Mia Goth Has A Mind-Bending Theory About Pearl's Projectionist
Ti West's 2022 horror film "Pearl" takes place in 1918 in a particularly remote region of Texas. Pearl (Mia Goth) lives on a secluded farm with her cold and abusive mother (Tandi Wright) and her paralyzed father (Matthew Sunderland) who requires constant care. Pearl longs for escape, seeing her farm-bound home as the ultimate prison. She can only taste the world of the big city's glamor through glimpses of silent movies she's able to catch at the miles-away movie house. Pearl's mother berates her for wasting money on movies, and Pearl is often punished for seeing them, but it's all she can dream about. Pearl's dreams of escape are encouraged by the theater's kindly projectionist (David Corenswet), who lets her in the movies for free. Pearl is also incredibly sexually repressed and begins having a brief, secret affair with the projectionist. The two of them watch the 1915 film "A Free Ride," said to be the earliest existing pornographic movie in America.
The projectionist only ever shares the screen with Pearl, and there is a weird, plasticine, ethereal quality to his presence in the movie. Movie theater projector booths are notoriously eerie places, designed to stay dark and to keep sunlight out at all costs. One can never know what time it is in a booth. In "Pearl," director West gives his booth a haunted house quality. It is a fantasy realm where Pearl finds solace and a place to express herself openly.
But is it real? Mia Goth thinks it may not be. In a 2022 interview with Cinerama, Goth theorizes that the projectionist may be, well, a projection. He may be a hallucination or perhaps just a fantasy, a human-shaped manifestation of Pearl's loneliness and fantasies of glamour.
Projecting
This was Goth's theory, and it may hold credence given that Goth also co-wrote the screenplay for "Pearl." The projectionist doesn't even have a name, implying that he is something less than a complete person. That David Corenswet is also dashed handsome and always well put-together could also indicate that he is something fantastical, something imagined. As Goth said:
"I feel as though the projectionist is almost a figment of Pearl's imagination. Like, he could play, on some level, as though he doesn't exist. Just his name alone, like, The Projectionist. He's Pearl's projections of what she envisions and desires and wants. She's projecting onto The Projectionist her desires and her dreams and her beliefs about herself."
The projectionist, like the films he projects, is but a moving shadow on the wall. He is distant and unreal and unbearably alluring, like a Hollywood movie, shipped in from out of state and only held in an obscure black room. Goth's theory is backed up by a sequence later in the film wherein she auditions for a traveling casting agent. Hollywood is looking for movie dancers, and Pearl is confident she is the star they're looking for. As she dances, Pearl imagines the world opening up. She imagines that she is already in the movie, as backup dancers and special effects surround her.
When she is shaken from her reverie, reality crashes into her like a truck. Her final wail — her barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world — is her screaming "I'm a staaaaaaaaaar!" One can wholly understand her violent impulses later in the film. We might all do the same if similarly trapped.