Does Ti West’s B-movie trilogy have any “A ideas” hidden underneath its sexy nurse’s outfit?
What does it mean to want to be – to believe that you are meant to be – a star? This is not quite the same thing as wanting to be merely famous, and it is not always about wanting to be recognised as being exceptionally skilled, either. It is more about seeing yourself as being exceptional full stop, and waiting for the wider world to notice. A star is a celebrity who has been magnified to mythic, inescapable proportions, and when we talk about what makes them who they are, we often point to something vague and indefinable. We call it ‘the X factor’, a je ne sais quoi. In 2022, the indie horror film director Ti West released a retro slasher called X about a troupe of circa-1979 pornographers who lose their clothes, and then their lives, on a shoot at a remote Texan farm. The ‘X’ of its title was a reference to the trade of its characters, and perhaps a nod to the way that they are Xed out one by one throughout the film, but it could also be read as an allusion to this mysterious quality – the very quality that its lead character Maxine Minx (Mia Goth) sees in herself when she growls “I’m a fuckin sex symbol” to the mirror in one of its earliest scenes, and that its killer-antagonist, the elderly farm owner Pearl (also Mia Goth, underneath an avalanche of prosthetics) believes that she once had. Both women, played as they were by the same actress, came together to depict the beginning and the end of the life cycle of aspirational stardom, and to highlight in some sense the close connection between the achievement of that dream, and a woman’s fuckability. Eventually, youth triumphed over experience, and Maxine became one of the horror genre’s many final girls.
X is not an especially good film, and its attempt to depict the erotic envy that the old feel for the young leans too heavily on the ‘spooky,’ oddly prevalent trope of using nude retirees as a jump-scare. Still, it birthed a more interesting prequel, 2022’s Pearl, set in 1918, and that film made the ingenious leap of letting Goth play the villain full-time: as the younger Pearl, she is an ingenue turned homicidal maniac, an aspiring star whose desire to be world famous drives her to bloody serial murder. On its face, Pearl might have come across like one of Joan Crawford’s later pictures, a Grand Guignol woman-with-an-axe farce steeped in corn syrup and silliness. What saved it from this fate was Goth’s performance, which rooted Pearl’s feral rage in a deep, terrible sadness. When those on the internet describe this film as being ‘Joker for girls’, what they usually mean is that it offers up a feminine spin on a similarly blood-spattered story of underdog revenge. It is very much like Todd Phillips’s Joker (2019), I would argue, in the sense that there is at times a startling dissonance between the broad tenor of the film itself and the work of the gifted performer (in Phillips’s film, the inimitable Joaquin Phoenix) at its centre, and also in the sense that this dissonance succeeds in making the end product almost unbearably tragic. Two moments in Pearl stand out especially: an end credits sequence in which Goth displays a quivering rictus of terrifying madness for almost two minutes, and a monologue that is so delicate and beautiful in spite of its horrifying content that its being situated in a B-horror movie feels, frankly, kind of nuts. What does it mean to want to be – to believe that you are meant to be – a star? Goth’s depiction of the younger Pearl suggests that it may mean needing to been seen or valued, and that it might be a form of sickness brought on by neglect. West may have made two films about frustrated stardom, but in real life it was undeniable: in Goth, a star was born.
All of which leads us to the release this month of the third film in the X trilogy, the 1985-set Maxxxine. Maxine Minx, now six years on from what the press have described as ‘the Texas porno massacre’, is trying to break into the movies, and in its first scene she aces the audition for a schlocky horror sequel called ‘The Puritan II’. Her part in the bloody events that were depicted in X is not known to the public; she has evidently already earned a decent profile in porn, although like the young Pearl, she is still insisting that she’s going to be globally famous, a star, and that the world is simply late in catching on. Concurrent with Maxine getting the role, several strange things happen: three of her friends are killed, in murders that are made to look like the work of the Night Stalker, and a private eye (Kevin Bacon, with an accent that recalls Jonah Hill in The Beach Bum, 2019) begins blackmailing her on behalf of an anonymous client. I guessed the identity of the killer about fifteen minutes into Maxxxine’s run-time, and I’d wager you will do the same. The murder mystery plot is beside the point, which is the film’s look, its sound, and its patina of 80s dirt – the latter element feeling, paradoxically, every bit as manicured as the rest of the film’s late-twentieth-century cosplay. As ever, Goth is a shot of the real in an otherwise heightened and unreal depiction of the past: her Maxine is neither a purely empowered avenging angel, nor a shivering trauma victim, but by turns mean, earnest, steely, scared, faintly delusional and swaggeringly cocky. Rarely does she lose her cool. In Maxxxine, there is hysteria aplenty, but not much of it is emanating from our heroine – for better or for worse, given how striking Goth can be when she is fully off the leash.
Elizabeth Bender (Elizabeth Debicki), Maxine’s director, describes her own new film as a B-movie with “A ideas”. Maxxxine is a B-movie – proudly so. Does it have any “A ideas” hidden underneath its sexy nurse’s outfit? Perhaps it doesn’t need them, since a cinematic theme park ride needn’t necessarily have a thesis. West’s continuing interest in pornography is, I think, largely aesthetic rather than political, and the same might be said of his focus on the past. The recent trend for making horror films that ape the movies of the 1970s and 80s seems to stem from the idea that adopting a style is the same thing as having style. Visually, X is an homage to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974); Pearl nods to technicolour, in particular The Wizard of Oz (1939). For Maxxxine, West has drawn heavily on the films of Brian De Palma, and he does a stellar job of recreating their grimy-flashy, primary-coloured sleaze. Cinema-literate viewers can watch Maxxxine and thrill at its references to De Palma’s Body Double (1984), or to Paul Schrader’s Hardcore (1979), or to various Gialli of the period; it rewards prior knowledge. The thing about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Wizard of Oz or Body Double, however, is that all of these films are iconic precisely because they have been filtered through their directors’ distinctive sensibilities. As an exercise in replication rather than in innovation, Maxxxine ends up lacking something – maybe heart, maybe soul, maybe the shock that comes from seeing something new rather than the shock of seeing a pair of testicles explode. One of the film’s showiest jokes about retro appropriation is its use of the set of the Psycho (1960) house as a location, first as an imposing presence on a disused movie lot, and then later as a hiding place for Maxine when she’s chased by a villain. Seeing her cowering in the empty belly of that famous building, I wondered whether West wasn’t actually doing something clever and self-deprecating with the image: showing us a cool but hollow piece of horror-cinematic history, all exterior and flash, with nothing else inside it of particular interest but his star. She alone has the X factor here.
Philippa Snow is a writer based in Norfolk. Her latest book is Trophy Lives: On the Celebrity as an Art Object (2024)
