She’s A Star
One for the horror scholars: how much do you know about Technicolour? To celebrate the arrival of Ti West’s Pearl – and another vibrant Mia Goth performance – Rory Doherty takes us back through the history of film, exploring the colours that make it.
Three strips of film. Black and white. Loaded into a single camera. The camera starts rolling, light hits the lens – a prism splits the light. Each piece of film records a different spectrum of colour. Red, blue, green. In post-production, the negatives are developed separately in a complex process of mirroring, reflecting, and laminating with complementary dyes. When put together, the colours pop. The contrast is high. The process is arduous and expensive. The results are eye-popping and exquisite. It’s the Golden Age of Hollywood, and they’ve just perfected Technicolor.
The practical demands may have been immense, but nowadays the Technicolor process is remembered less for its technicalities and more for the films that gave the brand its name. The Wizard of Oz, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Meet Me in St Louis – the joy and excitement pulsing through these films can be recalled by painstakingly replicating their tactile visual look. Pearl, Ti West and Mia Goth’s early-Hollywood origin story for the repressed elderly killer of last year’s X, is eager to use Technicolor as shorthand. In Pearl, horror acts as a prism, warping the bright lights of the sweeping tales of aspiration and adventure.
West and longtime cinematography collaborator Eliot Rockett did not shoot Pearl in actual Technicolor, and even with its highly saturated reds and blues, beefed-up sound mix, and deliberate, heavy camera blocking, there’s no doubt Pearl is a modern film. We meet Pearl (Goth), a young, unhappily married farmhand in 1918 rural Texas, skipping around her barn, talking to animals and professing her dreams of celebrity – she’s practically swollen with misguided hope.
Pearl’s wish for stardom isn’t innocent and pure, it eats at her like an aggressive infection. Everything tangible and immediate in her reality comes second to these remote, obscure fixations on transforming her life. Celebrity is inherently a hollow aspiration, its value as a socially desired position one that only a select few get access to. By recounting the fantasy so sincerely, we see all its imperfections – not to mention the inevitable crushing disillusionment. Pearl’s journey will be defined by acts of violence, first committed in small doses against animals and her paralysed father (Matthew Sunderland), then in fits of viciousness against her abusive, controlling mother (Tandi Wright) and a seductive projectionist (David Corenswet).
You can’t deconstruct Hollywood fantasies from within the genre that first sold them, like a musical or adventure film. Pearl is so effective because its commentary is coming from a genre diametrically opposed to the full-bodied romance of Technicolor classics, but one as rich in style and conventions. Horror was a fairly unfamiliar genre for Technicolor films; across Technicolor's 20-year heyday, only about a half-dozen were produced, predominantly science-fiction or literary adaptations. While some dramas plumbed eerie psychological depths, like Vertigo or The Red Shoes, the dearth of proper Technicolor horror, even in a defining era of Hollywood horror, is striking. The explanation is simple: horror was cheap, and Technicolor was expensive.
But horror offers a transformation of the recognisable into the perverse, revealing any hidden anxieties embedded within it. Pearl shows Technicolor idealism go through the same process, revealing the ugly hollowness of cinematic sincerity. Wishes aren’t granted based on how much the believer wants them; people are more likely to take advantage of your ignorance than help you; we will meet obstacles that cannot be reasoned with or compelled into stepping aside. Pearl’s distinct visual style reflects reality’s natural hues being colour-corrected – but instead of being attractive, they’re distorted.
Pearl goes on to conflate cinematic magic with liberating, purifying violence, as both provoke excesses of feeling that shatter her punishingly disciplined home life. After mimicking dancing with a scarecrow in an open field, she gives in to her fantasies and simulates sex with it (a not-so-subtle deviation from Dorothy’s journey through Oz); these urges are then encouraged by a pornographic film the projectionist lets her watch. Strangely, when she later has sex with him, it feels less motivated by the scarecrow or stag film, and more by the rush she just got by trapping her badly burned mother in the basement. After she butchers her lover for going back on his promise to whisk her away, Pearl lets out a blood-curdling scream – something not offered in her precious silent films. Her dreams used to feed on movies, now they feast on blood.
But instead of replacing her aspirations of fame with more violent ones, Pearl’s passion becomes fiercer with every act of violence. It’s not just because she’s systematically eliminating obstacles to her freedom, but each kill grants her more power, thus further convincing her she can grasp the life she wants. It’s a form of self-delusion, but not without a sense of liberation – and horror, with its ability to unravel order and upset hierarchies, gives our young dreamer a subversive power. When her audition for a touring revue show falls flat, she reaches a snapping point for her sadistic urges. Pearl has conflated becoming a star with her own violent emancipation so much that being told she’s not talented is like being reduced to meaninglessness – confirmed by the ghost of her mother, berating her from the audition panel.
Seeing Pearl splatter garish hues of blood across a saturated colour palette isn’t just an attractive novelty, it’s also an unfastening of the social restrictions that defined Technicolor films. Nearly every film shot in three-strip Technicolor was made under the Hays Code, a restrictive set of guidelines to enforce self-censorship from studios, active between 1934 and the late ‘60s. Profanity, sex, nudity, interracial or homosexual relationships were all banned; the Code was designed to culturally moderate a mass-appeal artform. All types of audience, no matter how remote and sheltered, were instructed on which behaviours and lifestyles they could recognise as socially acceptable. In fact, the way movies trigger such dangerous behaviour in Pearl feels like a sardonic mockery of the Hays Code’s proponents – their worst fears, of impressionable young women rebelling, are brought to life.
Even if Pearl’s dreams of making movies become worthless, West and Rockett still express her interiority through contemporary revolutions in the filmmaking medium. In the closing sequence, Pearl uncovers a world free of restrictions; she’s just dismembered the friend she was deeply jealous of, and prepares a decadent meal for the rotting corpses of her parents. The film image separates with a split diopter, revealing multiple perspectives and bursting with kaleidoscopic reflections of Pearl’s new domestic domain. The camera frame has been broken and stitched back together, a reassembling favouring a new radical power.
When her soldier husband returns to find his wife’s shrine to decay, Pearl’s cheer still doesn’t break, beaming with a rigid smile that remains fixed throughout the entire closing credits. As her smile slips into a grimace and tears fall from her eyes, it’s clear that Pearl’s fantasy can only last as long as the film does. Her pained, forced expression is willing the movie to keep on going, not giving in to the clear signs that the audience is about to disappear – they can’t leave, I won’t let them. As long as the film lasts, so will her freedom. She can still dream, as long as she sees colour.
Pearl is out in UK cinemas on March 17.