“It’s about making the best of what I have”: Womanhood and Aging in Ti West’s x and pearl

This is a slightly edited version of a paper presented at the 2023 Popular Culture Association conference in San Antonio, TX.

Of the several themes that run throughout Ti West’s body of horror films, one concern that he returns to time and time again is that of aging—particularly when women do it. We see this nascent fascination at work in both 2009’s House of the Devil and 2011’s The Innkeepers, but it becomes one of the central themes on which X and Pearl—both released in 2022—hinge. Amidst knifings, pitchfork stabbings, gunshots, axe murders, and death by gator, the real horror in X and Pearl is the horror of old age, the decay of the body, and the fear of squandered youth, especially for the women at the center of the narratives. In these films, West explores how youth and beauty—and the attendant desirability resulting from them—contrasts with the placid yet intractable march of time.

At the outset, I think it’s crucial to note how the passage of time is in important aesthetic marker in the Ti West oeuvre. He is a director who eschews the intensified continuity of most contemporary editing styles. In an essay in Screen, Glyn Davis employs the term “slow horror” to describe West’s work, noting how West resists the frenetic chronotropes that often mark horror—while X includes some jump scares, they are fewer and further between than the genre is usually marked by, and Pearl largely resists them altogether except as outbursts of violence from the main character. Davis argues that through his willingness to let scenes unfold in real time, “West identifies his desire to insert content and sequences – digressions, lingering shots, halts and delays, fragments of the everyday – that are normally absent in genre cinema.” The film is also what Davis calls “retrosploitation,” a stylistic subgenre of contemporary films that employ nostalgic encounters with classic exploitation films of bygone eras. In one sense this dislocates these films from our time period, but it simultaneously invokes our awareness that time—always inescapable—has indeed passed, which underscores the protagonists’ concerns about the loss of youth and the advance of aging. As a stylistic choice, this slow unfolding of narrative coupled with its dislocation from our contemporary temporal perspective makes viewers acutely aware of the passage of time in West’s films, and it gives the audience space to experience the world of the film alongside the actors in it—while simultaneously foregrounding how time inexorably moves ever forward. This plays out slightly differently in the two films, but it’s the common source of anxiety in each.

After first setting up the flash-forward style aftermath of the bloody events at the farm, X dives back in time to open on Maxine (Mia Goth) staring into a mirror, reciting an affirmation: “I will not accept a life I do not deserve.” It’s a refrain heard in different contexts throughout the film, but one which gives us an immediate glimpse into the ambition and hunger that Maxine has for success. The film follows the exploits of a group of people brought together to shoot a low-budget adult film, produced by Maxine’s new paramour Wayne (Martin Henderson). Alongside performers Bobby-Lynn (Brittany Snow) and Jackson (Kid Cudi), cameraman RJ (Owen Campbell), and his naive boom mic-operating girlfriend Lorraine (Jenna Ortega), the group heads to a remote farm in rural Texas where Wayne has arranged to rent a cabin from elderly couple Howard (Stephen Ure) and Pearl (Mia Goth). Wayne hasn’t exactly been forthcoming about what they are up to, so the group films their feature, The Farmer’s Daughters, in quasi-secret around the property. Nonetheless, Pearl shuffles around quietly, observing from afar (and sometimes with a startling closeness) as they film sex scenes in the barn and as Maxine skinny dips in the pond. Rather than offending the elderly Pearl, this display of youth and sexual vitality ignites her own desires while also stoking her seething dissatisfaction with both her aged body and the way her life has turned out. As evening falls and the visitors retire to their cabin to drink and pass the time with some music, Jackson and Bobby-Lynn offer a bittersweet rendition of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” while in slow, unhurried split-screen, Pearl contemplates the loss of her beauty and youth.

It is such a beautiful and sorrowful scene, and importantly, it makes you forget for a moment that you are actually watching a horror film. The song choice has inextricable resonances, too—“Can I sail through the changin' ocean tides? Can I handle the seasons of my life?” Bobby-Lynn sings sweetly, the melancholy of the lyrical content and its resonances driven home more deeply because of the contrast. “Time makes you bolder, even children get older, I’m getting older too,” the chorus repeats, which so beautifully underscores not only Pearl’s meditative sorrow but also Maxine’s hunger for success. It is specifically Maxine that trigger’s Pearl’s sorrow, desire, and rage—as stated multiple times throughout the film, Maxine has that “It” Factor, one that Pearl says she had when she was young as well. This duality is intensified by the fact that both Maxine and Pearl are played by actress Mia Goth—that Pearl’s bitter jealousy and desire are triggered by Maxine suggests an intense maiden / crone dichotomy that sheds light on the intense transformations that come with aging, especially as a woman. While young women are fetishized, sexualized, and celebrated as objects of desire, Pearl’s sorrow—and her anger—speak to the ways our social constructs render older women so often either invisible or repugnant. 

Pearl seeks reassurance from her husband, Howard, who, to her great frustration, abstains from sex with her due to a weak heart, and an intimate scene between them—after jointly slaughtering most of the group, and while Maxine hides under the bed—shows how Pearl is genuinely struggling with the loss of her youth. This scene really drives home the fact that as much as X is a horror movie, it is also a love story—albeit a fucked up, bloody love story. Howard is deeply invested in Pearl’s happiness, and his enduring love for her—despite their age—is palpable. Notably, X doesn’t gratuitously feature Pearl’s geriatric body for shock value the way aging female bodies often are in horror—the camera’s slow, unflinching depiction of her as she slowly undresses and climbs into bed alongside the sleeping Maxine shows her body in frank and nonjudgemental manner that does not cut away. The horror of the scene, and of Pearl’s aged body, is that which we bring with us as viewers.

In Pearl, Mia Goth once again portrays the now titlular character—but in her youth, in 1918, during a pandemic and a World War. Pearl is a kind of prequel to X, giving us the origin story of the character, and helping contextualize her bitterness about her lost youth in X. It takes place on the same farm that we recognize from X, although in shinier fashion, and we learn that it’s Pearl’s parents’ property. She lives with them to help take care of the farm and her vegetative father while Howard is away fighting in World War I—and, I might add, it’s not a situation she enjoys. She escapes to town to the movies whenever she can, and she has what one might call a “rich inner life”—she dreams of being on stage, and she puts on one-woman shows for the animals in the barn. But she finds farm life stifling and lonely—and deeply repressive. Living with her severe, icy mother and her paralyzed and nonverbal father, she has no outlet for the exuberance she feels, especially in a sexual sense. She retreats into fantasy whenever possible, rereading Howard’s love letters and sharing a simultaneously romantic and uncomfortable interlude with a scarecrow, before she finally takes up with the projectionist at the local cinema—who, when he fails to give her the intensity of attention she needs, she kills with a pitchfork and feeds to her gator. 

Pearl (the film) gives us context for the desperate envy and bitterness we see in X—we see the joyless and constricting home in which Pearl is forced to live, and we see how desperately she wants to escape that life. A locally-held audition gives her the opportunity she dreams of, but her mother forbids her to go. “How is it you find our life so beneath you?” her mother chastises, berating Pearl for the dreams she has. In her youth, Pearl is desperately aware of time passing—time filled only with what she sees as the repetitive, empty, Sisyphean domestic tasks of rural life—and she fears wasting her youth. As opposed to the “I will not accept a life I do not deserve” mantra of X, in Pearl, she remarks in the powerful final monologue, “It’s about making the best of what I have”—a much more fatalistic—and perhaps honest—view. Before his untimely demise, the projectionist tells Pearl, “You’re only young once.” This phrase resonates deeply with young Pearl, with intense consequences—which then helps to contextualize the events of her old age in X, casting her in no less villainous but still a more complex light.

Together, X and Pearl are a fascinating duology—and soon to be part of a trilogy alongside MaXXXine, which has just begun filming—that explores the complex vastness of female appetites—for sex, for youth, and perhaps most of all, for being an object of desire—the one constant value society tells us that we as women have. This is also why the film Pearl revises our understanding of the character within the context of X—because we know those fears were very much founded. It doesn’t excuse all the slaughter—what Pearl herself calls the “rottenness” within her—but it does offer us a glimpse into the why of it all—that fundamental and crippling fear of time, of being passed by in one’s youth, and of leading a life of domestic desperation. For Pearl, at least murder helps pass the time.