At one point in MaXXXIne (Ti West’s movie about a porn star seeking crossover fame), a director (played by Elizabeth Debicki) tells the eponymous main character she booked the part in her big, splashy movie because of what she had said after her audition. Crucially, West does not let the audience know what Maxine Minx (played by Mia Goth) said right away, allowing us the chance to fill in the blank in our own minds as we take the measure of this fame-obsessed survivor. When we do finally hear her words in flashback, they fall a bit flat.
Famous. I’m going to be famous.
That’s more or less what Maxine says after summoning tears and terror for a room skeptical of her start in adult film yet very willing to ask her to show her breasts once the acting bit is through. Name-checking fame; that’s all it took to convince the formidable director committed to Art that Minx was her star. It seems silly and vapid, yet the film as a whole wants you to believe that fame can be both shallow and a powerful force. In fact, as Joe and I posited in Episode 20 of Queer Cinema Catchup, Ti West wanted to interrogate this power by channeling it through his star and character Maxine Minx, a beautiful, tenacious, camera ready metaphor for fame and its impact on all those in its orbit.
In West’s film – the third in the X trilogy of slasher-horror films – the supporting characters don’t get much depth, but perhaps their broad strokes allow us to fit them into a paradigm of fame. Take Maxine’s best friend Leon (Moses Sumney) who works in a video store and seems to have extensive knowledge of film history and technology and doesn’t quite believe Maxine will make it big (Brooke Shields never did porn he tells her when Maxine suggests the icon was also a crossover star). Leon’s ultimately a queer-coded character who dies in a gruesome, on-camera attack that brings to mind unfortunate horror tropes of black characters dying first. While perhaps a problematic way to make the point, Leon is the expert on film yet he cannot reap the reward of it in the same way that, say, a Brooke Shields can. Indeed, his proximity to fame (i.e., Maxine) kills him and his perspective. Fame bests criticism and history and cares only for the marginalized insofar as it can exploit them, West perhaps suggests via Leon.
We can apply this lens of fame to the rest of the supporting cast and likewise understand, if not justify their stereotypical, underdeveloped roles. Maxine’s costars in both porn and on the big screen (Halsey, Lily Collins, Chloe Farnworth) either look up to Maxine (you made it, so I can, too) or patronize her (I made it, so you can too), suggesting how fame can feel like either the way out of bad circumstances or a barrier from such bad circumstances and the suckers who can’t quite make it. Except all three of the women wind up dead after a scene or two, indicating that both the hope and protection of fame are lies. This places what society perhaps sees as the lowest form of entertainment – pornography – and the art of the big screen on opposite sides of the same, easily flipped coin and suggests that women are disposable, hot bodies and nothing more whether or not it comes up heads or tails.
Beyond the actors, the other key entertainment players in this film – the makeup artist, the director, and the agent– likewise support this reading. The makeup artist (Sophie Thatcher) may not have much to do but she’s memorable because of the part she plays in one of the most striking horror images of the film. Thatcher cakes Maxine’s head in wet plaster to create a cast of her severed head for the final images of the film. She then leaves the actress unattended, oblivious to the PTSD-like flashbacks Maxine begins to have of the trauma she endured in X while trapped beneath the wet, setting clay. Thatcher returns and finds Maxine flat on the floor trying to tear the plaster from her face to free herself of her dark thoughts and disturbing memories. In other words, all the effects and glamor of Hollywood can jazz up a story, turn even the darkest of tales into a famous one, but beneath its tricks the truth remains. What has happened and how it affects us can’t always find resolution or explanation in a mold, no matter a movie’s magic.
In spite of this, the film-within-a-film’s director Elizabeth Bender nonetheless believes that the attention and infamy her horror sequel will spark during an age of satanic panic can still say something. In fact, she believes it is her duty to create meaning because eyeballs will inevitably be on her work because of the controversy. Presumably West, a director himself, has tried to do that himself in creating a film that uses the exploitative elements of horror to comment on fame, yet he also included that moment with the make-up artist. A moment he perhaps wanted to underscore by casting a young woman from Yellowjackets (a hit show about dark horror in the form of cannibalism that suggests via its dual past and present storylines we can never move on from our flesh-eating pasts).
It seems, then, that West both wishes to comment on fame and sees such commentary as futile, which brings us to another character who doesn’t care what art says so long as it pays. Maxine’s agent Teddy Knight (Giancarlo Esposito). Knight doesn’t care about what art says so long as it pays. He’ll do anything to protect that fame - er, Maxine - from harm, even if it means crushing the past and all it might do to ruin your reputation in a pancake crusher (a.k.a precisely what happens to Kevin Bacon when he turns up in the film as a private eye who’s got dirt on Maxine). Anonymity and a hidden past isn’t possible with fame, Kevin Bacon’s character tells us, unless you’ve got a damn good agent who will take out and literally crush the trash (disposing of any bodies it might contain in the process).
This scene was quick and not even the most untenable, bloody image of a film full of murder. Murder that attracts the attention of the law. The film’s cops (Bobby Cannavale and Michelle Monaghan) similarly exist within and shed light on this web of fame. The duo each buys into one of Hollywood’s two favorite visions of the law: the masculine, rule-breaking hero and the pure, justice-is-blind-and-will-prevail-over-evil ethos. Of course, West pokes fun at both of these visions. Cannavale’s Detective Torres puts on a macho persona precisely because he originally wanted to be an actor. Monaghan’s Detective William’s clear-eyed disdain for the seedy evils for Hollywood ends with her literal eye getting poked out just before she tumbles to her death at the foot of the city's most iconic sign. If Maxine is fame, then neither Torres’ aggressive pursuit of her nor Williams’ appeals to her higher self can win at the end of the day. Only Maxine can overcome and outshine the killer. Only fame can thrive.
What about said killer? The religious cult leader luring Hollywood dreamers up into the hills to make them star in a homemade film meant to teach the masses about the sins of the biz by murdering these corrupted and godless starlets on camera. A villain who just so happens to be Maxine’s preacher father who once told her that she should never accept a life she does not deserve. A man who dies at the hands of his own child beneath the Hollywood Sign, but not before he tells her he’s sorry for failing her.
You didn’t fail me. Maxine tells the Big Bad. You gave me exactly what I needed. Divine Intervention.
Those who judge fame; who claim it has no place in our Christian society nevertheless know that images, songs, and stories are powerful tools they’d be foolish to ignore, which is why Maxine’s righteous father seeks to punish and instruct via some movie-making of his own. By using the devil’s own devices, however, Maxine and the fame she represents gets to come out on top. She and it sends a message to all the believers that in Hollywood (and maybe everywhere else) the real God is her, the idea of fame itself, a dark and unholy message indeed.
Except of course that’s not where Ti West ends the film. Sometime later, after the bodies have been buried and the crimes turned into newsworthy sensation, Maxine finishes up her final day on Elizabeth Bender’s set to a round of applause from the cast and crew. Elizabeth asks her what she wants to do next as she and Maxine look on at the plaster cast of her severed head for their movie’s final horror scene.
I hope it lasts forever.
The words on Maxine’s lips as she stares into the face of her own death.
