This post contains spoilers.
MaXXXine, the final installment (for now) in Ti West’s horror trilogy starring Mia Goth, opens with a cutting quote from Hollywood legend Bette Davis: “Until you’re known in my profession as a monster, you’re not a STAR.” The maxim feels like a succinct description of Maxine Minx and her former adversary Pearl, the antiheroines of West’s first two films, X and Pearl, both played with sinister perfection by Goth. Davis had more to say on the tricky matter of finding celestial fame: “Don’t smile at this, it’s a very serious point; I’ve never been a monster, I’ve never fought for anything in a treacherous way. I’ve never fought for anything except for the good of the film and not always for just what I was doing in it.”
It’s ironic, then, that in Maxine’s case her desperate need for stardom—which takes her away from Texas—becomes the undoing of MaXXXine.
Since its release, X has been lauded as one of the better tributes to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Like the original, both the horror elements of the film and its protagonist’s longing for fame were amplified by its setting. Texas, it turns out, can be a terrifying place.
“The land is so open that the fear of the unknown is multiplied. It also serves as a way to think about what happens to people when they’ve gone off to rural areas in which they lose contact with the local community and in turn start to see some of their own humanity fade away,” explains James Francis Jr., an associate professor of English and film at Texas A&M University. “It is a place where you can kind of just disappear.”
It is within their lonely, rural Texan landscapes that Maxine and Pearl’s homicidal egos become amplified by their desires to get away. It was part of what made the first two films so thrilling. Because both characters were also bound to each other, it was hard to tell what was right and what was wrong, who was the hunter and who was the prey. Maxine and Pearl are driven to such extremes that we could almost relate to them.
Desire is also at the heart of a modern way that the franchise subverts horror’s “final girl” archetype. The trope refers to the last woman alive to confront a killer. This character typically lacks sexuality compared with others, providing her a moral high ground, thus ensuring her survival. No shade to Sally Hardesty, obviously, but throughout The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, her modesty, which is evident in contrast to Leatherface’s other victims, may be her saving grace. She doesn’t do drugs like her friends and wears an unassuming outfit; her more sexualized pals are killed first. The suggestion is that modesty is equated with virtue, providing the audience with a reason why these women deserve to live.
Final girls can interrogate gender in horror in different ways, but many of the earlier final girls (see: Halloween’s Laurie Strode) often follow this convention. On the other hand, Maxine reclaims her power through the explicit use of her sexuality. She and the other characters use porn as a means of securing their future in a society constantly swinging between puritanism and promiscuity, extremes represented by the Texas of the first two films and the seedier setting of the third. A few years after the events of X, MaXXXine finds its protagonist wandering a grungy, cocaine-fueled, 1985 version of Sunset Boulevard while Los Angeles is plagued by Satanic panic and a real-life serial killer known as the Night Stalker.
As the secret sole survivor of the infamous “Texas Porn Star Massacre,” a bolder Maxine, who’s now a blonde, has made a name for herself in the adult film industry, though she still longs for mainstream Hollywood success. Between gigs at shady strip clubs and backdoor porn studios, she scores an audition for The Puritan II, a low-budget supernatural thriller Maxine believes will be her big break. During the audition, one of the earliest moments in the film, Goth delivers an emotional monologue not unlike her character in Pearl. But the intensity of her performance is undermined by an immediate request from the casting directors to take off her top, reminding viewers that Maxine still faces obstacles to becoming the star she believes herself to be.
Both Maxine and Pearl cling to a mantra they repeat throughout the franchise: I will not accept a life I do not deserve. It’s why Maxine left the Lone Star State to begin with. Though she’s secured the mentorship of her equally ambitious director Elizabeth Bender (played by The Crown’s Elizabeth Debicki), Maxine is haunted by her Texas past, as well as other forces that could keep her down. Even more of her friends and fellow sex workers are dying, drawing attention from police detectives Williams and Torres (Michelle Monaghan and Bobby Cannavale). A slimy, gold-toothed, caricature of a private detective (Kevin Bacon but with a southern drawl) keeps threatening to expose Maxine for her culpability in the events of X, and another unknown, black-gloved stalker lurks in her shadows.
With references to Brian De Palma’s Body Double and Dressed to Kill, West’s pastiche of eighties sexplotation film tropes seems logical, given his homages to cinema thus far. X, the story of six young friends filming a low-budget rural adult film turned bloodbath, draws inspiration from early-slasher grindhouse movies in the seventies. Pearl, the backstory of the first film’s killer, uses the vibrant Technicolor of musical melodramas from the fifties to underscore that fame has been a pervasive desire since the dawn of Hollywood.
“Horror, unlike any other genre, loves to educate its audience on how it operates as a genre. So, you see character names are borrowed from other movies, or writers, or directors, in real-life lines of dialogue,” explains Francis. “All of this allows for the development of community knowledge for horror fans and/or aficionados. It really does just create this big community base more so than any other genre we have.”
By this point, West’s need to deliver consistent references feels heavy-handed. Chronologically, it makes sense that Maxine would end up in Los Angeles, but MaXXXine only reiterates the points brought up in the past, without really adding anything new to its main character or the franchise. Maxine is willing to do whatever it takes to protect her role, even if it blurs the lines between her and Pearl, who only exists in Texas and whom Maxine insists she is nothing like.
By making her more brash and less emotional, the film again plays up Maxine’s subversiveness as a final girl. In one scene, Detective Williams pleads with Maxine, asking her to help catch the killer so they might be able to save the next girl before she’s killed. “Maybe she should save herself,” Maxine responds bluntly. No moral high ground there. But now that she’s made it to Hollywood, there’s nowhere else for Maxine’s character to go.
The third act starts in the hills above Sunset Boulevard before Maxine confronts the killer, a little too fittingly, at the Hollywood sign. Under helicopter lights and surrounded by the police, she shoots her assailant in the head, verbally reminding the audience (again) that she refuses to accept a life she does not deserve. If you’ve been paying attention to the series, you probably also already figured out Maxine’s final adversary within the earliest moments of the film.
There are also just too many loose ends—a creepy Buster Keaton impersonator, a random chase through the Bates Motel set, and half-baked ideas around televangelist cults and sexual liberation. In one scene, the director Elizabeth Bender explains her desire to create a “B movie with A ideas,” a not-so-subtle meta explanation of MaXXXine itself. West is so preoccupied with aesthetics of B movies that he ignores the need to follow up with A ideas.
In the end, Maxine is a star—something viewers have known from the beginning—but unlike Bette Davis, she only fights for herself. Her individualistic, ambitious Hollywood tale plays out like a broken record, and West’s preoccupation with period fetishism undoes any depth the first two films may have been building toward. Instead of focusing on how he could make his stamp on the horror genre, there could have been more focus on the good of the film.
