Pearl and Dorothy: We Really Aren’t in Kansas Anymore
To quote Will Ferrell in his inimitable role as Mugatu from Zoolander, “I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.” Why? Because I watched Ti West’s Pearl, read the whole thing as a satiric and politically supercharged homage to The Wizard of Oz, and then loped around on the internet searching for what—to me—was the most obvious and available reading of the film.
Instead? Apart from a brief acknowledgement of the presence of Oz in the Austin Chronicle?[1] Crickets.
So let’s hit it.
For those of you horroristi who haven’t yet seen the film, here’s a quick plot synopsis. Pearl, the murderess from West’s previous film X, which I wrote about last week, is a teenager, living on a farm in rural Texas. The year is 1918, and so the historical backdrop of the film is the waning days of the First World War, overlaid with the immanent threat of the Spanish Flu epidemic. Pearl is young, beautiful, and floridly insane; she’s married to a soldier who’s overseas for the war, and is living at her parents’ farmhouse, where her mother is extremely emotionally abusive, and her father is wheelchair bound, paralyzed, and unable to speak. It’s pretty bleak.
But not in Pearl’s imagination. She sees herself as a destined star, aiming to be a dancing showgirl on the silver screen. She dances and sings for the livestock on her farm, seeming like a young child, rather than the perhaps 20-year-old married woman that she is. Seeming like a young child, that is, right up until she uses a pitchfork to impale a goose that had the audacity to honk during her performance. This goose-slaying is the first of many, many acts of outlandish and frankly campy violence that take place in the film. Pearl is a total, raging psychopath, murderess, sexual deviant (for reals: she fucks a scarecrow), who appears—even with all that—to have approximately as much executive functioning as a five-year old child.
Scary premise.
But what makes this a good film, and an interesting manifestation of the rise of High Art Horror in 21st century American film history, isn’t the premise. It’s everything that frames and supports that premise. The film is extraordinarily lush in its color palette; even compared with X, the prior film in West’s trilogy, one watches this one and thinks, “Wow, it’s in technicolor!!” On top of that, the score is opulent, thick, and roiling—again, very much unlike the sound design of the prior film. If X was meant to convey the feeling of the home-made porn, this film is meant to convey the feeling of major, big bucks, Hollywood production in the Golden Age of film.
And rightly so: it’s dark and gnarly remake of The Wizard of Oz. If Ti West doesn’t see this about his own film, he needs therapy. And the fact that we have a hard time seeing it too—just looking at the four or five film reviews I read that didn’t contend with this at all, even when they do contend with the film’s over-the-top visual and sonic lushness[2]—means, I think, that we as a culture are in dire need of some therapy. I’ll say more about why in a sec.
Mia Goth, first of all, looks like Dorothy: ribbons in her hair, which is rust colored. Apple-y cheeks, pink lips, big brown eyes, impossibly button-like nose, a soft, rounded jawline. I just don’t see this as coincidental casting.
Plus, the fact that Pearl aspires to be a singing, dancing actress of the silver screen? Yeah, sounds a little Dorothy-esque just for that reason, no? I mean, who are we looking at in this still: Mia Goth, or Judy Garland?
Come on: you had to zoom in to be sure, didn’t you?
Or how about here. If you look fast, it’s Judy G, no?
But the aesthetic parasitism of this film on the unimpeachable Hollywood classic is surely most obvious in its overall aesthetic: lush, opulent, rich color, a super dense sound design, many inset sequences of dancing and singing.
Plus, of course, the fact that we first start really to connect with Pearl’s insanity while she finds herself temporarily lost in a frigging corn field, and then emerges from that cornfield in order to dance with and then fuck an actual scarecrow. It’s tempting to revise the lyrics to “If I only had a heart” as “If I only had a cock.” But Pearl doesn’t need the scarecrow to have her phallus: she’s able to get off entirely on the strength of her own fantasy of being a Dorothy-esque film heroine.
Eventually, after her creepy-ass tryst with the scarecrow and subsequent clashes with her mean-ass German mother, Pearl goes to see the projectionist at the local movie theater who shows her a porno after hours. She’s pretty into it, as we might expect. “Pictures like this are going to revolutionize the industry,” says the projectionist, sounding much like Wayne and RJ from X, “And I for one plan on capitalizing early. It’s reality. There’s no denying we all share a fascination in seeing people as they truly are.” So, Ti West goes metacritical again. But this time, that meta-ness goes somewhere new. Pearl responds to him, simply, “I don’t like reality.”
Which, of course, is the central idea of The Wizard of Oz. Reality is a terribly grey, disappointing place where mean old ladies steal dogs and tornadoes rip through the sky out of nowhere. So Dorothy makes her way, in her own mind, to Oz, the land of glorious glow-ups, talking animals, companionable scarecrows, and magical beings. Released in late August of 1939, The Wizard of Oz catered to an audience that was still exhausted from the collective traumas of the first World War, the Spanish Flu, and, more recently, the Great Depression; plus it was a world poised on the brink of the Second World War: Kristallnacht had happened less than a year prior, and the Nazis would invade Poland on September first of 1939, less than a week after Oz hit theaters. The Wizard of Oz is an amazing, beautiful, powerful film on its own merits, but it’s hard not to admit that part of its ongoing allure and cultural heft has to do with how its total commitment to escaping from reality interfaced with the horrors of Real Life in 1939.
Back in 1939, everyone just wanted to go to a simpler time, and a simpler place. A place of moral absolutes (Glenda is good; the Witch of the West is bad) and fairy tales. A place where money was no object (the Great Depression was still simmering throughout America, and was particularly keenly felt in the bread basket), because candy literally grew on the goddamn ground and the streets were paved with gold. Of course, when Dorothy wakes up in the end, she’s right back in the grey-washed abjection of Kansan farmlife. But I think I can safely say that, when people think about that film, they’re rarely thinking about the return to reality at the end, and are mostly thinking about things like munchkins, Glenda’s crown, Dorothy’s dope shoes, and the fact that—there—wicked people can be melted to actual nothingness by water. Sigh.
But what Pearl gives to this subtext in American cultural and cinematic history is a swift pitchfork to the face:
You may want to escape from a reality that you don’t like, just as Pearl does. But trying to do so is both risky and, ultimately, impossible. Indeed, in the final scene of the film, as Pearl’s husband finally returns from the war, he finds Pearl in her parents’ house, with both of them dead and half-mummified at the dinner table, before a dinner of rotting pig flesh, crawling with maggots.
The desire to escape from reality is, at its core, dangerous. It’s what makes Pearl kill geese, projectionists, her parents, and her sister-in-law. She can’t abide the reality she lives in; it doesn’t comport with her sense of how things should be, nor with her sense of what her role should be in the world. She wants to be a star, but she’s shoveling shit in a barn, helping her incapacitated father toilet, and attempting to placate her rage-steeped Teutonic mother. Not a pretty picture. So she leans into this fantasy life that she has created for herself.
Just as, in 1939, people leaned into Oz.
And just as we, in 2022, with COVID still churning along, seek to escape our own various disappointing realities through film, through streaming services, and through the internet more broadly. And through social media. Ti West makes his critique of that impulse most palpable when the projectionist says to Pearl that it’s hard to tell who people are through the masks everyone is wearing. Diegetically, of course, he’s talking about masking during Spanish Flu—and there are plenty of such masks in the film, including on Pearl’s own face. But audiences in 2022 were all too familiar with masks as an uncomfortable and pervasive social filter. By making this link with transhistorical masking culture in the face of pandemic, Ti West reminds us that, in watching Pearl’s desperate and dangerous desire to escape from reality, we are simply watching a mise-en-abyme of our own desperate wish to escape reality.
And the fact that Pearl renders that mise-en-abyme via The Wizard of Oz strikes me as crucial. For film afficionados, The Wizard of Oz is perhaps the most visually iconic film of American history. The color! The sound! The dancing! The mirth! The killing of the Witch! In being that most iconic of films, The Wizard of Oz also perfectly encapsulates a very specific kind of escapism. Nostalgia.
When I was in college, my favorite professor said, kind of off-hand and casually, in the middle of a lecture about Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, “Nostalgia is politically dangerous.” I remember thinking, “You’re an asshole. I like my nostalgia, and you can’t take it from me.” Well, his comment stuck with me, through the years, and I have to say: he called it. Nostalgia is politically dangerous. Wanting to go back to some glorious time of technicolor fairy godmothers, water-soluble bad guys, and candy-toting munchkins is a way of saying, “Eh, maybe I don’t need to deal with the atrocities that are going on around me right now, because maybe I can get back to a time before they existed.” Trouble is: they always existed.
Etymologically, nostalgia is Greek for “an aching for home.” When we feel nostalgia, it’s because we want to go “home,” to a remembered place of safety, shelter, and refuge. A place where things were simpler, a time where things were simpler. But that aching for home is dangerous, because, of course, you cannot really go home, because things change, people change, time passes, and we get rolled up in the ever-advancing charge of history toward the present. Wanting to live in Oz-time is film-fan nostalgia, and, by the bright, shining lights of this brilliant and metacritical film, that nostalgia is not just politically dangerous, but actively lethal. The desire to get back to Oz is, in this film, what leaves us sitting at a table with rotting corpses. The past is dead, so don’t try to get back to it. Let it stay there. Better to face the future, however unknown and unsoothing it may be. We aren’t in Kansas anymore, says Ti West. And maybe we never were.
Pearl is totally what the critics say: a gnarly, but high production value romp through a variation on a theme of the final girl. But it’s not just that. It’s also a swinging-from-the-rafters meditation on and critique of the impulse to escape reality through cinema. Something we maybe should all take a cue from.
But what I am curious to see is what Ti West is going to do with the future of his own film trilogy, in his third installment of the X-Pearl-Maxxxine trilogy. Stay tuned in a couple weeks for that! For next week, I first gotta say some things about women, literacy, and history.
[1] https://www.austinchronicle.com/events/film/2022-09-16/pearl/
[2]As examples: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/mar/18/pearl-ti-west-mia-goth-demented-technicolor-homage-to-old-hollywood
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/pearl-movie-review-2022
https://variety.com/2022/film/reviews/pearl-review-mia-goth-ti-west-1235351591/