Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of MaXXXine
2024 · Ti West · MaXXXine on Sightlines
The last act of MaXXXine plays out on a hill at Universal, in front of the house from Psycho. Not a replica built for the shoot. The studio's own standing set, still up on the backlot, borrowed back into a new movie. Maxine walks toward it the way anyone walks toward a house. That shot tells you what Ti West is doing with the whole film: horror history isn't being referenced here, it's the ground she's standing on.
West's trilogy is one idea run three times in different clothes. X as backwoods slasher, Pearl as Technicolor melodrama, MaXXXine as 1985 Los Angeles sleaze-thriller, with Mia Goth carrying all three. The method is genuinely his: reconstruct a specific past cinema so exactly that the reconstruction turns into an argument about it. The common objection to this last installment, and it was common, was that it's all surface. Gorgeous homage, thin mystery. I think that reading has the machine backwards, and Deleuze can show you why.
In the chapter of his first cinema book given over to Hitchcock, which is convenient given the house, Deleuze describes what he calls a mark: an object that means what it means because of a chain of habit you already carry. A black leather glove enters the frame. You don't wonder what it is. You know a woman is about to die badly, and you know it because of Blood and Black Lace in 1964 and sixty years of Italian murder pictures after it. The glove holds no meaning. You do. Deleuze's claim is that a whole class of cinema composes itself out of relations the audience holds rather than facts the screen states, so the meaning arrives as a third thing, made between the image and a trained viewer.
That isn't a failure mode. It's a compositional method, and it's the one MaXXXine is written in. The split-diopter staging, foreground and background both knife-sharp at once, is De Palma's from Dressed to Kill. The gliding first-person prowl over fetish objects, married to Tyler Bates's pulsing synth, is Deep Red. The gel-saturated color is Suspiria. The camera as a weapon, recording as a way of killing the thing recorded, is Peeping Tom, which in 1960 ended Michael Powell's career for saying so out loud. Lay them side by side and a film that looked decorative starts to read as a sentence assembled out of other people's words.
Look at what that does to the killings. In the classical action film someone perceives a situation and acts to change it. Giallo broke that circuit. The murders in Blood and Black Lace don't transform a situation, they're arranged, lit, and presented for looking. Deleuze borrows a term from Eisenstein for exactly this transposition: the attraction-image, where action stops being performed and starts being figured. West's killings work that way, staged as set pieces in inherited grammar rather than as plot events, and Eliot Rockett's light finishes the job. Sodium-vapor orange, hard red and blue neon, a Los Angeles lit for iconographic charge instead of realism. Deleuze would call that an affective colour: a color that absorbs the entire scene, so the feeling sits in the light rather than on anyone's face.
Then there's who's watching. Deleuze calls it a dicisign when the camera perceives a character who is themselves perceiving, and you feel the camera in the room as a second watcher. West stacks them. Maxine performs for a camera; the performance appears on a monitor; the monitor's image ends up on tape; the tape becomes leverage in a stranger's hands. Laura Mulvey gave the standard name to what classical Hollywood did to women, making them the object of a look organized for somebody else. What's strange and good about Maxine is that she isn't ambushed by the look. She wants it. She's bargaining with it, trying to convert it into a career before it converts her into footage.
Which is why videotape is the film's real monster. The killer's currency is compromising tape and the plot runs on blackmail. Deleuze, following Zola, called this register naturalism: a derived milieu of agents, auditions and studio gates laid over an originary world of raw appetite that keeps breaking up through the floor. Tape here is a fetish in the strict sense, a part-object, a piece of a body cut loose and charged with compulsive force. And the originary world of MaXXXine isn't the industry. It's her father, the fire-and-brimstone televangelist, the shame that manufactured the appetite. The film puts the satanic panic, the video-nasty panic and the porn economy in one frame and lets you see they run on the same fuel. The man who wants to burn the tape and the man who wants to watch it are looking at the same thing.
One structural move deserves its name. Setting the murders in 1985 drops them inside the real Night Stalker summer, so any given body might belong to the film's plot or to history. Deleuze calls an act that could belong to two different situations an index of equivocity. It's how West keeps a mystery honest while the style screams.
Back to the house. Deleuze's crystal-image is an image and its reflection trading places until you can't say which one came first. The Bates house is about the purest crystal available to an American filmmaker: a structure that has never been anything except a picture of a structure, which West then photographs as a location, in a movie about a woman playing a part in a horror sequel, played by an actress who in X also played the old woman hunting her. The mirrors don't stop.
Goth holds all of it together with a posture rather than a psychology. "I will not accept a life I do not deserve" is not a feeling. It's a stance held in place, what Deleuze, after Brecht, calls a gest: an attitude that exposes a social relation. Survival worn as armor over the wound that made the armor necessary.
So what did the film do? Its forward influence is still forming and anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing. What's already legible is the shape: three films, three genre grammars, one performer, a star credited as producer and co-author of her own myth, which is a template independent horror was already reaching toward and which this executes at maximum volume. It also leaves a problem it has no power to resolve, the thing Deleuze calls a discourse-image. A period reconstruction of a moral panic about corrupting pictures, sold as one of the corrupting pictures. West doesn't settle it, and I don't think he can.
Watch it again for the deep background of the wide shots, where he keeps putting things you aren't meant to catch the first time. Then decide, on that hill, whether Maxine escapes the horror movie or finally just gets top billing in it.
Concepts in play
- Mark (relation-image) — The citation grammar the film is written in: the black-gloved killer inherited from Blood and Black Lace, Dressed to Kill's split-diopter staging, Deep Red's first-person prowl with synth — objects that signify through a chain of habit the audience already carries
- Attraction-image — Murders staged as giallo set pieces, arranged and lit for looking rather than as acts that transform a situation; West's neo-giallo staging of the killings as inherited spectacle
- Affective colour — Rockett's sodium-vapor orange and red-and-blue neon after Suspiria's primary gels; the Walk of Fame, adult theaters and the Hollywood sign lit for iconographic charge rather than realism, so the feeling sits in the light
- Dicisign — Screens nested within screens — Maxine performing for a camera, watched on a monitor, watched again on tape — plus the voyeuristic long-lens and prowling setups that install the audience as a watcher, extending Peeping Tom's camera-as-weapon
- Crystal-image (hyalosign) — The climax staged on the actual standing Bates house and Psycho motel façade at Universal, a set photographed as a location, with Goth playing Maxine playing a role in The Puritan II, and Goth having played Maxine's pursuer, aged Pearl, in X
- Originary world / derived milieu — The 1985 milieu of agents, auditions, video stores and adult theaters revealed as the crust over the fire-and-brimstone televangelist father, whose repression is the engine of the violence; the satanic panic and the porn economy shown running on one appetite
- Fetish (part-object) — The compromising videotape as the killer's currency and the plot's engine — a detached fragment of a body charged with compulsive force and traded through blackmail
- Index of equivocity — The real Richard Ramirez "Night Stalker" killings running behind the fictional murders, so any given death could belong to either situation
- The gest — Goth's Maxine as brittle armor over trauma; the carried-over mantra "I will not accept a life I do not deserve" played as a held posture rather than an emotion, exposing the terms the industry sets
- Discourse-image — A 2024 reconstruction of the video-nasty and satanic-panic wars over corrupting images, made and sold as one of the corrupting images, posing the problem without resolving it