MaXXXine (2024, West)
There's one major spoiler here in the final paragraph.
This one's for the cinephiles. The lovers of film. The celluloid obsessed. And MaXXXine couldn't be worse for it. A smug, satisfied, self-proclaimed "B-movie with A-ideas", MAXXXine is the nadir of Ti West's otherwise strong X series and a major inflection point for horror. What are we to do? What have we become when horror, our most crowd-friendly genre--our most uninhibited--disappears up its own ass and starts idiotically reflecting on its own existence?
This is not, of course, to say that self-reflective horror cannot be made, or horror that reflects our media environment. Blair Witch, Videodrome, Unfriended; each of these transmogrify unconscious or ignored anxieties about their respective developments in image-making. So let's, for the sake of argument, offer West his asinine digressions into evidence.
The film opens with the trailer-ready scene that obnoxiously announces the film's intention: make any horror subtext, i.e., that which belongs under the surface of an entertaining genre film, into glaringly obvious pronouncements about what it all means to watch horror and work in the film industry. There's a wonderful essay by painter and film critic Manny Farber (this is the first time I've referenced it here, but it certainly won't be the last) called "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art". In it he bemoans the supremacy of the White Elephant movie, that which calls attention to its own artistic merit, and the Termite movie, that which functions primarily as a well-crafted entertainment and conceals its themes (if such an elephantine notion is even necessary) underneath effective image-making. Therefore, the film's ideas bury into the audience's mind like insects, forever to skitter across our consciousness and infect our interactions and our inner lives.
MaXXXine does not do that.
Instead, MaXXXine revels in its own familiarity with well-worn tropes and iconography. Let's visit the Bates Motel! Let's put a Chinatown bandage over Kevin Bacon's nose (who is otherwise great as a cartoonish P.I. from New Orleans; why couldn't we have more characters like him and Giancarlo Esposito's talent agent?)! Let's visit a vertiginous street that's definitely not Mulholland Drive, it's Starlight Drive! Totally unoriginal references which serve no greater purpose than to prove that its filmmaker has seen these movies and wants us to know. I say nay.
Is MaXXXine competently made? Yes. The performances are strong, the lighting is moody, and a superficial yet convincing 1980s Los Angeles is evinced. But this is all worthless if the story is nonsense and the suspense totally absent. There are only a few gleeful moments of violence, and it flubs its stated theme: the egregious Bette Davis quote which opens the film, "In this business, until you're known as a monster, you're not a star."
Maxine doesn't do anything monstrous to become a star. She blows her insane father's head off in clear view of the police at the very end of the movie's rushed conclusion, a crime of which she is apparently exonerated offscreen, but that has nothing to do with her failure or success in show business. The rest of the movie is spent pontificating stupid aphorisms about the film industry with no actions attached to them. Even Mia Goth, the series's, if you will, X factor, is totally wasted as the audacious Maxine, who spends the entire film, "through her trauma," steeling herself against further oncoming traumas. Her performance is kind of like if you stood in traffic and held your eyes closed really tight: you know something dangerous is coming, but because you're in adrenaline mode you don't actually get to show any of your personality. Consider me out on the gentrification of the horror genre. See you at Trap and Smile 2.
