at so many things. First, we have to note how the farm has transitioned from being a place of harsh reality to a microcosm of Pearl’s delusion. And given how much the film tethers Pearl to movies and the dream of the movies, it feels like a very acute statement on the way cinema can shape the perception people have of the world and how they live their lives, to the point of causing dissociating stress.
Pearl is a fascinating take on the Hollywood Dream genre because it positions its main character on both sides of the screen. She’s damned in her pursuit and further cursed by the consumption. Ti West told Filmmaker Magazine, quote: To Me, Pearl is just a sort of someone who is isolated and has a lack of connection and a lack of intimacy. She certainly wants a different life and imagines a different life, a more exciting life, a sexier life, that will in many ways solve all her problems. I think that’s universally relatable to everybody: “Well, these are the things that I want that I don’t have, and if I get them, it’ll be great.” Whether it relates to her sexual drive, or her loneliness, I think she’s just someone who imagines her life to be rather different than how it actually is.
If you try to turn your life into a movie, you’re going to have a bad time. Because the world of cinema doesn’t translate to reality. So at first, Pearl wishes to escape into cinema. Then, when that doesn’t work, she attempts to recreate it. You can compare it to the notion of “Instagram versus reality” and the insidious influence social media has had on the way people believe they need to live.
Think about the above quote from Ti West as you read the following from Dr. Ali Jazayeri about the impact of social media on psychology. The world that we see on Facebook and other social media sites is not a true and real world. It’s a creation of people…. People, when they are happy, post a lot of happy things. But when I’m not happy I will consciously, or unconsciously, compare myself to others. As a result, I create a world that is not a true world because I imagine that everybody is happy in that world, except me…. Instead of me trying to deal with things I don’t like about myself, I will go online and present myself in a way I’d like to be seen, without any changes to me. It’s dangerous and very deceptive…. If we perceive that everyone else is perfect, then we push ourselves to become someone that we are not, and then we get frustrated, and then we get depressed.
This is why the film ends with Pearl’s big speech about her life. It’s something she knew the entire time but had been so desperate to deny. Saying it out loud legitimizes it. But that’s also the tragedy of the film. Because she always had options.
Do movies corrupt?
Ultimately, Pearl is a worst-case scenario. She is what happens when someone lacks the balance of a fulfilling life and looks to replace it with entertainment. Movies will always mix positivity and negativity, hope and violence, love and sex, comedy and tragedy. Cinema, in and of itself, isn’t the problem. The problem is people, and an industry that’s incredibly limited and harsh, plus life, in general, being unfair.
Pearl makes a pointed contrast between Pearl’s family and Howard’s, especially in how the movie positions Pearl versus her sister-in-law Mitsy. Mitsy has wealth. Pearl doesn’t. Mitsy is blonde and pretty. Pearl (in her own words) isn’t. God favors one and doesn’t answer the prayers of the other. Mitsy’s mom allows her to try-out, while Pearl had to murder hers to do the same.
This unfairness extends beyond the two women to the world as a whole. The Spanish flu pandemic rages through the country and afflicts indiscriminately. World War I claims 20 million lives, changes the trajectory of billions. Other girls run out of the try-out, crying. Pearl is one of many life has no pity for. As much as movies exacerbate Pearl’s madness, really, her issues stem from far larger societal influences that made her continually feel diminished and hidden away from the positive experiences that were so abundant for Mitsy.
Which gets back to The Projectionist. He voices taking fate into your own hands. Instead of being the consequence of the world around you, create the world you want. He has his own microcosm within the cinema itself. And he seems, from everything we witness, relatively normal and decent. His self-proclaimed bohemian status positions him as someone with an independent, nonconformist worldview. Which translates to why he shows Pearl the stag film.
Content of the stag film aside, it’s an independent movie. One free from the same soul-crushing Hollywood system that so many chastise. That’s meaningful in a story like this. What does The Projectionist tell Pearl? “Pictures like this are going to revolutionize the industry…. ” and “The arts are so much more alive in Europe. You can be whoever you want to be there. You can even be in pictures like this. I know I’d watch you.”
Yes, there’s a creep-factor to him recommending Pearl do porn. But. Remember that in this film that represents independent cinema. Ownership rather than censorship. Which is why West included that visual reference to the 1917 Cleopatra film. What the censors did to that film is similar to how Pearl’s mom limits her. Together, the two represent the oversight and demands made on the individual and art by authority figures. What The Projectionist is really saying is that Pearl can make art and live life on her own terms, rather than needing to conform to a system that marks where you stand with an X on the floor and judges your worth based on an arbitrarily defined x-factor.
So as much as Pearl is a denouncement of Hollywood and looks at the pernicious impact movies can have on someone, it actually lionizes independent cinema as a means of empowerment, because it contains a realness, a truth that isn’t necessarily present in what Hollywood turns out. The unreal optimism of Oz versus Pearl wrestling with the complicated emotions of wanting to be more than who you are. Which movie is, at the end of the day, more honest?
I’d argue Pearl is more helpful because through such dramatic exaggeration it captures and reflects a feeling that many people struggle to define: the slow-growing realization you aren’t the main character, that there is no main character, and that life may never be anything more than what you already have. It’s similar to I Saw the TV Glow in that it gives us a repressed protagonist who serves as a negative example. Someone who makes all the wrong choices and is who we fear to be. That is, bizarrely, quite inspirational. Whereas one could argue that for all of Oz’s enchanting abracadabra that it’s actually the more psychologically detrimental story. It presents acceptance of what makes you unhappy as a virtue.
(I do want to note, real fast, before moving on, that the woman who starred in Cleopatra and caused such a scandal was Theda Bara. She’s popularly known as Hollywood’s first sex symbol. Theda is also what Pearl named the alligator. You can read deeper into that if you want, presenting the gator as this embodiment of the connection between sex and violence, but I don’t think that majorly impacts the overall reading of the film. If anything, it would only support what’s already there.)
How does Pearl tie-in to X?
Most of the themes we talked about here are important parts of X. It replaces the woe of the Hollywood dream with the pernicious effects of television and religion. Independent filmmaking is still heralded as a means of liberation and progressiveness. In Pearl, the spirit was underground, something bubbling up. By the time we get to X, it’s a movement. Maxine and her group are part of this revolution that’s challenging the traditional zeitgeist espoused by the preacher, Maxine’s dad.
You can view the conflict on the farm between the filmmakers and Pearl/Howard as a microcosm of the nation’s own struggle between societal propriety and individual passion. We saw in her origin story how Pearl had tempered her hopes and dreams and accepted a normal, banal life. But then Maxine and crew remind her of the passion she once had.
It’s the same tension as in Pearl. You have Pearl’s mother on one side, Pearl’s Hollywood Dream on the other side, then the ideals of The Projectionist as the middle ground. In X, that becomes The Preacher on one side, Pearl on the other side, and Maxine in the middle. Maxine is who Pearl wished she could have been. Which is why Mia Goth plays both characters. In running away from her father, Maxine rejects being shaped by her parents and environment, in a way Pearl never could. And in defeating Pearl, Maxine rejects, essentially, the worst version of herself. That paves the way for Maxine to move forward on her own terms. Which is why the third film, MaXXXine, positions the character in Los Angeles.
So Pearl shows someone losing to local pressure. X shows someone else overcoming similar hurdles. And it seems MaXXXine brings the character into the belly of the beast—Hollywood itself. It’s the ultimate confrontation for a character who embodies the hope of independent cinema.
It’s cool, too, that Pearl styled itself after The Wizard of Oz, while X hearkens to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Which furthers the larger stylistic statement West makes about cinema’s evolution from the Technicolor days of the studio era to the rise of independent filmmaking that really came to fruition in the 1970s and served as a counterculture movement. Click here for a good article about it.
Why did Howard stay with Pearl?
Howard’s character isn’t all that well-defined. Pearl does mention how Howard liked farm work so much that after their wedding it was his call that they stay there rather than go live somewhere else. So he was already partial to it. We see in X that he’s not the best person. Maybe that’s Pearl’s influence after 50 years of marriage? But you could make the case that World War I desensitized him to such violence. Who is he to judge Pearl for what she did when he was probably doing the same. It might be a case of believing her freak matched his own.
Does Texas have alligators?
East Texas, yeah, especially along the coast from Corpus Christi up near Houston, then along the border with Louisiana, north to Nacogdoches. There’s a map below. So while it’s rare to see an alligator around cities, it’s possible Pearl would have one in the pond on her farm.
The rotting pig
The roasted pig serves as a nice visual motif. When it’s brought by Mitsy and her mother, the pig looks like something you’d see in a movie. Perfectly cooked and panned in a way that’s very all-American. But being left on the farm, it spoils. It reinforces that the farm is this place where dreams turn sour.
Pearl’s mom is German
There’s an interesting element with Pearl’s mom being German. She has this grounded, pragmatic attitude about life. While Pearl has this quintessentially American notion of dreaming big. The two are in direct conflict. You can tie that back to the First World War and that Americans were fighting the Germans. And it also adds a degree of irony to The Projectionist saying people in Europe are so much more open-minded about art. The one European person in the film is not an example of that perspective. You could argue that makes The Projectionist seem a bit more foolish. But I think it’s more of an irony than an undercutting of what his character means.
