Watched in the cinema (77th visit in 2023)

In Ti West's prequel to his porn horror love letter "X" you can see naked skin in only one scene, deliberately framed by the aesthetics of a movie projector: the young, titular farmer's daughter Pearl (Mia Goth) quietly and secretly witnesses one of the first pornographic celluloid flicks in a village movie theater, somewhere in Texas in 1918, her first encounter with unchaste sexuality. Trapped in the role patterns of an indentured housewife, frustrated waiting for her husband who is away as a soldier in World War I, tormented by her strict mother Ruth (Tandi Wright), something awakens in Pearl at the sight of the smut film. With Mia Goth's acting counterpart Maxine from West's "X", in which Pearl 61 years later as an old woman will make murderous hunt for the protagonists, she has in common the big dream of fame and after the unconditional love of others. In the same way she is sure: she is a star, the whole world will know her name.

While Maxine was blessed with self-confident promiscuity in the predecessor, Pearl has a murderous urge when she spears a goose with her pitchfork right at the beginning. In the spirit of Dorothy from "The Wizard of Oz", Pearl dreams of escaping from her parents' farmhouse, with murderous consequences for those who get in her way. Her bloody origin story represents the consistent inversion of "X" on a visual, content and structural level: The flickering film grain of the movie set in 1970 is traded for oversaturated, saturated colors in the world of 1918. Through this gaudy Technicolor style, West cloaks his film in a deceptively fairy-tale garb that depicts Pearl's initially innocent worldview, convinced of the American dream of the promise of wealth and celebrity. In terms of content, "Pearl" sets itself apart from its predecessor in the respect that West, despite its once again referential visuals, refuses any nostalgia here and instead comes up with a contemporary reference: The 1918 of "Pearl" is beset by the Spanish Flu pandemic, people only dare enter strangers' homes wearing masks, and an intangible paranoia reigns everywhere. The story itself could not be more topical in its feminist references around the emancipation of a young woman from social role patterns, as well as the reconquest of her sexuality when Pearl finally dreams of adultery with an attractive film projectionist (David Corenswet), given the increasingly restrictive women's rights within the United States.

Instead of dreaming of the past, Ti West brings the present into his film. This results in a much more ambivalent perspective on a woman who wanted to go out and inspire the world and ultimately only found her outlet for her own frustration in bloodshed, a frustration for ultimately nothing other than her own lack of talent. What distinguishes Maxine from "X" from Pearl, despite the overlap through the portrayal of Mia Goth, who co-wrote the script and allows herself to be subjugated here in every second of the entire film, is that she had just that "X-Factor", which ultimately let her triumph. Pearl, on the other hand, as the film tells us, was nothing special even as a young girl, and West's Origin Story, from this perspective, casts a deeply sad light on the other side of the American dream, on the very people who didn't make it. All of this also shapes the structure and tone of his film, which, instead of exploding furiously, implodes tragically. Consistently rejecting simple answers and familiar genre patterns, West's original story mutates into the image of a failing soul, which appears on Goth's ogling face and finally consumes it into a disturbing grimace in the grandiose end credits.