Women, Sex, ‘X’ and Subverting Retro Feminist Tropes
X via A24
This discussion contains spoilers for X.
The act of watching, according to Laura Mulvey’s groundbreaking essay from 1975, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” is a morally ambiguous one.
Drawing upon aspects of psychoanalytic theory, Mulvey argues that traditional cinema and its representation of the female form are structured around patriarchal ideas of sexual difference. The ways in which audiences are intended to interact with female and male characters in Western cinema are distinct and communicated through tension between objective and subjective perspectives. Female bodies are reduced to objects of desire, spectacles constructed to sexually stimulate and satiate the scopophilic tendencies of the spectator. Women play a passive role in film, generating visual pleasure as objects of the audience’s gaze while lacking the agency to redirect it. Male characters, on the other hand, play more active roles in the narrative, and they embolden the audience’s voyeurism by sexualizing and objectifying their female counterparts. The subjective perspective enables the audience to indulge in the narcissistic desire to view themselves in the ideal male archetype presented on screen. "In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female," Mulvey writes.
Horror is no exception to this analysis. In fact, it exploits, manipulates and amplifies the tension created by the objective/subjective, feminine/masculine, and passive/active dynamic to achieve its intended effect. Central to Mulvey’s theory is the idea that women in film are unable to control and direct their own narrative — the plot, and the actions of the male characters driving it, are forced upon female characters in a way that strips them of autonomy. In horror, the objectification of female characters is seen primarily through indiscriminate sexual violence and extreme female victimization. Take the infamous saw scene from Terrifier (2018), in which Catherine Corcoran’s character is hung naked upside down and sawed vertically in half.
Gender’s centrality to the genre extends beyond portrayals of sexual violence. The highly gendered slasher subgenre boasts an array of gender-driven tropes, some of which superficially undermine Mulvey’s analysis, but the objectification/projection duality persists. One example is the trope of the Final Girl, first identified by Carol J. Clover in her book Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Clover drew upon Mulvey’s analysis in her characterization of the Final Girl as virginal and innocent, qualities which set her apart from other female characters, who are presented as promiscuous and morally impure. The Final Girl is initially presented through the subjective perspective of the male killer, but as the film progresses, the perspective shifts as the viewer begins to more strongly identify with her. The Final Girl is masculinized to allow male audiences to identify with her; she often has a unisex name (like Sidney Prescott, Chris Higgins and Laurie Strode), presents androgynously, and uses a phallic weapon in her final action against the killer.
Arguably, the Final Girl is a reflection of the values of second wave feminism, which focused on women’s sexual liberation, but there is ultimately little liberating value to be found in it. Writer and director Anna Biller wrote of the trope on Twitter: “ … the ‘final girl’ is not there in most cases to celebrate a strong woman. She is there to dispel male voyeuristic guilt at the pleasure of watching eight other disposable women be violently killed, and so he can call his entertainment progressive.” Female characters in slashers have long been defined by their relationships with men, either as Madonnas (sexually pure and chaste, like the Final Girl) or as Whores (possessing strong sexual agency, usually killed off early). This Freudian dichotomy is inherently antifeminist, and the trope itself is tired and in need of reinvention in the form of subversion, a feat that filmmakers like Karyn Kusama (Jennifer’s Body, a feminist horror cult classic) and Ari Aster (Midsommar) have accomplished within the last two decades.
The most recent addition to the growing body of slasher-trope subverters is Ti West’s X, which premiered at South by Southwest in March. The film, set in rural Texas in the ‘70s, follows a group of adult filmmakers — cocaine-fueled stripper Maxine (Mia Goth), her producer boyfriend Wayne (Martin Henderson), aspiring indie filmmaker RJ (Owen Campbell), his shy girlfriend Lorraine (Jenna Ortega), unemployed dancer Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow), and budding pornstar Jackson (Kid Cudi) — who set out to make a pornographic film in anticipation of the boom of the home video market. The group rents a guest house from an elderly couple, Howard (Stephen Ure) and Pearl (Mia Goth), with the intention of using their farm as the setting for their film, all under the noses of their withdrawn hosts. Tension builds as Howard becomes increasingly suspicious of the group’s actions and Pearl draws uncomfortably close to Maxine, culminating in the couple embarking on a killing spree fueled by Pearl’s anger at her husband’s inability to have sex with her. After a series of gruesome and oddly Biblical deaths, Maxine emerges as the film’s “Final Girl,” crushing Pearl’s head under the tire of a truck and driving into the night in a The Texas Chainsaw Massacre-inspired ending sequence.
The most obvious subversion of the Final Girl trope lies in the identity of the final girl, Maxine. Unapologetically boundless and secure in her sexual identity, she embodies the antithesis of the vestal Final Girl described by Clover. There is also a noteworthy lack of “phallic appropriation,” when the Final Girl brandishes a knife or chainsaw and plunges the phallic weapon into the killer. If anything, Lorraine was set up to be the Final Girl early on in the film. The others in the troupe jokingly call her “Church Mouse” because of her reservedness and unwillingness to participate in the film beyond helping RJ by holding the boom mic. She initially protests her boyfriend’s participation in the film, citing its obscenity, but after being involved with its production, she asks Wayne if she can be in a scene. This reversal (besides being very disconcerting to fans of Disney’s Stuck in the Middle) marked the moment in the film where her role as the Final Girl was compromised. Without the characteristic naiveté and moral conformity, can Maxine truly be considered a Final Girl?
X’s subversion can also be seen in its representation of sex. Slashers are notorious for killing off teenage couples after they’ve had sex, and the effect is disproportionately faced by teenage girls in slashers who are killed for their overt or implied promiscuity. For example, in the original Friday the 13th movie, Pamela Voorhees specifically targets people who are about to have sex. In Halloween, three of Michael Myers’ victims have sex right before getting killed. X has none of that … sort of. Yes, all the characters killed in the film either have sex on screen or are involved with the porno in some way. But that includes the film’s killers. Pearl and Howard pause their killing spree to have (very tentative) sex, all while Maxine lies quietly under the bed. Sex is Pearl’s central motivation for wanting to kill, but its not because she thinks sex is immoral or otherwise corrupt — her anger against the porn stars stems from jealousy; jealousy of their youth and virility, and ability to have and commodify sex, things which have faded from her life as she aged. They are killed because their ability to have sex is coveted, rather than taboo.
The standout moment in the film for me is when, after killing Pearl, Maxine drives away from the farm. The roughly thirty second segment cuts from a wide shot of road to a medium shot inside the car, and to a final close up sequence of Maxine’s face. As mentioned before, this moment was heavily inspired by the ending of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre when Sally Hardesty escapes the clutches of Leatherface and rides the back of a pickup truck to freedom. The key difference is the control the women have in that moment, which is reflective of the larger control they have over their narratives. Sally finds herself at the mercy of yet another man, the one driving the pickup. He controls where the vehicle goes, where Sally herself will end up. Maxine, on the other hand, drives the truck rather than riding in the back of it; in that moment, she is in control of her narrative. In Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990), it is revealed in the introductory speech that Sally died in a healthcare facility. She survived the ordeal of the first movie only to be killed off in its sequel sixteen years later, a single plot point in a story ultimately centered on the male killer.
Filled with humorous and thought-provoking moments, X effortlessly communicates the existential dread of aging and accomplishes what any good film should: it manages to spark these essential conversations without being boring or overly moralizing. To answer the question posed earlier, I don’t think Maxine is a textbook Final Girl. A lot of the presumed Final Girls in recent horror movies haven’t been, either. Perhaps we’re in the middle of a new era of them, where their characteristics will shift to value more than her sexuality. ♦