In MaXXXine, the Muse Gets Her Due
This story includes spoilers for Ti West’s MaXXXine, as well as the previous two installments in the trilogy, X and Pearl.
In Goodbye to Berlin, the 1939 autofictional novel that would serve as the source material for the Oscar-winning film Cabaret, Christopher Isherwood wrote, “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.” The metaphor, a clever means of writing his homosexuality out of his own experiences, invokes the camera as a neutral instrument, an objective stenographer of what’s happening in front of it, but as demonstrated repeatedly in the age of social media — a time when anyone can whip out their phone, turn a stranger into content, and make them a star — that is not always the case. MaXXXine understands the camera’s capacity for violence. A sequel to the 2022 horror film X, which received its own prequel that same year in Pearl, MaXXXine, once again written and directed by Ti West, presents the camera as a kind of weapon, often one with sexual undertones, granting a degree of power to whomever happens to wield it. The camera also serves as a metonym for Hollywood’s insatiable hunger for beautiful young women, the forgotten ingénues and their aspiring replacements who yearn for something better than their precarious terms of existence.
The titular Maxine Minx, played by series star and Pearl co-writer Mia Goth, who now with MaXXXine adds a producer’s credit to her name, is one such beautiful young woman. “You’re a fucking movie star,” she tells her reflection in a backstage vanity’s mirror, later reminding herself, “I will not accept a life I do not deserve.” That mantra, always repeated by one of Goth’s fame-driven characters, is a twist on her estranged televangelist father’s prosperity gospel, as we learned in the final moments of X, with the promise of heaven replaced by an earthly rags-to-riches success. After opening with a quote from Bette Davis (“In this business, until you’re known as a monster you’re not a star”), the film cuts to black-and-white home-video footage that we’re told was filmed in 1959, in which Maxine’s unseen father, played by Ernest Miller, feeds her the line and then coaches her on its delivery from behind the camera, clearly aware of how he might use her to his and his ministry’s advantage.
Flash-forward to 1985, and we find ourselves in Los Angeles, a far cry from the pastoral settings of the previous two films. The lips are frosted pink, the fridges are filled with Tab, the McDonald’s boxes are styrofoam, and the eyelids are turquoise garage doors. The Satanic Panic has taken the nation; the search for the Night Stalker, the serial killer who murdered several young women in California for over a year in the mid-’80s, is on. West’s Los Angeles is beige and washed out by day, dark and neon lit by night — very much an homage to Paul Schrader’s Hardcore, Ken Russell’s Crimes of Passion, and other noir thrillers of the ’70s and ’80s that sought to depict the seedy underbellies of the Sunset Strip. (Elsewhere we find traces of Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill, particularly the hallway scene where a shady character slips away in an elevator.) These earlier films evince a clear familiarity with various sex-work industries, at least from the client side of things, often reading like they stem from a john’s fascination with the lives of the women he hires. MaXXXine reflects that particular lineage while muddying the division between auteur and muse in its depiction of Maxine herself.
The sex workers we meet — a mix of porn stars, strippers, and peep-show performers — as well as Maxine’s B-movie co-star, played by Lily Collins, all speak with heavy accents that seem chosen to emphasize their humble, non-cosmopolitan origins. Goth’s southern twang, Halsey’s tri-state non-rhoticity, Collins’s peppy Yorkshire dialect — their voices stick out when compared to the directors, casting agents, and producers we meet, most of them calling the shots in standard American English. An exception to this is Elizabeth Debicki’s director, also named Elizabeth, who speaks with an English accent, though one decidedly more posh than Collins’s character’s. Elizabeth is an artist, as she explains ad nauseam, and revels in the idea that Maxine’s porn-star past could generate controversy for her film. (Which, to be clear, is a sequel to a shitty B-movie slasher, meaning that Maxine’s friends and Hollywood peers are turning up murdered all over town because of a shitty B-movie slasher; the insanity of those stakes only serve MaXXXine’s central thesis that a starlet’s big break is a matter of life or death.) Elizabeth demands that her lead stay focused on the production, warning her that Hollywood “may never develop a taste for you again.” Even to the director, a woman like herself, Maxine is still just a consumable good.
It’s only in refusing to be eaten, to sit back as things happen to her, that Maxine finds the ending she hoped for. “Backup’s on the way!” a cop reassures her during the climactic final scene, to which she stands up and mutters, “So am I.” MaXXXine subverts the “final girl” trope common to slasher films of the past 50 years — but then again, isn’t every slasher film these days subverting the final-girl trope? Some, like the 2009 remake of Friday the 13th, kill off their supposed final girls just when we think she’s survived, while others, like 2011’s Scream 4, unmask their final girls as the killers all along. To West’s credit, MaXXXine’s subversion of the trope is more innovative and layered than a simple bait and switch, and its successful execution adds a lot of depth to the film’s examination of auteurs and muses.
Early on, for example, a random creep follows Maxine down an alleyway, trapping her against a chain-link fence. Seemingly panicked, she screams for help, but drops the act once she realizes that no one’s coming to save her, shifting from distraught to calm, cool, and collected as easily as she did while running lines in an audition. She pulls a gun out of her purse and orders her attacker to strip and drop to his knees. (The man happens to be wearing eyeliner for no discernible reason. Given the De Palma references sprinkled throughout MaXXXine, not to mention the explicit mentions of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, I couldn’t help but think of the transphobic trope that sees male killers styled en femme.) Maxine then tells the man, with all the heft of a director, to suck the barrel of her handgun like it were her cock. Once satisfied, she orders him to lie “ass up” on the ground, moments before stomping down hard on his balls, exploding his scrotum to nothing but goo.
Many such moments happen like this throughout the film. A blackmailer for hire played by Kevin Bacon threatens Maxine with video footage of the DIY porno she was shooting in X, which would tie her to the murders in X — and worse, sabotage her career! He taunts her with a camcorder like a flasher with his dick out, so she snatches it out of his hand and hurls it to the ground, shattering his camera beyond repair. She then goes on to orchestrate his murder with the help of her agent, at which point I suddenly realized that her body count rivaled the killer’s, who we later learn is her father — and lo, she murders him, too. Maxine is thrilled to commit patricide, knowing full well that this true-crime tale of survival can only help her at the box office. As she stands over her father, pointing a shotgun in his face behind the Hollywood sign, he tells her she looks beautiful and that he’s sorry that he failed her. “You didn’t fail me, Daddy,” she says, bathed in the spotlight of the police helicopter overhead. “You gave me just what I needed.”
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