No spoilers because it’s still a new movie!
Maxine Minx (Mia Goth) is a maenad. We meet her here at thirty-three, pragmatic about her career in porn where “women age like bread not wine” and this movie is about her pivot to that other body genre: horror. With a palette reminiscent of Ken Russell’s Crimes of Passion, in an outfit that Nomi Malone would covet, Mia Goth STRUTS into our brains in double denim as we follow her into the strip club and onto the porn set, all set to ZZ Top’s Gimme All Your Lovin’. One of the things I like about this song is that it is about a man begging for sex, and it stands in for every single man who would like to fuck Maxine. She is surrounded by the desires articulated by Gimme All Your Lovin’ and yet, in spite of her undeniable raw power, Maxine does not seem especially interested in fucking anyone for pleasure. She remains driven by desire, but that desire is for a more socially legitimate kind of fame. No longer the dirty-minded ingenue of X, Maxine is a woman who knows she is a star, and it is only a matter of time before everybody else sees this.
Set against the backdrop of the Nightstalker killings, and the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, we see real footage of heavy metal bands in court over their lyrics and imagery. Looking at these proceedings now, I find it additionally hilarious since quite a few of those guys absolutely went to art school or did a humanities degree. You can tell they got into music because becoming a poet was less viable; plus, you could have long hair, experiment with your gender expression and everyone wanted to fuck you. Yes, I am thinking about bands like Whitesnake when I say this.
About a year ago, I was watching a lot of old music videos on YouTube with a pal who asked me my top Bon Jovi song and I said IMMEDIATELY “hands down, Wanted Dead or Alive.” I spent a lot of time listening to Slippery When Wet, (released in ’85, the same year MaXXXine is set) as a not-quite-adolescent. Wanted Dead or Alive has a weariness to it that I like, and Maxine has that same weariness and grit. She too knows what it means to be wanted in this way, through her notoriety and through her secrets.
When Maxine turns up wearing this t-shirt, I found myself disappearing down a particular kind of rabbit hole. That t-shirt isn’t just a free-floating signifier about how people (wrongly) imagine porn workers (always ready to say yes) but like so much in this film, it grounds us in the historical moment. Oui is the name of a now defunct adult magazine. I recognised the font, because this was a magazine that I remember looking at in my youth. Reflecting on my past encounters with hard copy porn and rock music, I found myself thinking about what I was listening to in the mid-80s. I read a lot of rock music magazines, but it did feel that women weren’t the musicians: they were fans, journalists, photographers, but they didn’t say the things that men said with their lyrics and their clothes. It was a narrow slice of popular culture that somehow neglected to show me the legacies of people like Patti Smith or Stevie Nicks. It would be a few years before Madonna released Justify My Love, and I got my mind blown watching Madonna: Truth or Dare (Alex Keshishian and Marc Aldo Miceli, 1991) in the cinema.
There are a lot of textures to appreciate in MaXXXine. I imagine Maxine herself smells like the foil paper you used to find in cigarette packages, freshly opened with little flecks of tobacco clinging to them, hints of inexpensive cocoa butter lotion, and hair mousse. This is a film steeped in places that reek of stale cigarette smoke, that taste of full-fat Coke, and congealing pizza. The blood here is always giallo blood, grotesquely produced, excessive, squelchy. The streets are garbage strewn, and the peep shows recall some of the real locations on offer in the criminally underseen Variety (Bette Gordon, 1983), which along with Ken Russell’s Crimes of Passion (1984) is certainly an influence and inter-text for MaXXXine. The fact that Maxine’s break-out role comes via a folk horror franchise, made by a maverick director who is a woman seems no accident; Elizabeth Bender (Elizabeth Debicki) is a kind of icy, femme Ken Russell, with her films The Puritan I and II sitting somewhere between arthouse and grindhouse (once more A24 is on point with the merch. At long-fucking-last, A THONG! Any pals looking to get me a belated birthday gift this would be most welcome). MaXXXine left me with is a strong sense of reclaiming imagery and narratives that have made women subject to things they did not want, but thr throughline in West’s trilogy is the quest for legitimate stardom. The hunger for fame is explored throughout these three films, and particularly how this desire shapes both Pearl and Maxine, and their different trajectories. If X is about the horror of no longer being perceived, and Pearl is about the devastation of failed attempts to receive attention, then MaXXXine is about the tension of curbing the attention you don’t want, while still demanding the attention you know you deserve.
Glorious as always 💕