by M. Keith Booker and Isra Daraiseh
In an early review for The Guardian, Charles Bramesco calls Ti West’s 2022 film X a simple “back-to-basics slasher,” though he also notes that it “pits porn stars against elderly killers,” which already suggests that X differs significantly from the typical slasher film. In fact, X is much more complex than it first appears, addressing a number of important issues in sophisticated ways. To complicate things still more, it should also be noted that X gains special richness when it is read in conjunction with its prequel from the same year (but set back in 1918), Pearl: An X-traordinary Origin Story, without which X seems a bit incomplete. Meanwhile, as a film about the making of a film, X is a self-referential work about the filmmaking process that also comments specifically on the quest for fame via the film industry, acknowledging the Hollywood dream factory as a central locus of American aspirations. That the film being made within X is a porn film, though, puts a special spin on this aspect X. Of course, the quest for fame can be a killer, and X definitely contains many elements that are normally associated with slasher films—from the association between having sex and getting brutally murdered, to the presence of a single “final girl” who survives the murders. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about X, however, is the advanced age of its slasher couple, with the elderly wife being a particularly interesting slasher. Indeed, the film’s treatment of age and aging via this elderly female slasher is one of its most important contributions to the horror genre.
The Texas Chain Saw Scenario of X
X overtly calls attention to the extent to which its basic scenario resembles that of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, in that it features a group of young people outside the mainstream Texas cultural norm who arrive at a remote Texas farm and immediately run afoul of the murderous inhabitants. However, in this case, the visitors are the cast and crew of “The Farmer’s Daughters,” a porn movie that they plan to shoot on the farm, having arranged (without, of course, explaining their project to the farmers) to rent accommodations there. The porn motif puts sexuality at the forefront of this film, while the contrast between the youthful (and very sexual) bodies of the visitors and the older, failing bodies of Pearl and Howard provides a key thematic focus.
This main focus ties together the entire film, but X is a structurally interesting film with lots of surprises and subtexts. It begins with a sort of prelude that is actually a coda (because it actually takes place after the events it precedes in the film—anticipating the reversed chronology of the first two films in the X trilogy). In this prelude, the local sheriff arrives at a farmhouse where his deputies are already surveying the scene of what seems to have been a grisly multiple murder. The location of this farmhouse has not yet been specified, though its look is consistent with the later revelation that it is in Texas in 1979. The fact that the sheriff is black seems a bit unusual for this time and place, but then lots of things will turn out to be a bit unusual in this film. An old-style Southern televangelist is preaching on the TV that is playing inside the house when the sheriff enters, also providing a clue to the geographical setting. We hear the preacher complain that his own daughter “was taken by perverts and swindlers and let fall into a world of sin,” a bit of information that will turn out to be extremely relevant later. Then, the sheriff is pointed to the basement, where he observes something so shocking that it stops him in his tracks, though we do not, at this time, know what he sees.
The screen then goes black and cuts to someone preparing to snort cocaine, thus beginning the film proper, twenty-four hours before the time of the prelude. The person doing the cocaine is young Maxine Minx (also played by Goth), who is preparing to go onstage for her performance at the Houston strip club run by her boyfriend, Wayne Gilroy (Martin Henderson). It becomes immediately clear in this first scene, though, that Maxine views her work as a stripper as a springboard to bigger and better things. She looks into a mirror and gives herself a pep talk, complete with Texas twang: “You’re a fuckin’ sex symbol!” she declares. Going forward, it is clear that Maxine has big dreams. Encouraged by Wayne, she is continually reminding herself that she is special. She has, he tells her, “that X-factor,” providing a key clue to the meaning of the title of the film (and of the trilogy it kicks off), though the most obvious meaning is a reference to the X-rated film Wayne plans to make, featuring Maxine and Bobby-Lynne Parker (Brittany Snow), another stripper at his club. It is already clear in the early moments of the film that both Wayne and Maxine exemplify the quest to realize the American dream, though their bargain basement, somewhat lurid, version of pursuing this dream already suggests that this quest is not going to end well.
The cast and crew of the film set out in a van owned by the film’s director and cinematographer, 23-year-old RJ Nichols (Owen Campbell), who is also bringing along his young girlfriend/assistant Lorraine Day (Jenna Ortega), an all-American innocent who seems very out of place in this particular group[1]. For that matter, Nichols is a bit out of place as well. He seems to think of himself as the Orson Welles of porn, hoping that he will be able to make Wayne’s film into a genuine work of art that will launch his own American dream of a successful career as a filmmaker. He assures the others, for example, that he can disguise the low budget of the film with avant-garde editing “like they do in France.” The group is rounded out by Bobby-Lynne’s boyfriend, Jackson Hole (Scott Mescudi), who supplies the male “talent” for Wayne’s film.
Given the title of this porn film, it seems appropriate that Wayne has booked accommodations at a remote farm (it, of course, turns out to be the farm of the prelude) for the actual shooting of the film. At this point, X seems to shift into an overt homage to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. On their way to the farm, for example, they make a stop at a sketchy rural gas station, one of the iconic places of, not only Texas Chainsaw, but the entire genre of rural horror. Meanwhile, the television inside the gas station is showing that same televangelist, as if he constitutes the entire culture of the region. Maxine looks at the televangelist in a way that foreshadows the later revelation that he is, in fact, her estranged father, though we don’t get this information until the end of the film. We then get more foreshadowing (and some key atmosphere building) when the van passes by a dead cow on the side of the road, its guts strewn across the pavementafter it had been hit by an oil tanker, one of the film’s many iconic images. This gruesome scene also supplies some of the dark humor that punctuates this very bloody film as Wayne, realizing that an appalled Maxine is nearly sick from the carnage, quips, “Just when you thought you had escaped the slaughterhouse.” This comment clearly recalls the importance of the slaughterhouse background of the cannibal clan in Chainsaw. Meanwhile, we will later realize that the squishing of the van’s wheels through the guts of the cow on the road foreshadows the climactic moment at the end of the film when Maxine drives an iconic Texas pickup over the head of Pearl, smashing it to a bloody pulp.
Once they arrive at the farm, where Wayne has rented a bunkhouse that was originally built to house Confederate soldiers (but that is actually surprisingly habitable), they immediately come into conflict with Howard and Pearl, though the conflict is not quite of the type that one might first suspect—which would see the conservative Christian morals of the old couple offended by the making of a porn film on their premises, with the added offense that Jackson is black and the women in the film are white. Neither of these issues emerges as central to the film, in which the real conflict is derived from the fact that the frustrated old couple envy and resent the youthful sexual powers of the porn performers.
Aging and Horror
X was part of a wave of contemporaneous horror films featuring older women in key roles, though dangerous, possibly unhinged older women such as Pearl in X have been featured in enough films that these films have their own designation: the “psycho-biddy” subgenre, also sometimes referred to as the “hagsploitation” subgenre. Films such as Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) are typically cited in discussions of this genre, though production seems to have stepped up in recent years, with a number of new wrinkles. For example, The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014) and the Australian film Relic (2020) add elderly dementia to the motif, with an added supernatural twist. Meanwhile, Isabelle Huppert is a rather glamourous psycho-biddy in Neal Jordan’s Greta (2018), and Diana Rigg’s murderous old landlady in Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho (2021) is an interesting recent #MeToo-inflected example of this phenomenon[2]. Older women have also been featured as more positive horror protagonists, as in the much-hyped return of Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode (now a final elderly woman, rather than a final girl) in a new trilogy of Halloween films directed by David Gordon Green from 2018 to 2022. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise also produced a reboot (on Netflix) in 2022, with an aging, but now much more formidable Sally Hardesty returning to battle Leatherface after nearly half a century. That franchise was also an important inspiration for X, as West’s film continually reminds us.
The Texas Chainsaw franchise seems to lend itself to the depiction of aged and infirm characters, perhaps because its combined slaughterhouse and cannibal motifs directly call attention to the physicality of human beings. For example, Leatherface might be the original film’s slasher, as well as its most memorable character, but another very memorable member of the film’s cannibal clan is its ancient patriarch, Grandpa (John Dugan), a dried-up near-corpse who is barely alive, yet still rules the family, thanks to a combination of tradition and habit. To his family, Grandpa is a legendary figure, virtually worshipped by them for his ability to wield a sledgehammer so mightily that he could virtually always kill cattle in a single stroke back in his days working at the slaughterhouse. In the present time of the film, though, Grandpa is so feeble and senile that he can barely even lift a hammer, nor is it clear that he even understands what he is doing when he attempts to do so. Yet his current state of decline and disability seems to go virtually unnoticed by his all-male family, the members of which, not all that functional in their own right, continue to view Grandpa with veneration. And, of course, it is not insignificant that the only female member of this family who appears in the film is Grandma, and she appears only as a long-dead, desiccated corpse, who nevertheless continues to exercise a certain influence, somewhat in the mode of the mummified mother of Norman Bates in Psycho.
The return of a seventyish Sally Hardesty in the 2022 reboot thus seems highly appropriate, though (unlike Laurie Strode in the Halloween reboot trilogy) she had to be played by a different actress (Irish actress Olwen Fouéré, who turned 68 in 2022) than in the original, due to the death of Marilyn Burns in 2014. Memorable from the original 1974 Chainsaw primarily for her impressive screaming ability, Hardesty returns in the 2022 film as a shotgun-toting Texas Ranger, having served a career in law enforcement, meanwhile hoping for an opportunity to revenge herself on Leatherface. In this film, she gets that opportunity, though Leatherface doesn’t seem to have aged at all. He, in fact, has remained rather childlike, living on in an orphanage where he is tended by still another elderly woman, Ginny (Alice Krige), though this caregiver is so upset by a group of young newcomers (now hipsters, rather than the original hippies) that she has a heart attack and dies after only a brief appearance in the film. This death propels Leatherface into a new killing spree, in which we find that he seems weirdly to have morphed into an even more formidable figure than before, now more reminiscent of Halloween’s super-durable Michael Myers than of his own original self. Quite resistant even to shotgun blasts, Leatherface is now so formidable that he makes relatively short work of the new and improved (or old and improved) Hardesty. Leatherface’s newfound power leads to a particularly grisly ending and to a setup for a sequel as he returns to his original family farm in a bonus scene after the end credits.
The quick demise of both Ginny and Sally Hardesty in the 2022 Chainsaw seriously weakens the effectiveness of any commentary it might have sought to make about the aging female body, and the film’s true focus is elsewhere. This motif, though, is much more central to X, in which the central slasher, Pearl (played with extensive makeup by a twenty-nine-year-old Mia Goth), is herself a seemingly fragile and doddering old lady, though her exploits demonstrate that old ladies can still be quite dangerous. These exploits also take this film into the realm of the psycho-biddy subgenre, though Pearl’s ancient husband Howard (Stephen Ure) also plays an important role as her backup. Still, this film really centers on Pearl, especially after the subsequent 2022 prequel film devotes itself to supplying Pearl’s background in a way that retroactively makes her a much more interesting antagonist in X. The prequel, incidentally, features Goth as the young Pearl, which enriches her casting as the old Pearl in X.
The dialogue between Pearl and X also enriches the treatment of aging in the latter by making it clear that the impact of aging on Pearl compounds psychic damage that she had already suffered at an early age. Still, X is clearly very well aware of the psychic impact of aging, and the film resonates with a number of theoretical discussions of aging, especially the aging of women. For example, as E. Ann Kaplan has noted, aging in modern culture can be downright traumatic, especially for women. Or, as Kathleen Woodward puts it, in a comment that is highly relevant to the situation of Pearl in X, aging is particularly hard for women in modern America in terms of “the internalization of our culture’s denial of and distaste for aging, which is understood in terms of decline, not in terms of growth and change” (xiii).
Aging in X is quite clearly presented in terms that recall Robin Wood’s influential argument that horror films represent an attempt to come to grips with the deepest fears that we otherwise have trouble facing: “One might say that the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses or oppresses, its re-emergence dramatized, as in our nightmares, as an object of horror, a matter for terror, and the happy ending (when it exists) typically signifying the restoration of repression” (Wood 68). Wood does not specifically list aging among the repressed fears that figure in horror film, but Adam Lowenstein has built directly upon Wood’s reading of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to note that aging is a crucial motif in that film, and that, in general, the cinema of Tobe Hooper, “involves themes of aging: life’s perceived decay, dissolution, and decrepitude” (70). Using different terminology but making a very similar point, Barbara Creed employs Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject to argue that horror as a genre gives us opportunities to “bring about a confrontation with the abject (the corpse, bodily wastes, the monstrous-feminine) in order finally to separate out the symbolic order from all that threatens its stability” (14).
The old couple of X clearly experience aging as a loss of vigor and capability. Pearl’s dreams of getting off that farm, so central to Pearl, are now long dead, and Howard and Pearl are essentially marking time until they are dead as well.In addition, they are treated quite condescendingly by their young visitors. After the arrival of the newcomers at the farmhouse, Howard walks with Wayne down to the bunkhouse but has to stop on the way to catch his breath. Wayne tries to come to his aid in a way that emphasizes Howard’s age as a form of disability: “You all right there, old timer?” Similarly, Jackson tends to address Howard as “Pops,” clearly regarding the old man as diminished. Indeed, one reason why the old couple is able to kill most of the younger visitors so easily is because they are not recognized as dangerous until it is too late. As Wayne says to the others after their initial encounter with a rather hostile Howard, “It’s harmless. He’s just old.” Then he adds a sexual touch: “His pecker ain’t probably been hard since before you were born.”
The Iconography of Horror in X
The relatively simple opposition between the young porn stars and the old farmers does not entirely capture the texture of X. As the film proceeds, it gradually becomes clear that, while Pearl might envy the sexual powers of her new visitors, she also hopes somehow to conscript those sexual powers for her own use. Indeed, Pearl emerges in the film as a sort of sexual vampire, with Howard serving as her human familiar, helping her to procure human victims[3]. This vampirism might even be termed a symbolic form of cannibalism: in addition to the Sawyers of Chainsaw,Pearl definitely has a lot of Faulkner’s Emily Grierson in her, and the whole tradition of Southern Gothic lurks in the margins of this film throughout.
Pearl is, indeed, a multivalent horror character, suggesting that the horrors evoked by the aging female body are multivalent. For example, as Creed has pointed out, the physical characteristics of older women are often stereotypically associated with witches in horror films (33). At least in terms of her appearance, Pearl certainly evokes these stereotypes. In addition, sheis so ancient and decrepit that she is virtually posthumous, calling attention to the abjection of human physicality and mortality in a way that is reminiscent of many zombie films. Moreover, when we first see Pearl in the film, she is looking through an upper storey window in the farmhouse; we see her from the point of view of Maxine, who is looking up at her from outside. Because it is sunny, the window is almost opaque from the outside, so Pearl is a mysterious, barely visible figure, looking downright ghostly, as if the house is haunted—which, in a sense, it is. As Pearl appears in the window, ghostly music plays on the soundtrack, announcing that Pearl is to be regarded as a sinister presence. Then, in a variation of the standard Hollywood shot/reverse shot, we shift to Pearl’s point of view as she watches Maxine, foreshadowing the fascination with Maxine that Pearl will develop later in the film.
When we next see Pearl, she is once again watching Maxine, who has walked down to the farm’s large pond while the others are shooting the film’s first sex scene back in the bunkhouse. We see Maxine sitting on the boat dock and dipping her toes in the pond, preparing to go in for a swim, while we also see Pearl in the background, again looking ghostly, a halo of glowing backlit white hair around her head, but still not in focus. The shot/reverse shot technique, normally used to convey a conversation between two characters, gains a special force in these early scenes precisely because there is no direct communication between the characters, with Pearl watching Maxine from a distance. But a sort of one-way contact is established, as Pearl continues to watch voyeuristically, while Maxine strips and swims in the lake. She barely escapes being eaten by the local alligator, the existence of which she remains unaware (and of which Pearl declines to warn her). The camera, meanwhile, makes sure we are very aware of that large gator, including one Jaws-like shot in which we see Maxine swimming across the lake, the gator trailing behind and gaining rapidly. It’s a kind of close-call tease that is also another case of foreshadowing, given that Bobby-Lynne will later be eaten by that gator.
Pearl and Maxine will meet soon afterward, in a strange sequence in which the older woman invites the younger woman into the house and serves her lemonade. Pearl seems so sinister here that the lemonade almost becomes another sort of tease, as we wonder if it might be poisoned, though the film cleverly intercuts a simultaneous scene in which Bobby-Lynne is serving lemonade to Jackson on film as part of another sex scene. These parallel scenes suggest a possible sexual charge to the scene between Pearl and Maxine, though Pearl has done nothing to this point that is overtly sexual. She does, however, show Maxine pictures on the wall from earlier in her life, including a wedding photo of Howard and Pearl in which we can see the present-day Pearl reflected in the glass, again appearing ghostlike. Pearl also reveals her early dream of being a dancer, which will be central to the prequel. “Not everything in life turns out how you expect,” she sadly notes—then creeps out Maxine by furtively stroking her back, reinforcing the sexual vibe in this scene. When Maxine is clearly appalled, Pearl simply says, “You should go. It’ll be our secret,” setting up a key punchline that Maxine will deliver later in the film. Maxine does leave, barely escaping the arriving Howard, who seems at this point to be the more dangerous one of the two elderly characters.
When Maxine films her own sex scene for the film (after giving herself another of those pep talks), we see the scene initially intercut with shots of Pearl’s collection of creepy dolls, adding another bit of horror film iconography. Then Pearl comes down to the bunkhouse and peers through the window as the scene is filmed. The voyeurism here is quite overt. She views the scene not as a shocked and disgusted conservative Southern woman but as an envious onlooker whose own sexual desires have long found satisfaction difficult. Indeed, shots of a naked Maxine moving atop Jackson are intercut with shots of a naked Pearl making similar movements, suggesting that Pearl is projecting herself into Maxine’s place. Pearl then goes back to the house and immediately attempts to seduce Howard, but he rebuffs her advances—as he has apparently done repeatedly before. “We talked about this,” he admonishes her. He then reminds her that his heart is too weak to withstand any sort of sexual excitement, leaving her disappointed and in tears, so weak she is struggling to keep standing.
Of course, despite all these resonances of other horror subgenres, X is first and foremost a slasher film. The subject matter of the film takes a turn in that direction soon after a curious Lorraine insists on participating in a sex scene in The Farmer’s Daughters, justified by the fact that “I’m young” and thus extending the film’s equation between youth and sexual vitality. Lorraine’s subsequent performance with Jacksoncauses a jealous RJ to decide to take his van and go home, stranding the others. Pearl stops him, then (apparently excited by watching Maxine’s sex scene) makes sexual overtures, then brutally murders him when he resists her advances. Then she dances, slowly but triumphantly, over his body, as we hear the song “Oui Oui Marie,” which (we learn in Pearl) was a favorite from her younger days. This moment represents a shocking turn in the narrative, though it will appear less shocking as we go forward in this film (and in Pearl). Pearl, it turns out, has a long history of killing, and most of the rest of X consists of a series of murders in which it becomes increasingly clear that Pearl has ultimately decided to kill off all the other visitors so that she can keep Maxine for herself. Many of the murders in this series seem specifically designed for spectacular effect, following the tendency of the slasher film as a genre to move into body horror territory by seeking to find inventive new ways to destroy human bodies.
In addition to her vicious knife attack on RJ, Pearl will also carry out a spectacular killing of Wayne with a pitchfork to the eyeballs, punctuating an emphasis on looking and voyeurism that runs through the film[4]. It is almost as if Pearl here is taking revenge for the fact that men no longer want to look at her aging body. She also has an angry encounter with Bobby-Lynne in which she calls the younger woman a whore and clearly expresses her envy of Bobby-Lynne’s sexual vigor. Bobby-Lynne responds with a quite insightful analysis of Pearl’s problem, declaring, “It ain’t my fault you didn’t live the life you wanted.” Pearl then pushes her into the pond and that earlier tease with the alligator pays off as the animal now shows up and chows down on Bobby-Lynne. Howard then arrives and asks which of the visitors just got eaten. “You know I don’t like blondes,” replies Pearl[5].
This response suggests that Howard has apparently for some time been Pearl’s accomplice in the effort to secure sexual objects to stand in for his unavailability (given his heart problems). He himself is also a killer. His work is less colorful than Pearl’s, though: both of the killings he commits in the film (of Jackson and Lorraine) involve simple short-range shotgun blasts. We never learn the entire history of Pearl and Howard (though Pearl will fill in a lot of the early background). What we (and poor Lorraine, when she gets locked in the basement of the farmhouse) discover is that there is a murdered (male) sex slave shackled to the wall in the basement—which is presumably the shocking sight that the sheriff sees at the end of the prelude. When we learn in Pearl that Pearl also murdered (with a pitchfork) her first extra-marital lover, a young projectionist with whom she becomes involved while Howard is away fighting in World War I, we can put two and two together and assume that there has probably been a sequence of victims over the years, most of their bodies perhaps fed to the pond’s alligators.
Amid all the killings in X (which has an ultimate body count of seven, out of its eight main characters), it is important that the killings of Bobby-Lynne and Jackson have a somewhat different texture than that of the others. In addition to the contribution of Pearl’s hatred of blondes to her particularly vicious killing of Bobby-Lynne, there might also be reasons why Howard seems to take special pleasure in killing Jackson. Though Howard does seem willing to help Pearl procure sex partners, he seems particularly interested in preventing Jackson from becoming a partner to Pearl. “I can’t give her what she wants any more,” he tells a surprised Jackson. “You don’t understand what it’s like. You can still do as you like. Enticin’ my wife. The last bohemian that stayed here was the same. Traipsin’ around in barely any clothes, enticin’ my wife.” Given that this encounter occurs only a short time after Lorraine has discovered that sex slave in the basement (and Jackson himself has discovered what appears to be the slave’s VW Beetle, recently pushed into the pond), it is natural to assume that Howard is referring here to that sex slave. However, “bohemian” seems an extremely odd term for him to use, and it seems even more meaningful when we learn, later in Pearl, that the young projectionist also describes himself as a bohemian, though in a context that seems less incongruous. It only seems natural, then, to conclude that Howard is referring all the way back to that young projectionist, perhaps suggesting that this earlier bohemian was the last of Pearl’s sexual partners (or prey) of whom he was truly jealous.
That Howard would be jealous of the projectionist, who was Pearl’s lover in his absence, makes perfect sense. But, if Jackson is only one in a sequence of Pearl’s potential lovers (some of whom Howard himself seems to have helped her procure), why would he be the first after the projectionist of whom Howard was truly jealous? One reason, of course, could be that Jackson is a budding porn star, which might make him seem a special threat. But Howard is a white man in Texas, born at the end of the nineteenth century. It seems very likely, then, that Howard would regard Jackson as a particular sexual threat for the same stereotypical reason that black men have for so long been regarded that way in the South. Thus, though this film doesn’t really call attention to Jackson’s race in any way, it isn’t as if viewers of the film can’t see. Indeed, we suspect that most viewers are surprised that Jackson’s race doesn’t become a more overt issue in the film.
Maxine and Pearl
Ultimately, despite all the undercurrents and side issues, X pivots on the opposition between Pearl and Maxine. At the end of Maxine’s first encounter with Pearl in the farmhouse, we see shots of an old vinyl LP playing on a record player. It isn’t clear where this record player is—or if it is even diegetic. In any case, a close look shows that the LP playing on the player is Side Two of Loretta Lynn’s 1963 album Loretta Lynn Sings. The first track on that side then begins to play, as the film cuts to Maxine walking along jauntily and happily out in the bunkhouse, in stark opposition to the state in which we have just seen Pearl. Maxine seems to be walking in time with the music from that first track, which happens to be Lynn’s version of the country classic “Act Naturally,” which, of course fits perfectly here, with its “they’re gonna put me in the movies” theme of a “sad and lonely” young woman who hopes that “they’re gonna make a big star outta me.” This song might seem especially apt, but one of the most striking aspects of X is its highly effective and entertaining classic rock soundtrack containing numerous well-known favorites, most of them lively and upbeat, in contrast to the subject matter of the film. The soundtrack even includes a rousing rendition of Stevie Nicks’ 1975 classic “Landslide” (with Fleetwood Mac) performed by Bobby-Lynne in the bunkhouse, accompanied by Jackson on guitar. This song (actually performed by Brittany Snow with Scott Mescudi’s accompaniment—credited to his “music” name, Kid Cudi) is a lament for a failing love affair, though a close look shows that one of the song’s main themes is the inevitability of aging, which is thematically perfect for this film, in which aging is such a key theme.
The beginning of Maxine’s only sex scene in the film rhymes with a scene in the same barn in Pearl, with Goth sporting a similar scarf on her head (and milking a similar cow) in both scenes. The foreshadowing that runs throughout X can thus be seen to extend even into the second film, despite the reversal in chronology. That second film also makes even more clear the extent to which Pearl is a direct predecessor to Maxine, with their lives running in particularly parallel ways. Each comes from an oppressive (and repressive) background, and each has visions of escaping that background to achieve fame and stardom. Both their stories involve the pursuit of a classic American dream, but in both cases that dream turns to a nightmare. Meanwhile, the strong parallels between the lives of the two women suggest a motivation for the heavy use of foreshadowing, in which the life of Pearl suggests the baleful path that Maxine’s life is likely to take, above and beyond the general way that being young foreshadows being old. Given that Maxine herself becomes a killer (though it’s hard to blame her) at the end of X, she seems to be on her way, though she is less trapped and lives in a different time, so there is still a question at the end of X in terms of the direction Maxine’s life will take from here in the third film of the X trilogy, Maxxxine (2024).
The relationship between Maxine and Pearl becomes much clearer immediately after the killing of Jackson, when we cut back to a scene in which Pearl has undressed and slipped into bed beside a sleeping Maxine, beginning erotically to stroke the body of the sleeping woman. It seems clear here, though, that she does not so much want to have sex withMaxine as to somehow absorb Maxine’s youthful sexual vigor in an attempt to rejuvenate her own failing body. Maxine finally awakens, face-to-face with Pearl’s corpselike visage. She screams in horror and disgust, bringing Bobby-Lynne to the room as the naked Pearl staggers away, briefly confronting Bobby-Lynne in one of the film’s many jump scares. As they stare each other in the face, Pearl sees Maxine as the embodiment of the youth she has lost and still dreams of, while Maxine sees Pearl as the embodiment of the abject old age that possibly awaits her[6].
After a brief intercut scene that ends with the TV preacher yelling the line “right under our noses,” Maxine, freaked out from her encounter with Pearl, is then cleverly shown snorting some more cocaine; then, after the scene of Bobby-Lynne’s murder, we see Maxine frantically scrubbing her skin in an attempt to wash off the memory of Pearl’s touch. Her cries of disgust make clear how genuinely horrified she is by that touch, a horror that is undoubtedly related to Pearl’s age and the decrepit state of her body. Conversely, it is the youth of Maxine that attracts Pearl, who clearly views Maxine as a sort of younger version of herself. Moreover, Pearl seems to have a confused notion that she might somehow regain some of her own youth by association with Maxine. Discussing Maxine, as she and Howard total up the killings of the others, Pearl says, “This one was different. She had something special. Like I did. Sick and tired of never gettin’ what I want.” This moment leads to a passionate sexual encounter between Pearl and Howard, apparently the first in years, while Maxine cowers beneath them under the bed. This encounter, in fact, seems itself to rejuvenate Pearl, who announces that she no longer needs anyone else now that she has Howard back in her sexual life. If nothing else, X differs from the typical hagsploitation film in granting that Pearl can still be a sexual creature, even though she is long past childbearing age. Indeed, the sex scene between Pearl and Howard might not be a masterpiece of erotic cinema, but it is at least not accompanied by the note of disgust that has often accompanied the representation of the physicality of older women on film.
The fact that Pearl (both old and young) is played by the same actress as is Maxine makes the point that all old people were young once—and also makes it clear that Pearl’s age is so horrifying to Maxine because, at some level, Maxine is aware that she, too, will someday grow old (if something doesn’t kill her first). In this and other ways, the film specifically puts the two women in direct opposition to one another, including one late direct confrontation between them in which Pearl calls Maxine, who continues to resist her advances, a “deviant little whore” then claims, “We’re the same. You’ll end up just like me.” Maxine responds to this suggestion with a furious declaration: “I’m nuthin’ like you. You’re a kidnappin’ murderin’ sex fiend. I’m a fuckin’ star! The whole world is gonna know my name! I will not accept a life I do not deserve!” However, the vehemence of this response likely arises at least partly because Maxine is very much afraid of ending up just like Pearl, in the sense of becoming old, if nothing else.
The last sentence of Maxine’s response here is shouted in parallel by the preacher on the TV in the farmhouse, and by this time it is clear that this television is not an entirely realistic part of the setting. Despite its religious orientation, the ongoing sermon is not a supernatural presence, either. At one point, Howard is shown switching on the set (to drown out Lorraine’s screams), proving that it is, indeed, physically there, but there is never anything playing on that set except the televangelist, while the source of the signal remains unclear. In addition, the clever way in which the content of the sermons shown on the TV is synched to the action of the film, either seeming to comment on the action or at least enabling clever cuts back to the action, also suggests that the television is a sort of extra-diegetic insertion, even though the characters do seem to be able to see it.
The function of this televangelist, then, seems to be an essentially symbolic one, serving to indicate the Bible Belt context of the action. Meanwhile, the revelation at the end of the film that this televangelist is actually Maxine’s father is so unlikely that, read realistically, it would seem incredibly clumsy and heavy-handed. But this motif is not to be read realistically, nor are the various other motifs in the film that seem a bit cliché. X is an extremely self-referential film that continually calls attention to itself as a constructed artifice, including the fact that we observe the characters making a film. In a rather negative review, Abby Olcese notes the extent to which we are aware of the activities of West in the film almost as much as the activities of the characters: “Instead of the characters being energized by the ad-hoc creative process, it’s West himself who radiates excitement, nearly becoming an off-camera character as X gleefully picks off its filmmaker proxies one by one.”
Pearl is, in many ways, even more self-referential—among other things constructing Pearl’s early dreams with a texture that seems derived from classic Hollywood films of the 1930s, even though the film is set in 1918. It is also clear that the dual casting of Goth as both Pearl and Maxine is itself partly a self-referential stunt, as is the careful construction of Pearl to resonate with X. Granted, the prequel provides us with much more background to Pearl’s character, including a much better and more sympathetic understanding of how she got to be the way she is in X. Pearl clearly suggests that she might have suffered from an untreated mental illness from an early age, as well as a reminder of what a dreamer she had once been before those dreams were shattered. But the way in which X, Pearl, and the relationship between them calls attention to their own construction also suggests the way in which Pearl’s psyche has been constructed by an increasingly artificial emergent consumer capitalist society.Pearl might have been created partly by her particularly difficult family circumstances, but her path has also been greatly influenced by the historical circumstance of growing up in an early-twentieth-century American society that encouraged her to dream big but offered her few opportunities to realize those dreams. X suggests that this process is still at work in 1979, though the intervening decades of increasing commercialization and commodification have by this time begun to produce dreams that are increasingly tawdry.
Works Cited
Bramesco, Charles. “X Review – Back-to-Basics Slasher Pits Porn Stars Against Elderly Killers.” The Guardian, 16 March 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/mar/16/x-review-back-to-basics-slasher-pits-porn-stars-against-elderly-killers. Accessed 8 November 2022.
Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1993.
Kaplan, E. Ann. “Trauma and Aging: Marlene Dietrich, Melanie Klein, and Marguerite Duras.” Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations. Edited by Kathleen Woodward, Indiana University Press, 1999, pp. 171–94.
Lowenstein, Adam. Horror Film and Otherness. Columbia University Press, 2022.
Olcese, Abby. “X.” RogerEbert.com, 14 March 2022, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/x-movie-review-2022. Accessed 8 November 2022.
Walker, Billie. “Hagsploitation: Horror’s Repulsion of the Ageing Woman.” Refinery29.com, 29 March 2022, https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/hagsploitation-horror-ageing-woman. Accessed 28 December 2022.
Wood, Robin. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan and Beyond. Revised and expanded edition, Columbia University Press, 2003.
Woodward, Kathleen. Introduction to Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations. Edited by Kathleen Woodward, Indiana University Press, 1999, pp. ix–xxix.
Notes
[1] Ortega’s look is so innocent that she is perhaps best known for playing the lead in a TV series called “Jane the Virgin,” though her recent turn as the title character in the Netflix series Wednesday (2022) suggests an ongoing evolution in her image.
[2] See Walker for a concise survey of the persistence of the hagsploitation mode in recent cinema, including X.
[3] There is an entire body of vampire films in which a woman vampire retains her youth by drinking or otherwise employing the blood of younger women, typically virgins. Many of these, from Countess Dracula (1971) onward, are based on the story of the sixteenth-century Hungarian Princess Elizabeth Báthory. X also taps into a wider body of horror films featuring old women who regain youth by preying on the young, going back at least to The Leech Woman (1960).
[4] We will learn in Pearl that pitchforks have long been a favorite murder weapon for Pearl.
[5] We know from Pearl that Pearl has reasons to hate blondes, which might explain the relish with which she dispatches Bobby-Lynne.
[6] One might compare here Joachim Trier’s acclaimed The Worst Person in the World (2021), which is not a horror film, but which features a moment of horror when the youthful protagonist experiences a drug-induced vision of herself as an old woman with a spectacularly sagging older body.