X (2022) x Pearl (2022)—or, The Virtue and Vice of Cleverness

Even background extras are good-looking, or at least inoffensively bland. No one is ugly. No one is really fat. Everyone is beautiful.

And yet. . . . [n]o one is attracted to anyone else. No one is hungry for anyone else.

R.S. Benedict, “Everyone Is Beautiful And No One Is Horny” (14 Feb. 2021)

 

One of the things that I hold myself to, as a principle, is that you’ve got to make an effort to create a vocal silhouette, as well as the physical silhouette. . . . Accent work is not about phonetics or being accurate, to me. It’s about conjuring an atmosphere from a place which is authentic.

Tom Hardy, quoted by Katcy Stephan, “Tom Hardy on His Wild ‘Bikeriders’ Accent and Knowing ‘Furiosa’ Is ‘Special’ (Without Even Seeing It Yet)” (17 Jun. 2024)

 

I think something for any media, for me to . . . really enjoy it, is that it has to be earnest in some way. Like, I hate media that is like, ‘This genre is bullshit! I’m gonna reinvent it and do it better!’ And . . . no you’re not. Like, the reason that genre fiction works and the best examples of any genre fiction are the people who . . . truly, truly love the tropes and are trying to do the best job that they . . . can.

Noah Gervais, “10th(ish) Anniversary Patron Q&A” (30 Jun. 2024)

 

 

Note that this essay contains full spoilers for the films in the title and, because of the content of those movies, will feature some level of NSFW discussion more or less throughout and will also periodically include discussions of grotesque imagery or graphic violence. I have used vague descriptions and euphemisms as much as possible with the former category of material to avoid explicit content.

 

There are a couple of quotes that come to mind when I think about the first two films in Ti West’s (incomplete, as of this writing) X trilogy. The first is from episode 19 of season 15 of The Simpsons—“Simple Simpson.” As part of the inciting incident for Homer’s vigilante pie-throwing story, Lisa, the precocious liberal Simpson daughter, is taking part in a place setting competition at the fair. The series’ “Rich Texan” character is the judge for the competition, and when he gets to Lisa’s clever entry, he explains his strong negative reaction by saying the following: “Your place sittin’ thinks it’s better than it is. Like a yard dog that sneaks into the house.” That expression about an overly presumptuous “yard dog” has stuck with me over the years, and I sometimes think of it when I’m evaluating my feelings about some piece of media. It’s a delightfully folksy, in-character for the Rich Texan, way of expressing how… precious Lisa’s work is. She’s an over-achieving nuisance—I can say it since I was one too!—and this is an example of a time where she’s called out for it… But I digress.

The second quote I’ve been thinking of is a similarly catchy, derogatory but incisive statement, which is “wot if ya mum ran on batteries.” Know Your Meme traces the provenance of the quote to a 2017 Tweet by @nicemuscles which, in full, reads as follows: “black mirror is written by one stoned british dude who just mutters shit like wot if ya mum ran on batteries.” Black Mirror, of course, is an anthology series focused on dystopian sci-fi concepts. I haven’t seen enough of it to say exactly how much I agree with the above criticism, but it can be read as much the same critique as the one levelled at Lisa’s place setting: The supposedly high-concept series is dressed up better than it actually is, and it’s not actually good so much as it is some kind of pretentious. Maybe you can guess from this pattern why I’m thinking of these quotes with regard to X and Pearl. Both films have solid, quite high critic and audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes, but I’ve seen some much less charitable takes on my Twitter timeline in the past.

I did enjoy both movies after finally watching them this summer. While quite bloody, X and Pearl are not reliant on jump scares, and I really appreciated West’s commitment to finding upsetting or unsettling imagery to create horror rather than just going for cheap jolts—which have their place in the genre but which I just personally don’t like. Both movies also feature a certain amount of lewdness as well, though X has a lot more bare skin in it than Pearl. Given how little ambient horniness there is in our wider culture these days and how sterile movies specifically have been for a while, X and Pearl being quite Physical is a nice treat. I also like how X gives you a pretty clear content warning relatively early on, with the scene where the characters drive their van past (and also over, through) the aftermath of a wreck on the way to their filming location. A truck has hit a cow, and we see the corpse and the gore in very clear detail. This time it’s an animal, but it tells you pretty effectively what you’re likely to see if you keep watching. Ironically, the, for my money, grossest act of violence, where the murdering old woman Pearl stabs the group’s young director (RJ) repeatedly in the throat after he refuses her advances, ends up having what amounts to a red light filter that obscures the most literally gory details after a point. Similarly, Pearl shows you a pitchforked goose before any human beings start dying. There’s no visual filter at any point this time, but the humorous tone (more on that below, eventually) does take the sting out of the violence. Both of these movies are quite playful in ways both similar and different, and I could see them playing well enough to a general audience. People, very generally speaking, like nudity and violence and humor, and X and Pearl do have those things!

Still, I can appreciate why these movies might annoy some people as well, particularly those capable of/interested in getting past any surface-level titillation to critically consider matters of theme and style. Both a high praise and incredibly harsh criticism that I can offer of X especially is that it reminds me of something I might have written in college, when I was deeply immersed in my Clever Period. A lot of what I wrote, or attempted to write, at the time was meant to have some amount of violence or off-putting content to it while also being some level of self-aware. You can deflect criticism preemptively by being self-deprecating within the text itself, although you want to do so in a way that gives you some plausible deniability so that you don’t come off as too pathetic. This lets you do what you want and also avoid culpability if other people find what you want to be silly or inept because “Aha—The work is metafictional!” (or something like that). Maybe it’s overly presumptuous of me to compare my work to West’s, but I see a creative kinship here that both endears X to me further but that also makes me even more aware of the ways in which it can be annoying. In brief, X is a real “have your cake and eat it too” sort of movie, and this is most apparent in two-ish important areas: first, in terms of its self-awareness of itself as a movie and what it has to say about filmmaking, especially where more prurient fare like horror and “blue” movies are concerned; and, second, in its handling of its major themes of aging and intimacy. I’ll talk about each of these problem aspects in turn below.

The opening shot of X probably qualifies as a subtle bit of foreshadowing re. the filmmaking focus, but it could still strike an observant audience member as unnecessarily clever. What we are shown initially is a view of the main house where Pearl and her husband, Howard, live, post-carnage and as the sheriff is arriving on the scene, viewed from just within the open doors of the barn. This perspective creates the illusion of a, to my untrained eye, 4:3 aspect ratio thanks to the vertical margins of black to either side of the open doors, and as we move forward through those doors, the screen space slowly “expands.” There’s straightforward use of a more cramped aspect ratio at points when we’re shown the footage of the in-movie movie that’s being shot, but for now it’s just a “fun” visual trick. I guess one critique of this usage, though, would be something like, Shouldn’t it be in reverse? The point is that we’re going back in time with this movie—in terms of setting and, nominally, in terms of style—so wouldn’t it make more sense to pull the same trick with, possibly, the door of the house somehow? So that we go from a wider view to a narrower one? A similar, much more explicit, misfire occurs at the very end of the movie when the police find the filmmakers’ camera and the sheriff offers the (trailer-worthy) line about it containing “one goddamn fucked up horror picture.” This sounds cool, I guess, but it’s inaccurate since none of the grisly stuff was ever recorded—just an unfinished adult film. If the gang had set out to make their movie but had ended up also filming the violence as it happened to them, so that you could splice it all together to make a horror movie, this would work. As it is, the line only makes any sense if you get a bit Fancy and/or weird and conflate the two genres, which X kind of does at points. Both are seamy and less respectable, yes? At any rate, the opening shot could be said to function a lot like the later stuff with the gore surrounding the dead cow, in that it’s as good as a warning: If you won’t enjoy a movie that’s aware of itself as a movie, then this is your chance to stop watching…

In rewatching X and taking notes properly, I’ve found myself struggling with how to make this point in a succinct way that doesn’t require just running through every moment where it incorporates filmmaking into the proceedings. For one thing, that would just be incredibly boring, and, for another, there is a certain benefit of the doubt that I have to give X since you can’t make a movie about making a movie without talking about… making a movie. I could try to argue that it’s all actually self-aware, of course, but that would still be boring and time-consuming if done at length, and I also like to shy away from such absolute statements. I’m going to start with what I think is the strongest representative example of what people (reasonably!) could not like about X and its awareness of itself as a movie and then go from there, as this is the peak (the zenith, the apotheosis) of it all.

After the group finishes shooting for the day, they have dinner and talk. RJ’s girlfriend, Lorraine, asks the obvious question about seeing your loved one With someone else, and Wayne, who’s older and essentially in charge, says that “It’s just business. As long as the camera is runnin’.” “So,” replies Lorraine, “the camera changes things?” This conversation goes on for a bit and includes one of the two actresses, Bobby-Lynne, describing them and their work as “like a foxy car wreck,” as well as Wayne commenting on “this new home video market.” I don’t mean this as an insult directed at the intelligence of real-life sex workers, but that this group in X has such well-articulated thoughts on these subjects adds to the sense of unreality or pretension in the film. Again, it reminds me of something I would have written in my days of being too “clever,” by playing up the contrast between the accents, the profession, and the thoughts expressed. It’s just my feeling that most people—normal people, regardless of their profession but who are at least not writers and artists—do not spend a lot of time reflecting on their work this way. And even if I’m wrong, and most people do do this, I still think the presentation and/or framing here, with Lorraine’s questions drawing out these responses, feels too clearly like it has something to say on the matter, and the ostensible dialogue that’s happening reads as an excuse to say it. What this conversation is building toward, plot-wise, is that Lorraine wants to be in the movie, which kicks off an argument with RJ. I’m not going to quote the whole conversation, but I am going to include a nice chunk of it because I think it further supports this point I’m making about X’s self-awareness and how annoying that could be:

RJ: “I mean, it wouldn’t make any sense. We’ve already shot half of it. The story can’t just suddenly change midway through.”

LORRAINE: “Why?”

RJ: “Because it just isn’t done.”

LORRAINE: “What about in Psycho? You love that movie.”

RJ: “Well, Psycho is a horror film. And that plot was a MacGuffin to build suspense. And I’m not makin’ that kind of movie.”

LORRAINE: “Oh, come on, RJ. Nobody’s comin’ to see this film for the plot. They’re comin’ to see tits and ass. . . . Why not just give the people what they’re payin’ for?”

RJ: “Because I’m making something better than that.”

This right here is IT! Note that this conversation is happening about halfway through the movie, so the initial quote from RJ above feels like an acknowledgement or fourth-wall-break, despite X itself not really pivoting so dramatically and instead playing out more or less exactly like you’d expect from here (another sort-of misfire of a stylistic flourish, perhaps). This is also a conversation very explicitly about filmmaking and film that goes on for a bit. It’s not a quick aside or passing reference; it is the focus of the argument, arguably the centerpiece of the entire scene. The specific mention and criticism of classic thriller Psycho, the use of the term “MacGuffin,” and the way that Lorraine’s words could just as easily apply to X itself all feels so obviously, insufferably self-aware.

Even if there are other moments featuring film or filmmaking that could be taken straight, as just part of a reasonable plot about making a movie, this scene would still be enough to push X into yard-dog-in-house territory. There are gestures toward this being the movie Lorraine describes (sleazy and straightforwardly gratifying, generally speaking), but it has all these Thoughts as well, often buried in little quips or fleeting lines that I could interrogate but am going to just briefly exemplify before moving on. Upon seeing the farm for the first time from the van, RJ exclaims, “It’s perfect. It’s really gonna add a lot of production value.” “It’s called actin’,” says Bobby-Lynne after shooting a nude, rude scene with the in-movie movie’s singular male (and Black) actor, Jackson. Outside the guest house after Lorraine’s big announcement, Wayne says to RJ, “Hey, what is it they say? ‘Life imitates art?’” “It’s the other way around!” replies RJ, which is a sentiment just thrown away and interrogated no further. It’s obviously not all so loaded and may just qualify as shoptalk/as necessary for a film about moviemaking, but the self-aware or pretentious or overly precious or cute stuff colors the rest, making it all read that way. Any other bits of cleverness that might be simply groan-worthy (or actually just clever) in another film, like some incredibly on-the-nose needle drops, also get… enhanced by the general atmosphere of smirky, winky pretension and so make the movie feel that much more insufferable. I feel that this is ultimately quite different from something like Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon (2016), which is about modeling rather than filmmaking. In my essay about that movie, I started with the words “There’s media we interpret, and then there’s media that asks us to interpret it.” I said that film was part of the latter group; however, I don’t recall feeling quite so beaten over the head with theming when I watched it, though I did say “[i]t all but beats the audience over the head with its symbolism” at the time... There are plenty of obviously loaded images or bits of dialogue, but you still have to read between the lines or think a little bit (is my memory). Meanwhile, X just has these conversations openly, in one sense or another, and stops just short at times of having West himself address the audience and lay out his thesis. It’s not exactly fourth-wall-breaking outright since there are logical, internal reasons why the characters are having the conversations themselves, but there are “cracks.” If I was to riff on my own phrasing in an overly cute, more or less inaccurate sort of way, I could say “X doesn’t so much ask us to interpret it as it does tell us to our faces what it means.” Or, yet another way—While X might gesture toward sleazy violence while ultimately thinking of itself as too good to be in the yard, The Neon Demon’s intentions are clearer at first blush. That is an Artsy movie that also has some sleazy content, but the priority order is more acceptable, maybe, because it lacks the specific pretension of being something it isn’t.

As I mentioned before, there is a possible critique of X’s “highbrow” aspirations built into it as well. I would say the most potentially compelling manifestation of that criticism emerges from how RJ’s attitude toward the film he’s making changes once Lorraine decides she wants to… Participate. Early on, she expresses discomfort about this project they’re involved in, and RJ tells her off for being “a prude” and insists that “[I]t is possible to make a good dirty movie!” He’s all enthusiasm, with plans to elevate the subject matter through the artistry of his filming and editing. When Lorraine later decides to “act” in the picture herself, she throws his own words back at him as part of her defense: “When did you become such a prude?” While the hypocrisy here is technically just about RJ’s ready dismissal of the movie’s “smutty” nature and his sense of it as art disappearing immediately when his girlfriend wants to be involved, and so could be read as just criticism of him alone, he’s so closely associated with the topic of filmmaking within X that it’s easy to also read as a critique of both the in-film film and the film that we’re watching—a condemnation of treating something prurient as better than it is, or at least of trying to “elevate” material that either can’t be treated as art or even shouldn’t be.

After the traumatic experience of filming his girlfriend getting down to Pound Town, RJ has a weepy, pitiful shower in the dark and then tries to take the van and leave, which results in him getting killed by Pearl. As he’s starting the vehicle, he grouses aloud, “Let’s see how far they get without me.” There’s a bit of fun-annoying foreshadowing or dramatic irony in there since he’s referencing his own impending death as he also suggests that the rest of the gang couldn’t possibly film such a movie without his genius. This is just obviously untrue in a very general sense (because this isn’t something complex that they’re making!), but we’ve also seen concrete evidence of how RJ gives himself too much credit before—for instance, back at the gas station when they’re filming a quick scene of Jackson filling up the van: RJ is shooting the action in a more conventional, non-lewd way, but then Bobby-Lynne suggests that if he changes the angle slightly it will look like Jackson is using his dangus to gas up the vehicle. That is obviously the better way to shoot the scene for this type of movie that RJ is supposed to be making, but he doesn’t really know the genre (it seems) and also has too many aspirations—if not delusions—of grandeur and Artistry. The stuff with Lorraine just serves to tear it all down in a very human way. For the record, I doubt that most people would actually do better than RJ in this situation, regardless of how progressive they might otherwise be, and that they are lucky to not be in a position where they have to put the proverbial money where their mouth is. Although, with the ascendancy of sites like OnlyFans as major players in our ongoing gig economy dystopia nightmare this might not be as much of a fantastical scenario after all.

The salient, relevant, question is, Is RJ meant to be a stand-in for West here? I had the thought that there might be a physical resemblance if I squinted hard, but I’m not convinced after doing it. (Maybe if West’s hair gets long enough…) That hardly matters, however, given that they’re both filmmakers and both trying to make elevated entries in seamy genres. So there’s a link. Of course, RJ could be seen not as West himself, in West himself’s own estimation, but as a less successful or unideal or failed version of someone like him, or maybe just a director in general, taking the wrong approach with a similar project. In his capacity as director, RJ is very much the yard dog, but he has delusions of being in the house. He says to Wayne at one point, most excitedly, “I’m not treatin’ it like pornography, but as cinema. That’s what these other adult films are lackin’.” Except… The footage we see of this movie is just so unremarkable. Maybe I don’t have the firsthand experience or historical perspective, but this “story,” such as it is, and the way that it’s being told don’t seem at all special. And maybe that’s the point too—RJ is full of himself, and also kind of a dork. After the first day of shooting, the gang has their aforementioned long talk about love and their work which builds to a toast: Bobby-Lynne proposes a salute to “the perverts” (seconded by Wayne) for long supporting them financially, while Jackson throws in “being young and having fun till the day we die,” and then RJ submits “To the power of independent cinema,” of all things. This is clearly a punchline, making this guy and his lofty conception of what they’re doing the butt of the joke, and yet it's still hard to parse exactly where the line between any self-critique and the film’s genuine interests truly lies, I think purposefully so. Any sort of parody or satire runs into the problem of ambiguity regarding its goals since the format necessitates also reproducing the thing(s) being critiqued, which can make criticism look like endorsement. In X’s case, I feel like that ambiguity is being wielded intentionally. Perhaps the critique of RJ is genuine, though I still feel most drawn to the “have your cake and eat it too” angle—that any possible internal critique is meant to be ambiguous and that engagement with the potential flaws of X itself via RJ is primed to serve as a baked in defense like I described before. It’s both self-aware/deprecating and self-defensive.

And I both like and resent it. I love art about making art—from the homemade superhero comics copied surreptitiously at school in Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants series of children’s books, to the episode of season four of South Park where the kids are trying to put on a musical adaptation of The Miracle Worker, to how in X itself the gang pours a carton of milk into a bucket in the barn so that they can fake milking a cow for their movie. I adore this “DIY” vibe, and I also like when characters improbably have deep thoughts about things they might not realistically be so (self-)aware of. X’s pretentious side appeals to me, even when it’s being unsubtle or annoying about it. There’s this one bit, for example, when Pearl and Maxine, the second actress from the group, are having lemonade in the “real” world that sometimes cuts to the film footage of Jackson and Bobby-Lynne’s characters with lemonade as well. There’s this clear parallel being drawn between the two scenes despite them, on their face, having wildly different tones and intentions—One is “meant” to be titillating and flirtatious, while the other is “supposed” to be uncomfortable and intense. Of course, the intermixing of those tones is itself intentional and produces an obvious effect where bits and pieces of feeling get swapped around. The soundtrack we hear over the film footage is appropriate for the Pearl x Maxine scene but inappropriate for the stuff with Bobby-Lynne and Jackson and so makes the flirtation ominous while suggesting that the ominous stuff is also flirtation, which is very important to the movie’s plot and themes given that there is an ambiguous obsession with Maxine on Pearl’s part. Is this lust for the lost youth or just lust? Maxine is confused by Pearl claiming this meeting will be a “secret” between them, but that’s because she didn’t experience it the way that we did. We’ve seen the juxtaposition happening, and we get the implications of quasi-infidelity on Pearl’s part. The two different encounters stitched together imperfectly form a single, sensical scene as well. Pearl and Maxine aren’t saying or doing the same things as Bobby-Lynne and Jackson, but there’s a kind of rough continuity, still, that’s more fun for how it doesn’t quite, truly fit. What I’m saying by way of all this is that A) I think X is impeccably constructed to be what it is even if that happens to be obnoxious, and B) I’m probably the target audience for this thing. I’m the annoying person that the critique-but-not-actually and sleaze-but-not-really (I’m-too-smart-for-that) stuff is meant to please. I am the yard dog that also wants to be in the house—or, perhaps it’s the other way around: I’m one of those house dogs that likes to imagine itself rolling around in the mud, but I’m really just all well-groomed and perfumed and soft and fluffy, and if I encountered an actual muddy dog, I’d recoil in horror…

Man, I have so many notes for this essay I couldn’t work in, for reasons of flow or brevity. The gang’s van having the words “plowing service” written on it is an obvious, Family Guy-tier joke but still works for me, for example.

Further, I could have done a whole big paragraph on just the synergy between the music and on-screen action and how that further contributes to the sense of self-awareness/smugness, like, to work in another quick-ish example, the use of the Loretta Lynn version of “Act Naturally”: where we hear the words “They’re gonna put me in the movies” over a shot of Maxine, the aspiring actress. Or, one more, “I Shoulda Stayed Home” by Jerry Reed on the radio in the van as they’re driving to the farm.

I didn’t mention the recurring bits with the televangelist at all in the rest of the essay, but that’s yet another element of excessive cleverness that pops up at the beginning and toward the end of X. As the van is driving away from the gas station, for example, the preacher says, “That’s right. The deviants are already amongst us. . . .” Its stylistic usage becomes maximum maximalistic, however, during the final confrontation between Pearl and Maxine. Seemingly commenting directly on the situation, the televangelist proclaims, “Well, now here we all are together. We have reached a crossroads, with salvation or damnation?” Maxine uses some of this man’s language from earlier in the movie—calling Pearl “a kidnappin’, murderin’ sex fiend”—and then more or less speaks in unison with him to insist “I will not accept a life I do not deserve.” We learn in the near future that Maxine is actually this televangelist’s wayward daughter, but that doesn’t ultimately change just how self-consciously artistic- and artificial- (ARTificial) feeling for it this all is. “Now, that’s what I call divine intervention!” announces the preacher after Pearl misses Maxine with the shotgun and instead blows herself out the door, breaking her hip just like Howard (duplicitously?) worried she would earlier in the film.

Just one more: Wayne tells RJ that “People’s eyes are gonna pop out of their damn skulls when they see this [movie].” And then he ends up dying from Pearl pitchforking him in the eyes… which are then pulled from his skull when she removes the farming implement. This is what I mean when I say X is “impeccably constructed.” It has so many set-ups and pay-offs.

Last bit: Wayne describes RJ to Maxine as “this kid I picked up from the university,” which is another perfect example of internal criticism of him/filmmaking. He’s a “kid,” and also not even named. Just one among many, presumably. Wayne “picked [him] up” like he was a gallon of milk or some inanimate tool. I love how the shower RJ takes further plays up his own intensity of feeling about Lorraine catching the F Train on camera while also acting as a critique by virtue of that intensity and the connotation. This shower visual is something I associate with female trauma (specifically assault), but it’s used here with this male character after just filming a (consensual) scene between his girlfriend and another man. Like I said above, I don’t think most people would take that well, but this is yet another stylistic way in which RJ and the themes or ideas associated with him are belittled by the film, even as it also arguably embraces them by being made the way that it is in the first place.

The “have but also eat” mentality seems evident as well in the movie’s handling of the topics of physical intimacy and aging. This time, the frustrating tension lies in the contrast between the moments of empathy for the elderly and how aging bodies are deployed as part of the horror. On the one hand, expecting anything other than disgust from a movie like this—a horror film in general but also one specifically meant to be a certain kind of sleazy and gross—is probably unreasonable. You could see it as the demands of the genre, but, on rewatch, specifically at the moment where Pearl kills Bobby-Lynne and it’s clear how resentful or jealous Pearl is of the younger woman, I did have a vision of a more interesting but still gross film where a beleaguered elderly couple kills a bunch of uppity, spoiled, libidinous youngsters. Sort of like this one, but where the framing is such that our audience perspective is meant to be aligned with that of the killers. There are further hints of what such a film might look like with how Howard deploys the young folks’ assumptions about Pearl and himself to gull them, playing up a fear of Pearl breaking her hip when he speaks to Lorraine and of supposed confusion after dark to Jackson. Maybe that other movie already exists, but, even if it does, the point still stands that X doesn’t exactly break new ground here with its disgusting and murderous elderly, for all its “intelligence” (if self-awareness equals smarts). It is still disappointing to see a nominally smart film “fail” this way, however.

Aging is depicted here in very typically unflattering ways. Jackson remarks on Howard’s ugliness the first time he sees him from the van: The old man has a thick jaw and brow that give him this aggressively ignorant, blunted, Neanderthal-like appearance. The top of his head is bare, but he has a fringe of hair on the sides and in the back that is what might be called indecently long for a man of his age/baldness. He’s missing teeth in a grotesque configuration as well. Moreover, Howard’s impotence (due to a heart condition) is a major part of the plot and is another way that he’s insulted by the protagonists. “Been a while since you seen anythin’ that nice?” says Wayne at one point when Howard seems to be staring at Maxine in an intense manner. Later, he (Wayne) suggests that Howard probably hasn’t been physically aroused “since before you were born. I’d hate people like us then, too.” He’s referred to as “old-timer” by Wayne when he has some sort of spell or episode on the way to the guest house and as “the old codger” (by Wayne) in private. Jackson continually calls him “pops” to his face. Pearl may receive even worse treatment in the film given that she’s not just old but also a woman, so there’s even more leering, grimacing attention paid to her wrinkled and blemished skin, like, for example, the scene after meeting with Maxine where Pearl gets all dressed up to proposition Howard and we see an extreme close-up of her applying makeup to the pliant flesh of her eyes. Her body is deployed at points to maximize the horror, as is the case with a little jump scare after Maxine catches Pearl in bed (sans clothes) with her. Bobby-Lynne opens her own door just as the still-unclothed Pearl is passing by outside. Granted, some of the stuff with Pearl’s behavior would still read as scary and/or gross even if she wasn’t old, like the aforementioned taking her clothes off and getting into bed with a sleeping Maxine, but there’s no doubt that her physical appearance is meant to “enhance” these moments as well. To reiterate the issue here: The depictions of Pearl and Howard and the ways that they are belittled or framed as disgusting are not surprising or even all that “bad,” if you consider immensely predictable things to be unworthy of serious critical attention. The problem is X’s overall yard dog attitude, where it also makes overtures toward being different, or better, but then wallows somewhere in between either extreme in a frustratingly coy manner.

As with the previous major topic and theme (of filmmaking), there is a fair amount of more minor stuff I could discuss, but there are also a couple of major scenes that obviously dig into the subject and that are the most representative examples. Arguably the most sympathetic, if not exactly empathetic, is the one where Pearl has gotten dressed up for Howard and he rejects her, and then the immediate aftermath. When Pearl comes to Howard, there is still horror in the mix—The way that we see Pearl kind of rubbing/clutching at her lower stomach or groin area while ruffling/lifting her dress is another instance of her physical appearance being leveraged to create disgust, but the music during this encounter is at least momentarily noticeably more wistful and romantic than horrific. The wistfulness gets played up big time when Jackson plays Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” on a guitar for Bobby-Lynne to sing along, after dinner and following the first part of the gang’s conversation (before Lorraine announces her intention to do a scene in the movie). Here we have this beautiful moment of peaceful unity among the filmmakers and also of… reflection for Pearl in front of her mirror as she’s removing her makeup. There are some shots of the dusty beautification items to drive the point home. This is a very on-the-nose song choice, too, that contributes to the sense of X as obnoxiously clever, thematically, with stuff like “I’ve been afraid of changin’” and “gettin’ older,” but it does strike a soft and thoughtful and sympathetic mood. We see a close-up of Pearl’s back flesh, as she has essentially given up and is putting on her thick, sack-like, old lady’s gown, which is grotesque-adjacent, but this tonal framing is much different than other moments where her bare skin is a focal point. It’s meant to be pitying and sad, not stomach-churning.

The other scene worth discussing specifically is when the truth is finally out and Pearl and Howard are openly hunting Maxine, the last member of the crew unaccounted for. She hides under her bed in the guest house, and, upon finding the place seemingly empty, Pearl and Howard let their guard down. Pearl is despondent about not getting what she wants, and Howard laments that he can’t give her what she wants because he’s “tired too.” “I know,” says Pearl. Neither of them sounds particularly villainous here, and while the obvious answer for what Pearl wants is to Get Physical, the phrasing is vague enough that you can read it more generally. Howard can’t turn back time and make her glamorous again or famous either, of course. Pearl says she’s not beautiful anymore, and Howard says “Always.” “Tell me I’m yours,” says Pearl. “That you still want me.” She starts to disrobe… Setting aside the particulars of the dialogue and the horror movie music and atmosphere, the way this scene plays out and is paced, from Pearl sitting on the bed herself to Howard joining her and to the eventual kissing and laying back on the bed, is highly, recognizably romantic. An ultimate moment of understanding and vulnerability, as we’ve seen so many times before with younger couples. Critics of these depictions of physical intimacy in film sometimes argue against their inclusion on the grounds that they add nothing to the plot or that proponents should “Just go watch pr0n!” (or something like that), but the counter-argument is essentially what I just said: That it’s not about the act, entirely; it’s about seeing what two people reveal about themselves, before and during and after. It’s about a circumstance that strips (hardy-har-har) away the artifice that we all cloak ourselves in. A lot of anxiety stems from fear of that state—discourse about men moaning and such. I’m dressing (hee-hee-ho) it up too much, but, Who are you when there’s nowhere to hide? In this specific moment, we see Pearl and Howard as people, nakedly (metaphorically and then literally). They almost feel like the protagonists of their own story here. But it’s all supposed to be gross too. I didn’t watch X with other people, but I wonder what the average audience response to seeing Pearl and Howard kiss so passionately is? Howard’s bare backside is ultimately deployed for shock value, I think, and we can see the look of abject horror on Maxine’s face as the bottom of the bed bounces just above her as she tries to covertly escape the room while we listen to Pearl’s amorous pleading, which is in no way unusual but which is meant, like Howard’s butt, to disgust us because of the age of the people involved.

There’s a relevant Tweet I saw a while back that I can’t find now but that went something like this: “You live your whole life, maybe fight in a war, and then some child calls you ‘Peepaw Geegaw’ once and that’s your name until you die.” When I first read that Tweet, of course I thought about my own grandfather on my mother’s side, whose real name we never used. Watching X, I thought about how he lived well into his 90s and about how he had a “girlfriend” for a number of years very late in life. I’m not going to speculate about their personal business or share any scant details that I do know with the internet, but it is funny (read: dispiriting) how casually we dehumanize the elderly, how readily we ascribe to them wants or needs, or the lack thereof, so different from our own, speaking as something like a young person. It’s the extreme end of assumptions about maturity and aging that also includes the sense that at some point a switch flips and you’re an adult. Likewise, presumably, a different switch flips some years later and suddenly you’re old. Even just in my 30s I have enough personal experience with aging to know that’s simply not true. I do feel different than I did at 15 or 18 or 21 or 23 or 27 (or whenever), but there was never a point where I stopped being myself and became some sort of “adult.” I’m just me, sadly, and even though cognitive decline certainly exists, at this point I’m faced with the prospect that I’ll go on just feeling like myself as my body and mind inevitably rot. I’m not sure that’s better than the alternative, fantastical prospect of one day just being another person or more distinct version of myself. Now an Adult, then Old at some indeterminate point.

What X has to say about aging, if we exclude the perverse and grotesque conceits of the horror plot, is at once trite (“Old people are just like us”) but also unfortunately profound- and novel-feeling (“Old people are just like us”), perhaps as a consequence of the particularly air-brushed and roided-out pop cultural Moment we’re living in. It (“Old people are just like us”) feels ridiculous to even point out, but so much media is targeted at youth, or the suggestion is that youth is the ideal, what we’re all hungry for. Characters are either explicitly young or possibly implicitly young, existing in a weird limbo somewhere between 24 and 30-something, maybe. There’s a subliminal assumption at work that old people are uninteresting or alien, that to be old is to be shelved by default. I feel silly making a big deal out of something that seems so obvious, but it still also feels under-acknowledged. X grapples with the topic pretty directly: There’s the way that Howard and Pearl can’t be intimate anymore because of Howard’s heart and how that lack of physical fulfillment that they both still want has seemingly led to the perversity and grotesqueness so critical to the horror story. There are also smaller moments of meaningful prejudice involving the young protagonists, like I was describing before, like Jackson’s uneasy camaraderie and sense of superiority around Howard, as they both served in the armed forces but Howard is Old (and, I think, white and southern and, so, a potential enemy). One of my favorite scenes is the one where Bobby-Lynne finds the undressed Pearl by the pond late in the film. The Wikipedia description of this interaction (as of this writing) is interesting, as far as my point here is concerned, because it simply says “Bobby-Lynne finds Pearl standing on the lake’s edge and tries to help her. Pearl insults Bobby-Lynne and pushes her into the water where an alligator kills her.” It’s “interesting” in the sense that it omits the bit between sentence one and sentence two, where, critically, Bobby-Lynne is talking down to Pearl and treating her like a demented old lady. She doesn’t mean any harm by it, but even if Pearl was always going to do away with her, it’s this patronizing behavior within the scene that seems to get her killed. It’s a moment perfectly emblematic of the overall conflict with Pearl—Her body has aged, but she hasn’t. Going back to “Landslide” again, one line we hear over imagery of Pearl is “Can the child within my heart rise above?” Like, Can the young person I still am inside win out over old age? The tragic answer being “no,” that this is inevitable and irrevocable. As previously established, that is a moment where the tone feels understanding toward Pearl. The problem ultimately is just that the movie is compelled by the standards of its exploitative, grody genre, if not also a certain lack of imagination, to disregard empathy and the legitimate grievances of Pearl (and Howard) to leer and gawk and degrade instead. It takes a half-step toward understanding them as people and then three generous leaps backward into the muck.

In what could be seen as a misguided attempt at understanding, Pearl (2022) is essentially the Hannibal Rising (2007) of the X-verse(?)—It’s a wholly unnecessary origin story for a villain whose motivations needed no further elaboration and that, in fact, damages the mystique of that character somewhat. In X, for example, the fact that Pearl resembles Maxine physically and was apparently like her in her youth is just a fun bit of background weirdness and/or thematic illustration: Here’s how Maxine could end up if she fails to make it, or something like that, made clear enough at the climax when Pearl tells Maxine “We’re the same” and “You’ll end up just like me.” Then Pearl goes to great effort to make the young murderess’ dreams and personality align even more explicitly with those of her (eventual) counterpart. The echo is still kind of fun, but there’s something to be said about over-explaining a point, and I know a lot about that particular writing sin!

Running an idea into the ground through never-ending iteration and repetition could be said to be a positive (genuinely, or for reasons of camp) of both horror and adult films, however, so perhaps that is the intention. If West wants to truly commit to the bit, then there needs to be at least an “X6” (“X666”? “SiXXX”?) where the spirit of Pearl is possessing and murdering young actors in 2034 New York City. And if I wanted to make the same point about adult films, I’d probably just throw out a title that was crassly straightforward and painfully utilitarian, like, say, “Gape Bonanza,” and then I’d stick a random number on the end (maybe “8”) to complete the joke. The point being that in their seaminess both of these genres are endlessly, starkly capitalistic. If there’s money left on the table, then there’s another one in the chamber. And this may be the most positive way in which to conceive of Pearl’s creation! Filmmaking is a whole Thing in reality, but you can look at this movie—particularly at the way that its conception, production, and release overlap with X so thoroughly—and squint hard and imagine that someone said something along the lines of “Heck! We’ve already built the murder basement, so why not?” and then they grabbed Mia Goth and a few other people and filmed Another One. There’s part of me that wishes this was actually the case with Pearl: That it wasn’t tied up with X’s cleverness and was instead just a genuine slasher origin film, a la some of the later Texas Chainsaw Massacreses. I genuinely think it would have been better that way, in large part, because of how the obvious stylistic intentionality undermines the camp value it otherwise could have had. Purely theoretically, this “should” have been a situation where neither West nor Goth returned and A24 got someone else to write and star in Pearl because they desperately wanted a prequel.

Another charitable and reductive way of looking at the Pearl that we have is to regard it as something like a pet project for Goth, who shares writing credit with West for it. This read is largely vibes based, but these both strike me as films where someone (Goth, in this case) seems to be having a lot of fun. In X, she’s playing two roles, both heroine and villain, and one of them with pretty transformative costuming/makeup. In Pearl, she gets to be all murderess, all messed up from the moment she pitchforks “Mr. Goose” to the point where the credits are rolling over her massive, toothy, increasingly pained and desperate-looking smile as she stares straight down the barrel of the camera. It arguably undermines the potential horror of the film quite a bit to align the audience perspective almost exclusively with that of the killer, but it’s a lot of fun, and very funny at points. Goth’s southern accent, which is different between Maxine and Pearl, is just a lot of fun to listen to. It’s one of those accents that doesn’t necessarily strike me as accurate (more vibes—I’m southern but not that southern) but is probably even more enjoyable for it and might play into the overall trashiness or further contribute to the juxtaposition of tasteless excess and (attempted) thoughtfulness.

“Companion piece” is a phrase I’ve been mentally associating with Pearl. Aside from the very nature of the thing (as a prequel), that might also be a result of how secondary it feels to the (seeming) overall X story given that the upcoming (now released) MaXXXine looks like a direct continuation of the first movie without any obvious Pearl knowledge required. This film kind of works as a standalone narrative too, up until the ending. It is funny how much time West and Goth spend fleshing out the motivations and backstory of a character who didn’t really need the additional detail, but then the exploration as good as stops short when the young Howard finally returns from war to find his wife’s decaying mother and father sitting at the table and her in the kitchen looking proper manic and unsettling. How we got from that baby-faced, guile-less-seeming version of the man to one still deeply in love and cahoots with his wife to the point that he’s assisting her with her assaults and murders is arguably the more interesting, less straightforward question here. Did the war change him? Was he secretly pitchforking geese and humping scarecrows too? Or, what did Pearl say or do to convince him? This may be the biggest gap between Pearl and X, more so than anything related to the title character. (Or maybe it is truly as simple as what Pearl says to Maxine in X, describing her youth and Howard: “There wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do for me back then… That’s the power of beauty.”) An upsetting, quick conclusion isn’t inherently a bad thing, especially in a horror movie, but it does perhaps feel a bit presumptuous re. the audience’s existing knowledge of where the characters go from here. So that sense of a film that depends on its predecessor/sequel to act as the true conclusion to its narrative makes me think of it as less of its own thing. That Pearl is nonessential viewing is also supported by a recent (as of this writing) screening of both it and X where the surprise reveal was that those in attendance would actually be watching MaXXXine instead of Pearl. I’m probably belaboring this point unnecessarily, but I just think Pearl is more interesting as a narrative dead end and as a lark, as an indulgence, suggesting high self-indulgence.

Pearl revisits the major preoccupations of X that I discussed previously—filmmaking and aging—albeit in ways that I think feel somewhat diminished and in keeping with this as nonessential viewing that supplements rather than succeeds its predecessor’s takes. In the case of filmmaking, this is no longer a movie about making a movie, which immediately reduces the presence of that theme substantially. There’s no smart guy nerd character like RJ central to the plot either. His counterpart in Pearl is a nameless projectionist, a strapping and chadly fellow that contrasts with RJ quite starkly. The explicit movie talk isn’t a huge element of this character. He has a couple of cinema-oriented scenes but ultimately is more relevant to the plot as a temptation (and eventual victim) for Pearl. There’s a little filmmaking-adjacent content when he gives Pearl a frame from the movie she just watched and mentions that no one will notice it’s missing when he splices the film back together. This is more like “trivia” than anything that comments on Pearl the movie, of course. Similarly, the information he later shares about the illegality of making “stag films” could be viewed in a similarly casual way, but with his assertion that “Pictures like this are going to revolutionize the industry, and I, for one, plan on capitalizing early” being a bit more prescient or cute like the stuff in X. To me, the moment Pearl comes closest to X in terms of being self-aware and potentially obnoxious about film is at the try-outs for a touring dance group that Pearl is so desperate to attend. I wondered if the “X” mark where Pearl starts her performance was meant to be a clever incorporation of the title (and not just a universal symbol). Post-dance, after Pearl is turned down and refuses to bow out graciously, the director tells her outright that they’re looking for “Someone with X factor”—also, “[m]ore all-American” and “younger and blonde.” At least some of this seems to be outright anachronistic, as the Merriam-Webster dictionary claims the first known use of “X factor” dates to 1930, which would make the inclusion here, in a film set in 1918, inappropriate. Even absent that context, it also just has the feel of a stylistic indulgence, possibly because it’s an obvious intentional echo of X’s language. It still doesn’t push this film into a conversation with its own creation, however, and that is also my feeling about the other references to “the pictures” that come up. It’s more or less sprinkled throughout, so there’s a case that could be made for some level of self-awareness like I described before, on the grounds that this is still a movie that makes you think about movies while watching it and so may break the sense of immersion. If nothing else, I would say it is still, at least, less aggressive and less present than in X.

The focus on aging in Pearl similarly strikes me as “diminished,” or at least not as prominent. This is yet another thing that may be vibes-based, though, as it can still be quite forthright at times. The projectionist instructs Pearl that “[Y]ou only get one take at this life. And if you don’t make the most of it when you’re young, you don’t get a second chance.” Not too long after, Pearl’s mother gives her the old expect-disappointment-and-make-the-most-of-what-you-have talk, an obvious counterpoint to the projectionist’s words, and with both reinforcing the major focus in X on the elderly Pearl being enamored with the young, beautiful, potential-ful Maxine. That meaningful, extensive contrast is part of what makes X’s exploration of this theme feel so much more substantial, I think. The fact that Goth played both roles added further emphasis/seeming significance. Pearl and her mother do bounce off one another in a similar thematic way, but it’s more conventional, or safer. It lacks the weird drama of having the same face on two different characters or the explicit (read: EXPLICIT) heights X climbs to. Put another way, the concept of meeting your wrinkly doppelganger who may or may not be physically attracted to you just feels more novel and intriguing than a pretty straightforward case of the child not being willing to settle down and accept their lot in life like the parent has, mostly. As trite as it might be, “Old people still Get Busy” (“And now here it is on-screen in front of you!”) is more compelling, in part because of the potential novelty. The films are sort of inversely confident or interesting in a way, as while X is much… muskier than Pearl, it feels perhaps too uninspired when the slashing really gets going. Meanwhile, Pearl is significantly more modest, to my disappointment, but engaged me so much more with its violent moments, in part due to how much of the film can be taken as comedy.

For what it’s worth, the heaviest criticism I’ve seen of X and Pearl has come from either critics or cinephiles, or just people who watch a lot of movies and have both an eye and the language for discussing them precisely. I don’t know what the “laity” thinks of them, but it seems like the people most likely to appreciate what West is doing stylistically (maybe even his intended audience) are also the ones most likely to reject it. I count myself as tenuously part of that group, though I have less of the language and sense of cultural history necessary to fully dig into how (allegedly) creatively bankrupt these films might be. At the very least, I know the intentional contrast with the colorful visuals and grim subject matter in Pearl is not new. I’m just a sucker for the mismatch—see also a similar contrast in the opening scene of Michael Dougherty’s Krampus (2015), where the upbeat “It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas” is deployed over imagery of holiday shopping carnage to make a tired point about commercialism while also being funny. I know it’s not really all that clever or original, but it won me over the first time I saw it because the horrible truth is that I never fully stopped being “clever.”

Pearl pays off, or plays off, a few different elements of X, like how we once again start the movie inside the barn, just without the aspect ratio illusion this time (instead the initially closed doors swing open on their own, playing up the feeling of fantasy). A man wearing a sandwich board sign with the phrase “We shall not accept a life we do not deserve” is walking the street on Pearl’s first trip into town in the movie. The phrasing about something being “our secret” that Maxine and the elderly Pearl bounced off one another in X gets traded between Pearl and her sister-in-law here in a similar way—Old Pearl says it to Maxine, who then repeats it when she kills Pearl; young Pearl’s sister-in-law says it first in the prequel, and then Pearl repeats it not too long before killing said sister-in-law. Pearl’s vocal distaste for blondes that she expresses in X is probably meant to stem from what she’s (been) told in Pearl at her dance audition about how they’re looking for a blonde instead. The word “bohemian” gets used in both films: derogatorily by Howard in X to describe the previous guest on the farm, and by the projectionist in Pearl in a self-aggrandizing sort of way. We learn the origin in Pearl of the wheelchair we briefly glimpsed in the basement in X, when Lorraine was locked down there (we can assume it was Pearl’s father’s). These sorts of things are probably just fun Easter eggs or links between the two movies.

Obviously, trying to categorize everything that might qualify as clever about a text as either tasteful and maybe fun versus obnoxious and perhaps too transparently intentional for its own good is just impossible. I have imperfect metrics for this—like how I took about six pages of notes for X but only about two for Pearl (which expanded to around three on rewatch). There were simply more individual lines or conversations or observations in X that I felt deserved some attention or critique. This could be an imperfect sign that Pearl is either less self-aware than X or that it just isn’t as forward about it.

Pearl has this “Technicolor” look to it that creates a sense of unreality or fantasy right from the get-go and then also obviously contrasts with the violence because of how that visual style connotes innocence or nostalgia. Perhaps the very explicit artificiality counts as self-awareness? The audio quality can similarly register as artificial with how characters’ yelling or screaming in particular have this audible distortion/imperfection. Given that the movie is all about Pearl’s perspective, you can, of course, argue that this is how she sees herself, as already a star, already in a movie. When she’s forcibly removed from the dance auditions, she’s yelling “I’m a star!” You could read that as “I have star potential!” or you can see it as evidence of this larger delusion Pearl has about her life. She does say to the barn animals early in the movie that “Y’all see me for who I really am… A star.” The stylistic elements of the overall package of Pearl are primed for interpretation in ways that might be X-like, though there is somewhat more ambiguity without an RJ. You could see it as inauthentically reverent—that West could have just made a horror movie in something like a classic style, as a proper period piece, but then there are elements that feel like they undermine that, like the long, lingering, unadorned monologue by Pearl where she unburdens herself of all her various sins and fears and failings. It doesn’t read as harmonious to me. It’s more X-ish and doesn’t feel… artless enough to match its surroundings.

One surprising element of Pearl that massively distinguishes it from X and defies comparison and that makes it feel less like wholly supplemental material is its commentary on COVID-19, of all things. Set in 1918 during the “Spanish flu” pandemic, there are a number of references to the illness spread throughout the movie. I took notes while watching it and then color-coded those notes based on topic—“filmmaking,” “cleverness,” “aging,” “sex,” “COVID,” and “general enjoyment.” This isn’t exactly science, but the COVID notes are some of the more numerous and consistent. I think this was a “fun” way to make a movie that’s kind of about the modern pandemic without just making a movie about it directly. It’s also nice to have a piece of media like this that preserves the Moment during which it was made. Again, it’s not really, technically about COVID, but the intention feels anything but implicit. Pearl’s projectionist beau uses the word “pandemic” at one point, which is a general term, of course, but which could only be associated with one thing by the audience of a movie releasing in the early 2020s. Similarly, after Pearl’s mother realizes she (Pearl) has been to the movies, she orders her to take her dinner out to the bunkhouse and says, “Isolate yourself until we know you’re not ill. That is what’s right.” The key word here being “isolate,” another very loaded term. The threat of illness is mostly background detail, though the aforementioned demand that Pearl isolate is part of an escalating dinner-time argument that culminates in Pearl’s mother being (accidentally) lit on fire and then (intentionally) pinned up in the basement, so it’s not totally inconsequential. You could also read between the lines a little bit about how the literal illness could exist as some parallel to Pearl’s own “sickness.” When she attempts to unburden herself to her sister-in-law, Mitsy, near the end, Mitsy’s first response to Pearl worrying that there might be something wrong with her is to jump to “the germ.” This is a connection Pearl’s mother makes as well during their fateful dinner confrontation when she describes Pearl as “not well.” Even earlier in the film, Mitsy says, “All this isolation has been enough to make one mad, hasn’t it?” To which Pearl replies, “It really has.” The ambiguity/sense of talking simultaneously about two different things is, of course, intentional.

So, the flu which is being associated with the real-world COVID situation is somewhat entangled within this movie with an unfaithful, unhinged murderer. The associations matter since this is where the film’s messaging on the subject emerges. There’s no explicitly-stated moral of the story for the pandemic, but the way in which caution regarding the flu is deployed here suggests a negative attitude about prevention, although not necessarily outright denialism, unless you lean heavily on the fact that we never do see an actual sick person, which could make the fear seem like nothing more than fruitless paranoia. It feels very Early 2020s in terms of its suggestiveness, hitting on the period of peak uncertainty around COVID, when it was still unclear exactly what precautions/preventative measures were necessary or would even be helpful. For example, Pearl’s mother is concerned about her bringing an old top hat into the house because of germs, and she’s instructed to leave the hat outside and to wash her hair. It reminds me a little of our own household precautions back in those early days, maybe most directly of how I’d shower immediately after work each day. In Pearl, this perhaps outsized reaction to the hat seems designed to be part of the mother’s larger characterization as a classically stodgy, conservative figure (see any number of other stories about precocious children with uncooperative parents!) who is unfairly repressing her daughter’s lust for life/future prospects. When she orders Pearl to the bunkhouse later in the movie, Pearl protests that “it’s freezin’ out there.” Like taking away the girl’s entire supper since she supposedly bought herself some candy in town, this is meant to be yet another instance of extreme, authoritarian behavior. At the one point when Mitsy and her mother stop by, Mitsy tells Pearl “It’s the first time we’ve left home in weeks. Mother is so afraid of gettin’ ill.” Mother is afraid—Mitsy is not (at least not in this moment). Pearl confirms that her own “Mama” is similarly fearful. While Mitsy’s mother is a largely unknown and neutral player in this story, Pearl’s mother is the antagonist, so caution about illness is something like doubly associated with one of the more negative characters. The things she says and does are meant to make the audience dislike or root against her and what she stands for, which includes her fear of illness.

Less clearly coded is how the projectionist once grouses that “It’s hard to know who anyone is nowadays with all these masks people are wearing.” That’s yet another very loaded line for the audience’s benefit/recognition that I could have brought up before, and while the projectionist is not opposing Pearl in her quest, he is still something of a negative figure in the movie. From their first interaction in the alley by the theater, it’s clear that he’s attracted to Pearl (a married woman), and he later shows her a “stag film” without any real warning, which was possibly a ploy to turn her on and would, at the very least, be considered a distasteful thing to do unannounced. Even if you don’t care about the consent angle, it’s still definitely a pretty creepy way to interact with someone. In fact, it may come off as deceptively less foul than it actually is because we, the audience, know that Pearl is a certified freak herself, but it feels so much more disgusting when we consider that from the projectionist’s perspective Pearl is just some normal country girl he’s trying to seduce (and/or maybe impress with his big-city language and flexible morality). That’s my argument, at any rate, and even if there is a bit more ambiguity around the projectionist’s role in the story, which complicates the scant attitudes toward sickness and its prevention associated with him, the preponderance of flu/COVID stuff is still centered on the more clearly unreasonable, bothersome mother(s). “You should’ve thought of that before putting me at risk” certainly feels like the sort of line a COVID minimizer/denialist would get good and incensed about, contributing to the sense of the mother (and by extension people “like” her) as a selfish, dislikable bore. It seems like Pearl takes a pretty unsurprisingly dismissive stance on the pandemic (Which one?) in this way. I say “unsurprising” since dismissal has become a pretty common position even amongst more nominally progressive people, and I don’t think it’s shocking that such an Artistic director-writer and actress creative duo would arrive at this as their implicit thesis. If that’s not the intention—similar to the muddiness surrounding aging in X—then it’s still how it looks, to me. That a movie principally concerned with how an old, freaky murderer first got started getting her freak on has any opinion about COVID was a shock and I think at least complicates, even if you don’t necessarily feel that it elevates, the work.

Despite what failings of execution and/or “problematic” elements I might have noted during or after watching Pearl, I enjoyed it a lot—more than X, in fact. I would like to say that it was a matter of style: That Pearl has less of that smarmy self-awareness that I’ve argued could be so off-putting to potential viewers, but the truth is that I probably just like the fundamental juxtaposition of tones a lot. This is not a new idea at all, but the fantastically colorful visual style that evokes impressions of an idyllic farming paradise contrasts to great effect with the more disturbing or unsettling or gory moments. The freeze frame and giant “Pearl” title written in this sweet, cursive-like font as Pearl is in the process of offering the bloody body of a goose stuck to the end of a pitchfork to an alligator while the music swells in this classically dramatic way just Works for me. It’s obvious; it might be annoying because it’s a played-out concept, but it’s a foundation on which the film’s humor is built, and it might be the humor, which isn’t entirely dependent on the visual style, that truly endeared Pearl to me.

Take this prayer of Pearl’s, for example: “Please, Lord, make me the biggest star the world has ever known so that I may get far, far away from this place.” The joke is a bit more understated than all the contrast with the goose and font and gator and color and relies instead on the phrasing used being just a bit whacky (just a tiny bit syntactically tortured), on the very premise of praying to God to make you famous, and on Goth’s previously-mentioned accent. Or how about her screaming “I’m married!” at the scarecrow she danced with and then tongue-kissed after she has this brief flash of the projectionist’s head on its shoulders? Or the completely eye-rollingly pretentious, wannabe-self-assured way that said projectionist describes himself as “what more civilized people refer to as bohemian” and how Pearl says “I don’t know what that is” with so much sweetness and such an utter lack of suspicion or self-awareness. Or how the dinner fight with the mother leads to her (the mother) revealing that she apparently knows exactly how evil and twisted Pearl is, and also how hard she (mom) lays into her (Pearl) about it. At what length and with such force! She has this downright Loomis-ian sense of Pearl as an evil that must be contained on the farm for the good of other people and gets this great (read: over the top) line where she says, “Malevolence is festering in you, I see it.” And then there’s how when Pearl is dragging her mother’s burnt body down the basement stairs, the head seems to hit every step along the way. There’s so much stuff that either reads as an intentional joke or functions as one despite any other intent. I noticed that the film had been labeled with, among other descriptors, “comedy” on Amazon before I watched it, and while I was initially a bit uncertain about that, I ended up feeling like it was very accurate. Wikipedia describes it as psychological horror instead, but I think the former is much more fitting.

 X certainly has humorous moments, especially if you find the self-awareness funny, but I still think Pearl has more. Pearl’s quite long climactic monologue to Mitsy, where she embraces the conceit of addressing the other woman as her husband to the point of what looks and sounds appropriately like delusion, feels like such an obvious set-up for the punchline of Mitsy’s eventual reaction to it all. The longer it goes on, and the more heinous or intensely personal stuff that Pearl reveals, the more power and anticipation are directed toward whatever response we will eventually get from Emma Jenkins-Purro, and while the eventual pay-off feels perhaps disappointingly understated, it still makes perfect sense as a reaction. What better way to respond to your sister-in-law’s impassioned confession of infidelity and parricide than with an interval of awkward silence capped off with the CLASSIC “Welp! I guess I’d better be heading out now…”? More or less. Mitsy’s exact words—“I should probably get goin’ now”—mirror those of Maxine in a very similar situation with the older Pearl (with the lemonade), when she says “I should probably get back now,” but I think this moment will read to most people as a punchline first and as a reference to X only as a distant second, if they see and hear the resemblance at all.

If it wasn’t for stuff like the quite bloody and frank dismemberment of Mitsy’s body and certain uncomfortable moments where Pearl is letting it all hang out in the bath with her paralyzed father sitting in his wheelchair right beside her, you could almost forget this is supposed to be a horror movie for stretches. Pearl feels much more like an intermittently gory and/or upsetting story in much the same vein plot-wise as, say, Drew Barrymore’s Whip It (2009). The catch is that we know Pearl’s rebellious spirit and determination to do what she wants in the face of her uncooperative parent could at any moment turn either lewd or violent, or both at the same time. It’s honestly a fun sort of purgatorial state to be in for an hour and thirty-ish minutes. I can’t get the way that Pearl/Goth says the words “Mr. Goose” (as if she and this innocent bird have some long-standing beef) out of my head, and the way she stabs the projectionist mid-escape with her pitchfork while screaming and then falls over as he, stricken and bleeding, just casually rolls off down the slope away from the farmhouse in his car is absolutely hilarious. The dogged, square-shouldered resolve with which Pearl pursues Mitsy with an axe for her final kill of the movie? Delightful! While I found the prospect of rewatching X somewhat off-putting because of the nasty tone it cultivates, despite some levity, I thought of revisiting Pearl as much more enticing. Humor aside, Goth’s performance as young Pearl is very solid. She’s incredibly good with and game for the character’s louder, hysterical moments but is also really great at projecting a sense of growing menace during some of the quieter bits before a storm of violence, like with the projectionist in the barn and Mitsy in the kitchen. Despite a lack of personal experience with which to evaluate the verisimilitude of it all, Goth (and her scene partners) really sell(s) a credible sense of being in a room with someone both dangerous and deranged, and of the mounting horror that comes with sensing that person’s regard for you turn questioning and then murderous. It’s possibly more enthralling than “scary,” exactly. Matthew Sunderland is also excellent as Pearl’s father. He does so much with just his face and occasional soft grunts. He’s an unwilling confidant to Pearl thanks to his paralysis, and seeing his reaction to things as the mayhem increases adds to the horror but also heavily contributes to the humor. He’s the ultimate straight man, in a sense—completely unable to do anything but support Pearl’s wilder and more extravagant “performance.”

            X and Pearl both are just movies with aspects that I personally respond to, though I can still acknowledge that those same aspects are things that could be seen as negatives from a different perspective. I’ve always felt that a mixed bag is more compelling than a clear-cut triumph, however; and these movies have “personality” or “attitude,” even if some might consider those things, in terms of their particulars, to be caveats rather than positives. If West’s movies are house dogs trying to get in the yard (or vice versa), then I can still appreciate the audacity of the attempt, even if I remain conflicted about whether it’s laudable or “good.” Would X and Pearl have been better as more genuine, straightforward, earnest movies? They would be simultaneously less pretentious and less interesting to talk about, I think—a case of the ways in which something is bad being kind of fascinating to examine. I can also just appreciate the tug of war between the competing impulses of honest, open (vulnerable) artistic expression and something that operates at a bit more of a remove, cleverer but also transparently protecting itself. Ironically, this draws some people in, but it’s not unreasonable to remain at a distance either when you’re being intentionally pushed away.