A Story of Two Princesses: Maxxxine, Pearl, and Los Angeles: The Three Years of Maxxxine Revisited
For now, Maxxxine marks the end of the story. As has been the case before, West is still thinking about where the franchise can go from here. While he’s not giving anything away just yet, there is one key difference this time: he might actually take a break. He wants to get the snowball rolling on whatever he is hoping to be next, then take a little vacation before jumping into it.
He was able to land on the franchise’s unique naming scheme. The original plan was for X to be followed by XX and XXX, but he started working on other films. When he wrote Pearl, it was clear that the movie should be titled Pearl because of the name Maxine has. If she had no X in her name, we wouldn’t have called it that.
The first two films are the accompanying pieces. The sets are the same and Mia Goth is in both. In Pearl, she’s the titular villain, and in X, she plays both an aged Pearl and Maxine, the sole survivor of the elder’s latest massacre. Stylistically, the films are different — one awash in bright Wizard of Oz colors, the other grimy like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre — but they share a tight connection through the story, location, and cast. West says that he always had “rough ideas” for a trilogy but didn’t really commit to writing until he knew the next movie was a sure thing.
Bender’s fictional film within a film helps establish early on what kinds of real-world movies MaXXXine ultimately excels at echoing — cheesy, practically created thrillers revolving around beautiful young people and psychopaths hot to murder them. MaXXXine has a much larger scope compared to the last film by West, which was just a little bit smaller.
Six years after narrowly escaping with her life and setting off to realize her dream of becoming a mainstream movie star, Maxine has wound up in Los Angeles and damn near done the thing thanks to an unflappable work ethic and the unwavering support of her crooked agent Teddy Knight (Giancarlo Esposito). In a town full of newly minted blondes hungry for big breaks, neither Maxine’s thick accent nor her willingness to show skin is quite enough to make her stand out — especially for bigger-budget projects that aren’t just about people having sex. The director is so convinced that she has found the star of her new supernatural horror, The Puritan II, that she met with Maxine and watched her try out.
You can feel West channeling the sexiness of dramas like Flashdance and the grimy glamour of neo-noirs like Body Double as Maxine rushes from her gigs at a strip joint to rehearsals on set. The world of MaXXXine is larger and more complex than that of Pearl or X, and coupled with Goth’s steelier performance makes Maxine feel almost like a different character. West also uses this newly added space to paint a picture of LA (the city) at its sleaziest and emphasize how the US’s Ronald Reagan-era political conservatism had a transformative effect on the era’s larger pop cultural landscape.