“Please, I'm a staaarrrrr!”
Since A24's official TikTok channel first posted the clip in early October 2022, it's been hard to go online and not hear Mia Goth's desperate cries overlayed onto videos of Gen Z mimicking her distress with captions like ‘when he sees me without makeup on'. As is true with many viral moments, the successful memeification of this scene from Pearl speaks to both its capacity for camp amusement and the more sobering feelings of recognition it evokes – in this case, the emotional devastation of a failed opportunity.
The film is set in 1918, during the last days of World War 1 and in the heat of the Spanish Flu pandemic. Perhaps it is not surprising then that Pearl has already achieved her cult status of slasher queen and TikTok sensation with today's audiences, who are still reeling from our own covid-fuelled period of fear and isolation. But if we are to view Pearl as a character of our times, it would be remiss not to note an entirely different – and yet eerily similar – female icon who also came to dominate a time of residual trauma and unrest.
When talking about Pearl's striking stylistic evocation of Hollywood's Golden Age of technicolour films, director Ti West has cited The Wizard of Oz as a strong visual reference, and even had Goth watch the film as a palette cleanser to the 70s aesthetic of X before shooting Pearl. Initially released in 1938, The Wizard of Oz also enjoyed a successful re-release in 1949 when its popularity was fully realised. Showing to audiences who were still grappling with the after-effects of WW2, the film became an escape for many who found comfort in its themes of good overcoming evil and the importance of home. As its charmingly innocent protagonist, Dorothy became a symbol of hope in equal measure, as well as a picture perfect example of American family values.
In addition to the distinct aesthetic similarity, The Wizard of Oz also lends several thematic correlations to Pearl – including the basic narrative both films follow of a young girl living on a Texas farmstead who dreams of a more vibrant, exciting life – until finally accepting that ‘there's no place like home'. Whilst Dorothy eventually embraces this home truth with a click of the heels and a sigh of relief however, Pearl's resignation to make ‘the best of what I have' is decided upon with a clawing desperation and a wringing of blood-stained hands.
The aforementioned conclusion of each film, similar in narrative form and yet wholly different upon approach, encapsulates the way that Pearl in its entirety both imitates and rejects The Wizard of Oz as a filmic blueprint. We first see this in Pearl herself, who is established as a Dorothy figure not just via her role as the film's plucky protagonist but also through her wardrobe. Beginning the film in a blue blouse and overalls and rag ribbons in her hair, her look is reminiscent of Dorothy's iconic costume. Later, in her growing resolve to achieve her dream of becoming a dancer, Pearl adopts a blood red gown that similarly references Dorothy's infamous ruby-red slippers.Setting a precedent for their differing characteristics, where Dorothy sports only a flash of incendiary red, Pearl douses herself in it.
Perhaps the next most obvious parallel between the two films is Pearl's dalliance with a scarecrow. With her husband away at war, it's clear that Pearl's isolated life on the farm is doing nothing to satiate her sexual appetite. Still reeling from the charms of the projectionist she has just met in town, when Pearl finds herself alone in a cornfield with the company of only a scarecrow she does what any lonely young starlet would do; she asks him to dance. Unlike Dorothy's loveable and, crucially, sentient straw-filled man in The Wizard of Oz, this scarecrow has been crafted with an unnerving dead-eyed grimace, and is decidedly inanimate. After waltzing both herself and the viewer into a romantically energised trance, Pearl seals the deal with a kiss straight to the scarecrow's frozen mouth. Despite a flash of guilt, expressed in a startling yell of “I'M MARRIED!”, Pearl gives in to temptation – gyrating on the lifeless body of the scarecrow until it's her own cries of satisfaction that scare the crows away.
With its direct acknowledgement of female sexual desire and the idea that, just like men, lonely women get horny too, Pearl achieves a level of relatability (especially with the memory of enforced isolation fresh in its audience's mind) that The Wizard of Oz could never dream of, and that mainstream cinema is only recently beginning to understand. And yet, Pearl's unsettling ability to embrace the grotesque in pursuit of her own pleasure is a disturbing foreshadowing of what is to come.
As well as the scarecrow, this power also proves true of her flirtation with the projectionist, who much like the great and powerful Oz lives in an emerald green room and devotes himself to the art of illusion – both in his film exhibition and his promises to whisk Pearl away to Europe ‘where the arts are so much more alive'. By the end of the film, these words will hold a prophetic irony over the projectionist's fate. Just as the wizard ends up flying away from his promise to take Dorothy home in his hot air balloon, being suitably creeped out by Pearl's erratic behaviour (and having already slept with her anyway) the projectionist attempts a similar escape. In an abrupt departure from the precedent set by Dorothy within this dynamic, Pearl does not weep or cry for help, but instead stabs her man behind the curtain through the chest with a pitchfork.
The final and perhaps most complex of the comparisons between Pearl and The Wizard of Oz comes with Ruth, Pearl's mother, and the parallels between her and both Dorothy's Aunty Em and the Wicked Witch of the West. With her constant nagging at Pearl to help out around the farm and their obvious maternal relationship, Ruth undoubtedly acts as a double for Aunty Em. Indeed, once Pearl has had her own ‘there's no place like home' realisation, it is her mother's arms she longs to return to. Unfortunately, and in a markedly morbid difference to Dorothy's equivalent reunion, the arms Pearl finds herself in are unmistakably limp, and she must once again rely on the power of her delusions to spur a lifeless body into showing her affection.
This brutal scene of imagined motherly love presents itself because, despite her similarities to Aunty Em, as Pearl's main antagonist Ruth also comes to resemble Dorothy's Wicked Witch of the West. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy accidentally melts the Wicked Witch by splashing her with water meant to put out the fire that has erupted on the scarecrow. In a distorted mirroring of this scene, Ruth's dress catches the fireplace whilst fighting with Pearl and she is engulfed in flames, leading Pearl to throw a huge pan of boiling water over her body. Covered in significant burns, Ruth later dies in the basement that Pearl, unable to fully face up to what she has done, hauls her into.
As with Pearl's interaction with the scarecrow, it is in moments like this where Pearl's simultaneous imitation and rejection of The Wizard of Oz elevates the film to one that speaks a more complicated truth to its contemporary audience. With Ruth embodying an intricate duality of both maternal comfort and an increasingly threatening hostility, Pearl adds an important layer of realism to its portrayal of a mother-daughter relationship, and that of the female experience in general.
Perhaps the main difference between Pearl and Dorothy as characters is hinted at from the very beginning. Where Dorothy's technicolour dream begins after she suffers a head trauma in a hurricane, Pearl is already living in a colour saturated fantasy, suggesting that her experience of the world is more a product of ingrained delusion. Dorothy is naïve and sweet, and brought comfort to a nation that desperately needed it, but there comes a point when this two-dimensional image is no longer enough. Behind the scenes, it has been widely reported that Judy Garland was both bullied and sexually harassed on set – allegations that cast a damning shadow on a film that conversely holds its female protagonist in such high regard. Pearl is naïve and self-absorbed, and at her worst is a psychotic killer – by no means a role model – but she does at least provide an outlet of expression for the darkest depths of female rage and desire that have otherwise been left to fester unchecked.
In addition to her online presence as a disembodied voice on TikTok, yelling into the void for the attention deserving of a star, Pearl has also made her appearances in the recent ‘girlfailure' meme. Writing for i-D, Roisin Lanigan describes the girlfailure as the opposite of the girlboss; the product of a collective fatigue among women who are simply tired of striving for wins when the world continually sets them up for losses. The emergence of this meme, undoubtedly also linked to a world still recovering from mass isolation and trauma, speaks to a very specific mode of representation that Pearl has managed to accurately capture. She may be very, very flawed, but in a weird way her deranged extremes of girlfailure behaviour provides a comfort that is both reminiscent and unparalleled to stars that have gone before her.
