I think we and X got off on the wrong foot.
Granted, a lot of that is by design. Going into this, nobody had any idea that a prequel had already been shot. Hell, we didn’t even know until a couple of months ago that we’d be getting two of these movies in the same year!
Yes, Pearl is ostensibly a movie about the younger and more beautiful days of our namesake antagonist, back when she was a dancer and aspiring movie star. We know a lot of these details from what Pearl herself told us in X. Even so, there’s a marked difference between backstory that only exists in the filmmakers’ heads and backstory that we actually get to see in its own movie. It doesn’t even matter if the prequel isn’t out yet or if the audience hasn’t seen it — simply knowing that the film exists and this is what it’s about recenters the conversation significantly. And that context is something we didn’t have back when X first came out.
What’s more, the film was explicitly made and marketed as a ’70s slasher horror throwback with a pornographic hook, and that is indeed what the filmmakers delivered. But I don’t know if anyone was ready for the more intelligent and surprisingly poignant themes that the filmmakers threw at us. Sure, the critics and savvier audience members immediately picked up on a lot of the underlying themes, but trying to look for it past the initial shock factor is still an unexpected challenge. And of course, watching the film with closed captioning helps a great deal.
With all of this in mind, I wanted to give the film another look before Pearl came out this weekend. And I did indeed have to write a whole ‘nother blog entry to reassess the picture.
To be clear, I stand by a lot of the grievances I listed in my previous blog entry. It still annoys me that the characters are all too stupid to live. There are still a lot of editing choices that attempt to tie everything together in a clever way, but only serve as a distracting eyesore. But there is something that I specifically want to go back and address.
“On one hand, these two [Howard and Pearl] are shut-ins with nothing better to do than listen to televangelists scream all day about how the world is going to hell because of perverts, drug dealers, and so on. But at the same time, Howard and Pearl are madly jealous of the tenants who are still young and attractive. Pearl wants to recapture the beauty and sex appeal she had as a younger woman, Howard wants to bang a woman without the risk of his heart giving out, and the both of them are taking out their sexual frustrations on our victim pool.”
At the time, I speculated that maybe the hypocrisy is the point. Upon a second viewing, I caught the televangelist preaching against “kidnappers, murderers, and sex fiends living in our midst” immediately after Howard and Pearl are confirmed to be all three. So there can be no doubt that the hypocrisy is absolutely the point. But there’s even more to it.
Late in the movie, Maxine cries out her mantra “I will not accept a life I do not deserve.” At the exact same time the televangelist (later revealed to be her father) roars out the exact same thing. Maxine is talking about how she personally deserves wealth and fame and adoration as a worldwide sex symbol. Her father and his followers are talking about how they deserve recognition and authority for being morally and spiritually righteous. In both cases, it’s a delusional self-serving lie predicated on the notion that they deserve more because they’re special in some nebulous undefined way. The “X factor”, if you will.
That moment explicitly cements our amateur pornographers and our elderly slashers as two sides of the same coin. And it’s not the only such moment.
Much as I hate the splitscreen editing during the “Landslide” song break, that scene is an understated cornerstone of the entire film. Just a few moments prior, the younger characters were talking about how they make their money by filming the sexual fantasies of their audience, having sex on camera while they’re still young and beautiful and sexually viable. Compare that to Howard and Pearl, obsessed with their sexual frustrations and angry because they’re no longer beautiful or desirable. And the fulcrum between them is a song about the status quo crumbling and vanishing as children get older.
Hell, I could make the argument that the doomed RJ/Lorraine relationship is a dark reflection of Howard and Pearl in a way. After all, Howard is so upset that he can’t satisfy Pearl’s lust, and he’s so angry with the notion that she’ll try and get her rocks off elsewhere, even a mere shadow of suspicion is enough that Howard shoots Jackson in the chest at point-blank. Compare that to RJ, who’s so immensely jealous of Lorraine having sex with another man on a strictly professional basis that he’s not only willing to break it off with Lorraine, but he tries to take the van and leave everyone else freaking stranded.
Howard claims to hate kidnapping and murder, but he’ll do both for the sake of his own jealousy. Likewise, RJ is only too happy to argue the artistic merits of pornography, right up until his girlfriend wants to take part. Not to say the hypocrisy is equal, but it’s unmistakably there in both cases nonetheless.
The crucial difference is that our victim pool is just a bunch of amateur pornographers while our slashers are serial kidnappers and killers. Any reasonable person would argue that Howard and Pearl deserve serious punishment for their crimes. But do the other characters really deserve comeuppance for their actions? Well, it’s a slasher film — particularly, a slasher film set in 1979 and made in the style of the time — so of course the horny idiots are going to die. But even in 1979, I expect there would be some manner of controversy as to whether anyone deserves serious punishment just for shooting a porno. And only the most fringe of pious lunatics (like Howard and Pearl, for instance) would argue that they deserve to fucking die for it.
But let’s get back to the notion of aging and nostalgia. This is where it makes a huge difference, knowing we’ll actually get to see Pearl in her younger days as an aspiring starlet. Put simply, it clearly and explicitly puts Pearl and Maxine as two sides of the same coin, knowing that Pearl and Maxine were more or less in exactly the same place with exactly the same aspirations and at exactly the same time in their respective lives. (Of course, it certainly helps that they’re both played by the same actor.)
Everyone either dies young or lives long enough to die old, and those are the only two options anyone ever gets. It follows that everything old was once new. If all of that wasn’t clear enough watching Pearl and Maxine together, try comparing Pearl of X to Pearl of the prequel.
If something (or someone, or whatever) is hot and sexy and attractive right now, give it a few years. Something else will come along while the formerly new thing grows old and crusty. Howard and Pearl (most especially Pearl) resents the fact that she had to grow old and ugly and unable to dance or make love like she used to. And while Howard refuses to see anything other than the heartstopping beauty that Pearl used to be, younger generations can only see the senile old hag that Pearl currently is. (Sorry if that sounds harsh, but I’ll remind you she’s a serial killer.)
But the problem isn’t that Pearl got older. Indeed, Pearl and Howard might’ve easily enjoyed their golden years if they could simply make peace with their own encroaching years and found more constructive ways to love each other. Hell, they could’ve settled for some means of physical intimacy that didn’t involve actual sex. But no, they just had to latch onto their obsession with superficial beauty, taking out their sexual frustrations and senescent anxieties on a younger generation that no longer sees them as attractive.
And judging from news that a third movie is beginning production, it looks like Maxine is well on her way toward the same.
From the look of things, Ti West and his team are putting together a cinematic statement about the cyclical nature of time, the like of which could only be done across multiple films. With Pearl and X, we get to see how everything new eventually becomes old. The characters themselves — most especially those played by Mia Goth — demonstrate the dangers of refusing to let go of the starry-eyed past, such that those obsessions threaten the present and even the future. Yet the films themselves demonstrate that the past can still have value, imitating and interpreting the aesthetics and values of old to create something new.
Of course, I could be wrong about all of that. These filmmakers have definitely subverted expectations before…