Ti West’s new horror thriller Maxxxinethe third film of his trilogy, starting with X And pearlcontains a strange detail that’s easy to miss because no one mentions it: the title character’s best friend, Leon (Moses Sumney), has an arm cast. It’s dirty and tattooed, suggesting that his arm was broken a long time ago so he’s had plenty of time to sign it and get it dirty from use, but not long enough for it to heal. On top of that, his glasses are broken and held together with conspicuously placed tape. What happened to him isn’t part of this story — but there are hints of it onscreen.
The audience learns very little about Leon throughout the story. Maxxxinealthough he is clearly meant to be an important part of her life, as one particularly emotional scene shows. When we put together what we Do to learn something about him – especially from elements that don’t quite fit together if you don’t read between the lines – it feels like either Maxxxine had a Leon subplot that got cut at some point, or West wants us to put the pieces together to figure out what’s going on with him. Let’s get to the bottom of the clues.
[Ed. note: Major spoilers ahead for Maxxxine.]
Xan ode to horror films of the 1970s like The Texas Chainsaw Massacrerevolves around the doomed production of a porn film being shot on a rural Texas farm in 1979. It stars Maxine Minx (Mia Goth), a ruthlessly ambitious wannabe film actress whose motto is, “I will not accept a life I don’t deserve.” In this film, Maxine survives a massacre of the film crew, orchestrated in part by one of the bitter, elderly farm owners, Pearl (also played by Goth).. The second film, pearlis a flashback to the time when Pearl (again Gothic) was young and had her own ambitions to become a star, and is visually based on classic musicals of the 50s.
Maxxxinewhich after Max ine’s escape in X
[Maxxxine is] reminiscent of the boom of home video [in the 1980s] and stuff like that. In 1985, there was a huge moral outcry about censorship and about lyrics and music causing people to kill each other and commit suicide, and horror movies being too violent or movies in general being too violent. Or children having access to things they shouldn’t have. And so there was this weird puritanical moment in the mid-80s in response to things like “Video Nasties” in England.
This moral panic about violence on television mixed with a moral panic about the AIDS epidemic and a Backlash against gay Americans due to AIDS fearAll of this places Leon in an era where queer people were likely to be either perpetrators or victims in mainstream films. This was especially true in horror films, where they were more likely to be notoriously exploitative methodsAnd that is relevant, because while no one in Maxxxine ever utters the word “gay,” Leon is coded as a queer character.
We know only a few things about Leon: he runs a video store and knows a lot about movies—enough to casually rattle off a list of movie stars who started their careers in horror films. Maxine lives in an apartment directly above this store, which probably explains how they met. They are such close friends that when she finally gets her big break in a Hollywood film directed by revered up-and-coming actress Elizabeth Bender (played by Elizabeth Debicki), she runs straight to Leon to tell him. But the proximity of his store and her apartment doesn’t fully explain their relationship—at one point, when he mutters quietly to himself as she leaves his store, he thinks she only likes him because he’s the only man she knows who “doesn’t try to get into [her] Trousers.”
A later scene in which Maxine and Leon both fall asleep while watching Bender’s groundbreaking horror film The Puritanwith Maxine’s head in Leon’s lap, suggests a comfortable physical closeness and a high level of trust between them. Does this mean he’s gay? That wouldn’t be the case in 2020s Hollywood, where it’s a little more accepted that men and women are capable of friendship and that casual physical contact isn’t always sexual.
But in the language of 1980s films, it is a clear code. And in the language of Maxxxinea gender-conscious horror film in which attractive women are mostly portrayed as prey for monstrous men, it is even more obvious. If he is not one of the men who want to exploit, rape, control or dismember Maxine – if he is not a lecherous lecher who sees all women as sex or violence – it can only maybe because he’s gay. The only man a woman can feel safe around in an ’80s exploitation thriller is one who has no interest in women at all.
If you take that as a given, it suddenly explains a few more things that aren’t overtly explained in the film. One happens when a barely-seen man walks into the video store late at night and Leon gets serious, tells him something like “I’m not doing this anymore, it’s just a video store,” and throws him out and closes the store behind him. The other happens when the villain, a leather-clad slasher who had only targeted women up until that point, chops up poor Leon in a sequence that’s a bit reminiscent of Brian De Palma’s murder (complete with painted, too-bright blood and too-obvious gore makeup) and a bit like “Detective Arbogast Meets His End in Psycho“ (complete with a straight slash that acts as a direct visual reference).
What is happening in this scene? Why is the killer specifically targeting Leon? What did the other stranger want and why did Leon turn him away? And what does the broken arm have to do with it? Consider this narrative. There aren’t enough clear clues to confirm or disprove any of it, but it would at least tie all the pieces of the narrative together. Maxxxine Leaves scattered around.
The killer, Maxine’s estranged father Ernest, turns out to be a televangelist type driven by self-righteous religious mania. He carries a classic Madonna-whore attitude towards women and fears that his beloved daughter has turned into the latter, but wants to confirm her as the former or convert her to the former. He has tortured, branded and murdered Maxine’s strip club colleagues, which he sees as punishment for their sins – a classic Archetype of religious hypocrisy
Leon is gay and largely hides his homosexuality, which he had to be in order to be safe in a time when conservative and religious leadership aggressively stir up fears of gay menwhich leads to a new wave of hate crimes against them. Since it is a dangerous time to come out and be open, Leon either uses the video store for anonymous dates or works as a crook on the side – a likely scenario in Maxxxine‘s heightened environment of exploitation, where everyone in Los Angeles is peddling their body in one way or another.
Then he has an encounter that goes wrong. Maybe he’s attacked by one of his customers, or maybe (like Maxine earlier in the film) he’s attacked by a stranger who sees him as an outlet for his frustration. He ends up with a broken arm and is once again determined to avoid behavior that could make him a target. When one of his old customers shows up at the store, he says he’s done with that part of his life, whether he’s working as a prostitute or just having sex.
When Ernest kills Leon, it’s not a random attack or a warning to Maxine, but because Ernest has been spying on the place, knows Leon is gay, and thinks he’s another sinner who needs to be punished. It’s no coincidence that he kills Leon right after one of Leon’s old acquaintances shows up – West is quick to remind us that the one guy who won’t touch Maxine has something else wrong in his sex life.
Does Ernest kill Leon out of vicious homophobia for corrupting Ernest’s supposedly pure daughter with his evil gay presence? Or does he want him out of the way because Ernest is setting up to kidnap Maxine? Is it a warning to her as Ernest is deliberately terrorizing her? Or just another exploitative element in the film? There’s a lot more to this than West tells us. There’s a lot about Leon that isn’t addressed in this film in order to keep him in the background so West can focus on Maxine’s story.
And since her story is explicitly about how ruthless she is, how willing she is to let go of anything and anything to get the life she thinks she deserves, having a good friend in her life that she likes and trusts is a narrative obstacle. Perhaps she had to lose Leon and the tenuous connection to humanity that he represented in order to achieve her final form. Perhaps that’s what the final shot of her fake severed head on a bloody bed on the set of her film really means – she’s achieved everything she wanted, but she couldn’t achieve it until most of her was cut away piece by piece, whether through the trauma of Xthe death of her friends and her father in Maxxxineor their own conscious decisions.
Perhaps West had more planned for Leon, but had to largely cut him out of the story to get to the point. (Polygon has reached out for comment and will update us if we hear back.) Whatever the case, all the weird little clues surrounding him suggest there’s more to his story than we saw in the final cut.
Maxxxine is now in theaters.