Review of the movie MaXXXine

The detective-psychological slasher MaXXXine closes the vivid trilogy of director-writer Ti West about the "Hollywood dream" that an ambitious provincial starlet gnaws at with blood and sweat. The ruthless determination of such a dreamer, who does not put her finger in her mouth (and does not put anything else in her mouth either), was enchantingly and radically portrayed by actress Mia Goth for the third time, categorically demonstrating how a girl from any era goes to success, cutting through the thorny path of sex and drugs with an axe (or a chainsaw, or a sharp boot heel...).) a thorny path through sexual exploitation and patriarchal inquisition. It is quite obvious that the author of this predatory triptych, who has established himself as a master of stylization, eventually grew from a promising beginner into a full-fledged artist.

The first film in the trilogy, titled X, was inspired by the 1970s and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which once launched the popularity of American slashers. The original story by Ti West told the story of a young but very persistent and daring Texas porn actress Maxine, who, while acting in a provincial adult film at the height of the sexual revolution of the 70s, experiences a Texas bloodbath while working on a remote farm as a nymphomaniac milkmaid. The crazed, ugly old farmer hacks the entire film crew to pieces, and only Maxine manages to escape, as the girl mercilessly hacks back... Last but not least, despite her purely technical perseverance, the heroine's manic desire to escape from the wilderness and become a big star at any cost helps her survive, so that she doesn't rot in disappointment and oblivion, like that ugly old woman who was probably also young and attractive once and who also dreamed of becoming famous and shining.

The second film, Pearl, was a prequel spin-off and told the story of the youth of that unfortunate woman who turned into a rabid, crazed, shriveled sociopathic killer, mourning her faded beauty and a life flushed down the toilet. Her name was Pearl (meaning "pearl," meaning shining and special, which is the author's irony about the bitter truth that the idea of specialness is a great Hollywood self-deception, and even the "most special" will eventually sink into oblivion, leaving behind bones in the Hollywood cemetery and, at best, crumbs of memory scattered over the Hills). The second film, referring to the first half of the twentieth century and the birth of the Dream Factory, was an equally skillful stylization of a completely different era, namely the golden era of Hollywood cinema, namely the first legendary fairy tales-musicals like The Wizard of Oz and Mary Poppins, only inlaid with a meaty slasher extravaganza.

It is important that the young Pearl was portrayed by the same Mia Goth, because the director needed to emphasize the conditional sameness of the faces. Not only because Pearl was a frightening reflection in the mirror of Maxine's inglorious future if she fails to achieve her goal and "get the life she deserves." but also because the X trilogy is a feminocentric American Story X, or rather Hollywood Story X, that is, the story of not a specific girl with a specific name, but a portrait of a generalized starlet X from any decade who either contemplates the collapse of a dream, grows old, withers, dies; or realizes a dream and then somehow grows old, withers, diesbecause the Hollywood fairy tale itself lives forever, but it grinds its bio-tools like Moloch.

The third film, MaXXXine, was a direct sequel to the first part and returned to the story of a pornographic actress who survived the Texas massacre and, in pursuit of her dream, moved to California and grew up to become a Los Angeles porn star. 1985. The slasher genre is still in its heyday. While fucking on camera, Maxine, of course, longs to finally become a real movie actress, a new Hollywood diva, to repeat the path of Jamie Lee Curtis after Halloween and the famous scene where the actress showed her breasts. "Can you show us your breasts?" - asks the committee at the audition for the feminist horror Puritan 2. Of course, Maxine can. She can do anything.

This time, T.W. resorts to stylizing the giallo genre (and this is perhaps his most perfect impression). Giallo is an Italian slasher or spaghetti slasher (similar to the spaghetti western), and it originated before the American one and, in fact, inspired Hollywood filmmakers to create a new brutal subgenre of intelligent classic horror about demonism. It was started by Italian director Mario Bava with his film Six Women for a Murderer (1964), but it was brought to the level of a phenomenon by the famous Dario Argento with his box office hit Bird with a Crystal Plumage (1969). Giallo was sure to combine rivers of blood with eroticism and, most importantly, with an intricate detective plot that would certainly have cold logic and motivation in its conclusion, not just fierce manic bloodlust. In Argento's films, the only thing that was visible of the mysterious killer in the frame was his hands in black leather gloves, which he used to strangle and cut the victim. In fact, the emphasis on the hands has become a hallmark of giallo, and it is precisely these hands in these gloves from this perspective that we see in MaXXXine.

Interestingly, Ti West places the fictionalized story in the context of a real-life Los Angeles serial killer nicknamed the Night Stalker. And just as it is shown in the movie, the real Night Stalker (or Night Stalker or Night Hunter), who really operated in 1985, was guided by Satanic ideology and left pentagrams on the bodies of his victims. This technique of combining fiction with historical facts about Hollywood of the past decades, coupled with the director's synechophilia, rhymes with Quentin Tarantino's latest film, where a beautiful fiction (a beautiful Hollywood fairy tale) is superimposed on the real Los Angeles of 1969 and the massacre of Charles Manson's sect.

Ti West is a virtuoso of non-random symbolic details that are sometimes barely noticeable and understandable only to the "initiated," only to moviegoers and film scholars. For example, there is a shot where the main character puts out a cigarette butt on Ted Bara's star on the Walk of Fame. You can't think of anything more symbolic. An assertive starlet dreams of becoming a new sex symbol and literally stomps her boots on the dubious memory of a movie star (whom no one really remembers anymore), who is considered the first Hollywood sex symbol (Teda Bara was a silent film star, bright but very short-lived; thanks to her aggressive sexuality, she created the image of a vampire woman, but her popularity did not even survive until sound films).

No less symbolic (and ironic) is the fact that the star of the first Puritan in the film is played by Lily Collins, who, while filming the climactic scene as a believer whose soul is taken over by the devil, bites a bleeding apple (the forbidden fruit that caused Eve to fall). Collins had previously played Snow White, who bit off a poisoned apple and literally fell. Similarly, with a cinephile's eye and a cinephile's ear, one can notice that the cops find the bodies of two more victims of the Night Stalker in a pond near the Hollywood Cemetery, or rather, they arrive at the scene after two fans who came to lay flowers on Judy Garland's grave and saw the corpses call the police because it was Garland who played in The Wizard of Oz, and her star, unlike Ted Bara, is still remembered and honored... perhaps because she was definitely not a sex symbol.

One of the most intense scenes takes place in the set of the movie sets, where Maxine is being chased by... Kevin Bacon (and it's not a spoiler, because the hands in the leather gloves are not his). The girl is hiding in the Bates Motel (where, while on a tour, she was so fascinated by the location from her favorite movie that she saw the silhouette of old Mrs. Bates in the window of the house... or the silhouette of old Pearl... or a response from her old self's future). Again, this is deliberately symbolic. After all, the Bates motel is a setting from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, and Psycho is the ancestor of both the jallo and the slasher.

And by the way, in the finale, Maxine appears as a retro blonde from the 1950s and 1960s. This image is both a "Hitchcockian blonde" (the great suspense maestro was a genius, but... he exploited blondes, sexualized blondes and in addition kept in his own shadow his intelligent wife Alma, who was the screenwriter and author of the most daring and innovative of his ideas, including the radical idea to kill the main character of Psycho in the first act); and the infamous sexiest blonde of the twentieth century, Marilyn Monroe, a sex symbol and movie star who, outside the "Hollywood fairy tale," was a completely broken doll in the hands of endless "daddies."

So, if we talk about the leitmotif of the confrontation between the "Hollywood dreamer" and the "patriarch" (literal father, figurative "father," "pope inquisitor," "daddy" Weinstein...), Ti West reinforces it with many obvious and non-obvious allusions. Marilyn, by the way, was obsessed with her father, whom she never knew, and Ted Bara disappointed her father when, instead of getting a serious education, she went to act and get naked in front of the camera... However, Maxine overcame the curse of the "Hollywood girl's" dependence on the "priest" (a woman from the patriarchal system) absolutely mercilessly, in a completely trashy style. What now? Will her star and her freedom shine forever?