54935: MaXXXine

One of my earliest movie memories was of watching Poltergeist while one of my mom's friends was babysitting me. I think I was in Kindergarten. Another time was watching Aliens on HBO after my parents had vetted it to make sure it wasn't too scary. I must have been in first or second grade. The point is, the 1980s were different. We were pretty okay with kids seeing gore, horror, and over-the-top violence, so long as the good guys won and the bad guys got punished. Those kinds of movies were okay, assuming there wasn't a bunch of nudity. Now, without giving away too much, let me say that MaXXXine is exactly the kind of movie my parents would not have let me watch when I was a kid. It is lurid, loud, and unrepentant. There are exposed breasts, people snort cocaine (and for some reason aren't immediately punished by the universe), testicles get stomped on. You get the idea.

It is also a fantastic horror film, and a beautiful pinnacle to writer/director Ti West's "X" trilogy. As a standalone film, MaXXXine still works. It is an adept thriller with an interesting narrative and some insights into the façades at the heart of Hollywood, as well as some intense, bloody murders. Mia Goth delivers a chillingly charming performance as Maxine Minx, a young woman whose entire existence is a carefully constructed lie. Her single-minded pursuit of fame is pathological, and engrossing.

Kevin Bacon is despicable as John Labat, possibly the biggest piece of shit he has played in recent memory. His performance as the casually, professionally evil Labat is genuinely off-putting in its menace and corruption. One of the most frightening members of the cast, however, is Elizabeth Debicki, playing Elizabeth Bender, the director of the film-within-a-film. Her cold, cruel, manipulative demeanor seems utterly perfect for a woman directing in Hollywood in the 1980s. She is devoid of humor, compassion, joy... basically all the niceties have been drained out of her, and one can imagine that she has stepped over many bodies—figurative and literal—to get where she is today.

And if that's all you know about the Maxine character and her universe, you can still have an incredible time watching these and other pieces careen around the chessboard in unexpected patterns.

If, on the other hand, you've followed West and Goth on their 67-year journey of sex and death, then MaXXXine will provide some fun callbacks as well as a deeper critique of our tendency toward narcissism. With this third film, West is inviting us to engage with cycles of trauma and self-delusion. For example; Pearl begins in darkness, with the world slowly revealed to us as the doors of family barn open up for us, welcoming the audience into what will become a dark and bloody story. It is that same point of view that opens X, looking out through the open barn doors, neatly framing the world in the aspect ratio of 16mm film. In MaXXXine, however, the barn door is replaced by the massive doors of a soundstage, and instead of an idyllic or blood-soaked farm (depending on the year) we see pinpoints of light on the doors, like make believe stars. This is the chance that Maxine and Pearl both fought so hard to find, but from the get-go we're given some indication that this might be a "careful what you wish for" scenario.

There are other callbacks, though in the context of the rest of the films in the X cycle (it feels so pretentious to write that) maybe they should be seen more as echoes. Maxine begins the film with an audition, alone in front of a table of judges, and after her performance she politely tells the rest of the girls waiting their turn to not even bother. She fucking nailed it. It's the same swagger Pearl brought to her audition 67 years ago. On that same studio backlot, Maxine runs into a group of actors dressed as WWI GIs, and appears (to me) visibly shaken, much as Pearl was in Pearl, when she spotted a lone Doughboy on her way home from her tryst with the projectionist. Is it Maxine's left over trauma from the events of X? Is it meant to signal some shared foundation between the two women, that events in the life of one of them echo through the years and into the life of the other? I loved that the movie-within-a-movie, which represents Maxine's big break as well as Pearl's unrealized dream, is the sequel to a horror movie called The Puritan, which is easy to see as a wink at the struggle of female sexual liberation against America's puritanical spirit, which has informed so much of the first two films in the trilogy.

Later in the film, we see Leon, played beautifully by Moses Sumney, watching B-movies at the video shop he runs, including one film about a killer alligator reminiscent of Pearl's alligator friend, Theda. I'm sure there are other callbacks that I missed, but the common thread is Peal and Maxine. There is a shared thirst for fame that drives their decisions, one that is tied inextricably to their sexuality. In the prequel, Pearl's affair with the projectionist coincides with her fascination at the movie house and her dreams of being in movies. Maxine, on the other hand, readily dips into her sexuality to power her dreams of fame through porn stardom, and the opportunity to launder it into mainstream stardom.

At the same time, the fame that both Pearl and Maxine seek isn't necessarily a worthy goal, as presented in MaXXXine. Hollywood is rife with façade in MaXXXine. The movie sets which Maxine explores are one-dimensional. Even the iconic Psycho house, which Maxine spends significant time in, is barely more than a frame and some windows. Thematically, everyone is pretending to be someone or something else. Bobby Cannavale's Detective Torres, for instance, is a cop who harbored dreams of being a film actor. Maxine puts on the airs of a Hollywood actor while also earning her money at peep shows (which is, I suppose, its own kind of fame).

From a technical standpoint, MaXXXine is, itself, pretending to be a movie from 1985. West opted to use only the kind of production equipment available in 1985, and used the production techniques that would have been in vogue at the time (which explains the hokey way blood and gun violence are depicted in MaXXXXine). It's very effective at aping the look and feel of a 1985 slasher movie, which is in keeping with how West approached the look of the other two films, creating aesthetics which pay homage to the grandiose world of early Hollywood and the dark, seedy side of amateur pornography at the end of the 1970s.

All told, MaXXXine is a good horror flick. It has elements of a mystery, horror, slasher, exploitation, and family drama, which West and Goth skillfully weave into an enjoyable movie that holds up in comparison to the rest of the series. Check it out on VHS if you can.