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| “ | Perhaps I should kill him for you? | „ |
| ~ Ruth sarcastically offering to kill her husband to Pearl |
Ruth is one of the two overarching antagonists (alongside Ernest Miller) of Ti West's X trilogy.
She is Pearl's abusive and domineering mother who often harshly punishes and verbally abuses her daughter.
She was played by Tandi Wright who also played Dr. Rush.
Biography[]
Early life[]
Ruth was born in Germany, where she presumably met her husband and where they got married, before moving to the United States, more specifically a farm in Texas. They eventually had a daughter around the 1890s named Pearl.
At an unknown time, Ruth's husband contracted an unknown illness that left him completely paralyzed and required Pearl and Ruth to spend most of their time caring for him, something Ruth is shown to despise.
Pearl and Ruth are implied to always have had a sour relationship, with Ruth being strict, domineering and even abusive at times toward her, punishing her harshly and looking down on her dreams to become a chorus girl and get off the farm. Ruth often witnessed her killing innocent farm animals, and it's hinted that Pearl might have hurt another human before.
When Pearl became an adult, Ruth hired a farmhand to help out on the farm named Howard, who fell in love with Pearl, the two eventually marrying.
Pearl[]
Around the time of November 1918, when Howard left to fight in World War I, Pearl was growing more restless of life of the farm, often putting on Ruth's old clothes and daydreaming, until Ruth would catch her and punish her with more chores. One such day, Pearl murders a goose that interrupted her daydream out on the farm and feeds it to her pet alligator, Theda.
The same day, Ruth sends Pearl into town to buy medicine for her father. Against Ruth's wishes, Pearl doesn't keep herself isolated from the townspeople (due to the Spanish flu pandemic) and instead interacts with a projectionist after going to the picture house. Ruth, discovering what Pearl did, scolds her and withholds her food from her.
Mitsy, Howard's sister, then visits the farm with her mother, bringing Ruth a pig for dinner and secretly telling Pearl about a dance audition being held in town the very next day.
That night, Ruth finds a playbill from the picture house that Pearl took, and she confronts her daughter at dinner. She tries to make her go and sleep in the bunkhouse for endangering her and her father by not isolating herself from other people and the sickness, when Pearl informs her about her plan to go to the audition the next day. Ruth refuses to let her go, and admits that she knows about how violent Pearl is in private, tears the playbill into shreds, berates Pearl, telling her how unhappy she is in her own life, having to care for her disabled husband, and sarcastically offers to kill him for Pearl so that they can both go to the audition, and picks up a knife.
Ruth then seems to calm, admitting she sees Pearl as a failure and wants her daughter to feel the same way when she fails the audition, causing Pearl to say she just doesn't want to end up the same way as her mother. Ruth then physically attacks Pearl, resulting in an altercation where Pearl shoves her into the fire. Even after Pearl puts it out, Ruth is still heavily burned and barely alive, and Pearl simply drags her into the basement and locks her down there.
Having fled to the Projectionist's house in a panic afterwards, Pearl comes home the next morning with the Projectionist, who has promised to take her to Europe so she can have a career. However, he gets distracted by the sound of Ruth in the basement, although Pearl at first insists it's the dog, but then gets caught in her own lie, thus resulting in her murdering the Projectionist and then her father.
When Pearl gets to the audition and does not get picked, she hallucinates the burnt body of her mother as one of the judges, who tells her she's failed, resulting in Pearl having a breakdown and Mitsy taking her home.
Pearl admits to all her crimes to her sister-in-law, and admits she doesn't hate Ruth, she feels Ruth had a hard life, and that she deserved better, as she only wanted a home to feel safe in. When Mitsy attempts to leave, disturbed, Pearl proceeds to kill her with an axe and dismember her, feeding her corpse to Theda.
Now fully alone, Pearl goes down, into the basement, to her mother's corpse, and hallucinates her stroking her hair, singing to her in German, and telling her she loves her.
Pearl takes Ruth's words to heart to make the best of what she has, and sets her parent's corpses up at the dinner table with the now rotting pig, which a horrified Howard comes back from the war to.
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 Villains
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Douglas' Estate Others | ||