#tandi wright

“Hello Herman” vibes right out the gate, “you’re a superstar, yes you are, yes you are,” but also killing small animals is surely a sign of what's to come in Pearl’s future, I mean, honey… (At least Maxine was just a coke fiend before she met you.) I like that she feeds Theda the alligator but it debunks my “she's a witch” theory from “X” and also I wish she didn’t feed the gator with a pitch fork, what if she stabbed the poor thing and it couldn’t death roll a certain hot blonde in the future?

Pearl exhibits some strange behavior from the beginning of the film, it’s hard to tell if it’s mental illness, a reaction to the stressors of life, or if she might just be a little evil. She doesn’t have the easiest life with her husband at war, her strict mother, her disabled father, and her dashed dreams of dancing for an audience, but she isn’t entirely without. When the man working at the cinema encourages her to live her youth, you feel that she is entitled to spreading her wings a bit, but then we get a harsh reality check at dinner when Mama informs us how tight money is.

The only thing tighter than the money was how tight the women in that house were wound up because it came to physical blows very quickly. The worst part is they both had reasonable points but things heated up so quickly. Speaking of heating up quickly, Mama. Pearl accidentally (on purpose) pushed Mama into the fire and her dress caught up and burned her badly. Papa watched the whole thing (remember, disabled). Mama was sent to the punishment basement to die while father got his favorite pillow. Pearl goes to the cinema worker to run away but he takes her home first and gets spooked and tries to leave so she freaks out and kills him, classic Pearl! Here we get to see her iconic pitchfork before it was iconic.

When the church dance audition rolls around, Pearl really hams it up… Which the Church folk don’t want, they want someone cute and blonde like Pearl's sis-in-law. Pearl gets all her anger and sadness off her chest to her Sissy-in-law before taking a lot of Sissy’s chest and back and everywhere off with an ax. Finally, her husband returns to the gruesome stage Pearl has set with her parents at the table, complete with a roast pig in the middle, rotten, maggoty, and molding. He is horrified at his wife, his Pearl, and all she can do is smile and cry. The unease you feel as Mia Goth grits her teeth at the camera while tears roll down her cheeks, the tendons in her neck splaying out, as the screen slowly closes around her in a black circle, evokes just the final feeling we needed. I felt such sympathy for both characters in that moment though after I remembered what they both got up to in “X” I felt much less bad for them. This movie posed the idea that misery breeds misery. The old “If I can’t be happy, no one can be.” Which is a sickening mindset to have but could explain a lot about the events in “X.”