i think long and i think hard and i think OFTEN about how pearl and every iteration of her is always portrayed as a storyteller in some way or form, something to entertain the other three presences that seem to follow her throughout every stage of the song cycle, even at her own expense as she is so often victimized by them. i think about the way that she is almost always portrayed as being in tune with her other selves and just generally kind of being "above it all" in a sense
the camera shop owner telling the photographer the story of her great grandmother, of those two sisters, and all of rose red's sins across every version of herself.
pearl white's starwatching with the astronomer, presumably feeding him stories and observations about the sky just as rose red had.
the soldier telling rose about her service and everything she has lost and so bluntly laying out her wishes after rose tries to weave this poetic net to trap her in.
lady usher and the bedtime stories she reads for roxie out of arabian nights, and the way that the tables turn after the loss of her daughter in usher iii and she can only be soothed by having those same stories read back to her by edgar.
scheherazade and her nightly tales for the shah and for her sister, her thousand and one stories, her knowledge of things that are both real to them and not, of things that have not yet happened. her knowledge of rose and pearl, of the usher family, of the death in the subway, of countless others. the fact that she KNOWS that they are all interwoven, and knows that she too is part of that web.
the tango dancer, the ancient, run dry of all her tales. she is still aware of it all, but she has nothing left to give. no stories. no stardust. not a single piece to spare for rose, not a single piece for the bastard child she takes for her own. just a haunting recounting of things before.
and then in the subway, as the victim— FINALLY, she's given one last story to tell. not an honest story, really, but a narration of her final moments. not to rose. not to the photographer, the starchild bent to do her bidding— but to the audience. rose doesn't need it anymore. she would have no use for it, so the victim shares it instead with someone who will. us.
she is such an interesting piece of the story to pick apart for me. and at the end of it all, when rose can't even get what she had wanted, when she gives up and just drowns pearl with her own hands, she's made into a fiddle.
a tool of entertainment, yet again.
