X (2022)

R and we should be happy that it stopped there.  I mean, the title of the movie is X, which is a horror movie surrounding the creation of a pornographic movie.  Yeah, there's a lot of objectionable content here.  Besides the sexuality, nudity, , sexual assault, language, and drugs, you can add violence, gore, scares, and blasphemy.  It's got everything.  

DIRECTOR:  Ti West

I wasn't going to watch it.  From the trailer alone, I thought that I didn't need this in my life.  If we were to diagnose me and characterize me, you'll now realize how much of a role that FOMO plays in my life.  Honestly, I only heard good things about this movie.  I can see why people are kind of obsessed.  But all that being said, I can say that I'm a bit tired of a lot of horror.  If you want everything shocking and things that are upsetting per A24, that's great. In fact, I'll even say that X is more fun than most A24 movies.  But in terms of actually delivering something that is satisfying, I think I'm just a tired old man who probably keeps his serial killer old lady wife in a farmhouse.

It's not that I don't have anything to say.  I do.  If anything, X is a celebration of the low budget cinema of the '70s.  Is there a pornographic element those films, sure.  As someone who tends not to endorse such films, it didn't really hit that button for me.  But I'm talking more about the can-do attitude of ambitious filmmakers in the '70s.  X has a Texas Chainsaw Massacre vibe that is super fun.  I don't know what it was about the horror movies of the '70s.  Maybe the fact that no one really seemed like a celebrity.  (Now I have to pretend that Jenna Ortega didn't just blow up in the past twelve months.)   There's something very garage rock about the whole thing and I think that X captures that vibe.  It's the cinematography.  It's the acting.  It's funny, because there's a lot of work that goes into X to make the movie look cheap while we're all wholeheartedly aware that there's nothing cheap about it.  This has to come from Ti West.  I don't know much about Ti West.  The reason I know the name comes from the face that there are now three movies in this series (despite the fact that the movie has a 2022 release date). But I've seen House of the Devil and I realize that West's big thing is his attention to detail, especially when it comes to pastiche.

But, per usual, I want to explore the morality of X.  X has a message and I'm kind of giddy to say that it's a bit more complicated than what my gut is going with.  From the start of the movie, we meet the gang of pornographers. The majority of the protagonists are there for fame and fortune. They have a lovable-conmen vibe to them.  We know that they are not naturally gifted with success.  From an outside perspective, both because we have the dramatic irony of knowing that this is a horror movie and the fact that this archetype rarely ends up with pennies from heaven, there's an understanding that this movie is going to go poorly.  There are two in the van who consider themselves to be artists: the director and his girlfriend, the church mouse.  I do love that so many of these characters fit into archetypes so readily because it makes analysis so much easier.  Anyway, like many of the morality slashers that I grew up on, we acknowledge that, because they are morally grey, the film allows them to be victims of this mass murder.  It's really screwed up that we're wired this way when it comes to storytelling, but West kind of wants to point that out.  From all perspectives, the Church Mouse should be the Final Girl of the movie.  After all, she's Jenna Ortega (admittedly, not of Jenna Ortega fame yet).  Because she's the prudish outsider, it only makes sense that she's going to escape the carnage that occurs at the farm.

But the film refuses to stay on the Church Mouse.  Maxine quickly grabs the attention of the camera.  She's the more shy of the two porn stars, which seemingly gives her a foot in both worlds. She's somehow distanced from the audience because of her profession, but also so shy that she can observe the world from the same perspective of the audience.  Bobby-Lynne is too cartoonish to be our protagonist.  Her loud disposition is there for both comic relief and for sex appeal, which doesn't necessarily make for a well-rounded heroine.  This is where West pushes archetypes even further becacuse Maxine isn't one person either.  While Maxine sober is the blank slate to relate to the audience, her drug use almost rockets her into another personality.  Maxine on drugs is haunting, eventually leading to the blurring of lines of heroine to potentially even worse villain than Pearl and Howard.  Maxine's true personality is the coke-addled one, by the way.  That's what the movie feeds us.  So we're left with almost no real everyman because even the Church Mouse abandons her moral code for the thrill of stardom.

This is where things get complex.  To a certain extent, Ti West is advocating for the "whatever makes you happy" / judgement-free lifestyle of the filmmakers.  As kind of gross as Wayne gets, he's not wholly wrong.  All of the filmmakers seem genuinely pretty happy.  They have a devil may care attitude that real life would absolutely destroy.  But the Church Mouse realizes that she's the most upset part of the group.  Now, West uses these Easy Riders to contrast the view of the conservative right.  Throughout the piece, this deep south farmhouse is being peppered a televangelist.  There's something automatically gross about the televangelist.  If I wrote it out right here, I'd come across as bigoted, but he's the gloom-and-doom, fire-and-brimstone type.  The televangelist's congregation is Pearl and Howard.  They're the villains of the piece.  They're the ones who chop up kids for having a good time and that's what most movies leave us at.  But Pearl is somehow more complex than all that.  Pearl and Howard do seem to believe the words of the preacher, but Pearl holds more in common with the filmmakers than she does with the religious right.

The climax of the film almost leaves us with the message that everyone's the same: pornographers and preachers.  Howard has his heart attack after killing the Church Mouse.  It comes down to Pearl and Maxine, both played by Mia Goth.  This is where the double-casting kind of plays a loop with the brain. Maxine's entire philosophy is to take the life she deserves, which is echoed from the preacher's mouth.  It isn't Pearl who is repeating the words of the preacher.  West reveals that Maxine is the wayward daughter of the preacher on TV,  a point that almost has no meaning to me.  I don't think this moment needs to happen.  But I do love how think the line between holy roller and condemned sinner actually is.  It's when Maxine takes her role as Final Girl to a new level where we realize that Maxine's drug fueled survival mechanism makes her the ultimate predator.  Time has repeated itself (from what I'm assuming, these ideas will be cemented in Pearl) and Maxine has become the new Pearl (something that I'm sure that MaXXXine will cover.) 

But, I do think that there's a little bit of messiness there.  I like the movie a lot and I'm glad that West makes the film more challenging than a standard slasher film.  But I don't know if the double casting is absolutely necessary.  There's something very fake about Pearl and Howard that comes across as somehow distancing.  For a long time in the movie, we don't get any shots of Howard and Pearl.  Part of that is to save for later in the movie when the two go on a rampage.  But the other element is that it isn't convincing.  There might be something actually scarier with casting actual old people. The movie might be missing one of the more important elements because I just kept seeing behind the camera for scenes with Howard and Pearl.

But do you know what I like most about the movie?  There's something very meta about the film itself.  I think there is no greater comment on the rise of A24 as a film studio, especially when it comes to horror films, than X.  RJ, the director, is out there to prove his craft.  He knows that what he's making is pornographic, thus hiding in the lowest escelons of pop culture.  If genre storytelling is low-art, then pornography is even lower than that.  But RJ's entire purpose for being the direct of this movie is to create a movie that even the greatest naysayer can stand behind.  How on the nose is that for A24?  It was only this year that A24 really cracked open and dominated the Academy Awards.  As gorgeous as many of their other genre films have been, they've largely gone ignored by the cinematic canon.  Somehow, horror seems like lesser movies.  And the point of all of the goings-on in X are about making a movie that people can't ignore, despite the subject matter.  Now, I find it funny that X really leans hard into cheap slasher territory for a lot of the movie. In an attempt to make it come out of the '70s, some of the artsier techniques that we see in things like Midsommar or The Witch aren't seen in this movie.

But what greater comment on genre storytelling is there than to compare horror movies to pornography?  I have that emotional and logical distance between the two.  But horror, like pornography, to a certain extent ties to those baser instincts of society.  The crazy thing is that I can justify watching a horror movie in my brain.  It, like much of entertainment, is meant to be intentionally false. It's that feeling of adrenaline that is undeserved.  But the entire movie has the victims of these attacks somewhat sympathetic.  Yeah, again, Wayne is a jerk. But every one of the victims of this movie tends to be an overall good person.  Ironically, the most unsympathetic character in the movie is church mouse, who takes out her own insecurities on Maxine immediately after Maxine saves her life from Howard.  It's got some legs, this analysis stuff.