X – Memphis Flyer

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” — Maya Angelou

Here we are, less than 90 days away from a nation-defining election, and the world’s richest man is showing us who he is, every single day. I’m speaking about Elon Musk, the South African mega-billionaire behind Tesla cars, SpaceX rocketry, and xAI, the world’s largest supercomputer, now operating in Memphis.

Musk also runs X, formerly Twitter, the world’s biggest news and chat app, and herein lies a problem. I’m still using X, sometimes against my better judgment, given the amount of racist, misogynist, and white supremacist content that streams from the site. I delete and block posts (and posters) every single day, but there’s always a steady torrent of horrible content, much of it generated by bots and AI.

So why am I still on X? Because it’s still the best place for an information junkie like me to get breaking news. I follow all the major news outlets’ X accounts, plus a couple thousand journalists and writers whose views and reporting I respect, as well as lots of local folks with smart (and often funny) takes on Memphis politics, sports, food, and entertainment. Still, it’s a flood of information, much of it worthless or worse, and you have to be diligent in mining the diamonds from the dreck.

Even when X was Twitter, before Musk bought it for a sweet $44 billion and changed the name, it had lots of crap posts, but the policing of intentional disinformation and vile Nazi-ish stuff was better, and it was usually taken down quickly. Now, not so much. That’s mainly because Musk has taken a hands-on approach to the site, and under the guise of “free speech,” he is consciously permitting, and even encouraging, posts that traffic from the far fringes of the right-wing, white supremacist world.

And it’s not like he’s hiding his intentions. He’s got 194 million followers! (When you join X, you get Musk’s posts and reposts automatically, unless you intentionally unfollow him.) His personal account is a fount of racism, misleading statistics, and outright lies. Often, Musk posts an obviously racist meme and asks — a la Tucker Carlson — “Is this true? Just asking.”

Musk is a Trump supporter, of course. He often reposts anti-Kamala Harris tropes, including those that are obviously false or misleading. On Monday, he hosted Trump for a two-hour “interview” on X, during which Musk lavished praise and admiration for Trump’s “honesty,” among other insane comments. Musk’s politics would be anathema to most of the residents of this decidedly blue city, I suspect, but make no mistake, Musk is here, and in a big way. Needless to say, I’m not a fan, either. He seems weirdly and dangerously unbalanced.

And speaking of fans (and clumsy segues), Musk is now running a bunch of non-permitted gas turbines to power his Memphis supercomputer from its site in South Memphis. They are noisy and are sending gassy fumes into the atmosphere 24 hours a day. I urge you to read Sam Hardiman’s well-reported Daily Memphian story from last Saturday.

Citing a “source close to the company … who is not authorized to speak publicly,” the DM said xAI had determined it had the right to run the non-permitted turbines for 364 days. The DM story also quoted the Greater Memphis Chamber on the matter: “XAI obtained official guidance that based on federal, state, and local regulations that permitting would not be required for this temporary solution to use turbines for testing its supercomputer.” How nice. Let’s hope this deal works out for the benefit of the city, and not just for xAI. I have my doubts. Musk is just not a Memphis kind of guy. He’s a Trump kind of guy, with similar baggage.

Need more proof? Consider this recent Musk repost from Daniel Concannon, the self-titled “World’s Most Unbearably White Man”: “White people have been taught that white people are evil and everyone else is good. Non-white people have been taught that white people are evil and everyone else is good. That’s not divide and conquer. That’s ‘Kill Whitey.’” Musk added a single comment: “True.”

Elon Musk is showing us who he is, folks. It would behoove Memphis — and the rest of the world — to believe him.

What makes a person into a monster? Is it a response to a life of trauma and bad breaks, or were they born that way? Or is it a little bit of both?

In the fall of 1918, Adolf Hitler had been on the front lines of World War I for four years. He was sitting in a field hospital, where he was recovering from a mustard gas attack that left him temporarily blinded. When he heard the news that Germany had surrendered, he went blind again. Hitler never got over the emotional trauma of his army’s defeat on the battlefield, and the narrative that the Jews, the Marxists, and the racially impure had “stabbed Germany in the back” formed the core of Nazism.

One factor in Germany’s defeat that perhaps didn’t occur to Hitler was that 900,000 of their soldiers caught the flu. The 1918 flu pandemic started at an Army base in Kansas and was unwittingly shipped to warring Europe by American troop transports, where it spread like wildfire in the cramped, unsanitary trenches. When director Ti West’s new film Pearl opens, the rural Texas community where the title character, played by Mia Goth, lives is struggling to keep going as the second wave of the 1918 flu pandemic sweeps over them.

Pearl lives on a farm that will be familiar to those who have seen X, the slasher homage West and Goth released earlier this year. She lives with her mother (Tandi Wright), a German immigrant who is none too happy about the way the war is going, and father (Matthew Sunderland), who is paralyzed and completely dependent on his family. Though the carefully tended farm looks idyllic from the outside, the dynamic between Pearl and her stern, demanding mother is increasingly toxic. Pearl’s husband Howard (Alistair Sewell) is in Europe fighting with the Allied Expeditionary Force, and she’s chafing under the demands of farm life and caring for her invalid father. Pearl’s only escapes are the fleeting trips to the local movie theater, where she sees Thea Bera, film’s first sex symbol, as Cleopatra. It’s the dancing chorus girls in a “soundie” (short films played between features that were the precursors to modern music videos) called “Palace Follies” that really catch her eye. She plays out her fantasies of dance and fame before a captive audience of cows and sheep in the farm’s little barn, away from the disapproving eyes of her mother.

Maybe it’s the little hits of morphine she skims off the top of her daddy’s medicine, but Pearl doesn’t feel like other people, and the pandemic-induced isolation hasn’t done her state of mind any good. The only person who seems to understand her is the theater projectionist (David Corenswet), a self-described “bohemian” type who is pretty easy on the eyes. Pearl struggles with unfamiliar feelings of lust — she’s already married, after all — but when he offers to take her away to Europe, where they can rake in the cash making stag films, she falls for him. When her sister-in-law Mitsy (Emma Jenkins-Purro) tells her of a dance audition at the local church for a touring vaudeville show, it sets her on a collision course with her family obligations that will end well for no one.

If you’ve seen X, you know that Pearl never does escape that farm. She’s too dangerous to walk among the normals, and she knows it. This prequel is all about the creeping revelations of her murderous nature, and the titanic failures of nurture that set her on a path to destruction. Goth and West came up with the idea for Pearl while devising a backstory for the villain in first film, and dove right into Pearl once A24 saw the early cuts of X and immediately green lit the prequel. Her final monologue, in which she confesses everything that’s been going on in her mind to a horrified Mitsy, is an instant classic, but she’s spellbinding in every frame of this film. West shoots Pearl like it’s a Douglas Sirk technicolor melodrama — think Imitation of Life, with more beheadings. There’s another Goth/West film in production, which finishes the story of Maxine, Goth’s porn star character in X. Based on Pearl, all I have to say is, shut up and take my money.

Pearl
Now playing
Multiple locations