The X Trilogy and Explicit Content

The abandoned art of making intimate acts neutral - Lain

The X trilogy is comprised of three movies: X, Pearl, and MaXXXine. All three are lead by Mia Goth and directed by Ti West.

Admittedly, they are my favorite films to date. I am painfully aware of how hated they are, even back when X dropped in 2022. I was in my freshman year of college, and I dragged myself to see it in theaters instead of focusing on finals.

It stuck with me enough I went back to see it twice more that same week.

Every review I read thereafter had a similar conclusion: The films are sex and gore just to satisfy a certain audience - lacking substance in terms of plot or relevancy.

So, here is my review of the X trilogy, and the messaging I believe was missed.

*Note: Spoilers for all 3 movies are included here.

Now, for those who haven’t seen it. I’ll give a brief summary of each film before delving into their themes.

X is the beginning of our story, where a group of strippers, their manager, a film buff and his girlfriend all set out to a cabin in the woods to make the first ever adult video. The old couple who run the farm attached to the cabin turn out to be renting out the cabin to lure young people to their deaths, picking off the group one by one.

Pearl is the second movie, but actually happens around 50 years prior to the story of X. We discover the story of the old woman, Pearl, who was the antagonist in the first movie. Through her perspective, we see what started her murder spree, and the struggles she faced while her husband was deployed.

MaXXXine is the last of the three, taking place a few years after the first movie. It follows Maxine, our final girl from the first film. We see her working multiple explicit jobs around Los Angles, and facing yet another killer who is targeting street workers. She seems to be the center of these killings, leading multiple organizations to chase her for answers all while a murder slowly picks off her support system once more.

With the plots out of the way, let’s discuss the three main themes that exist in these films: Purity culture, and breaking free of routine.

Purity culture is one of the most direct and overarching themes in the three films. Maxine’s career revolves around her body, and every challenge she faces is people disagreeing with her use of it. What’s new, right?

This movie did something I hadn’t seen before, even in modern film: it made her body painfully uninteresting in every scene she showed it. Every time there was nudity with Maxine involved, it would crop to focus on her face or would black out to just dialogue. Her body was the money maker, but not something the plot revolved around. Rather, it was Maxine’s personality and behavior that pushed things forward. Her drive allowed her career to break into Hollywood acting.

In Pearl, this concept is similar yet from a different lens. Pearl wants to be a line dancer and loses her audition to her sister-in-law. This happens because her sister is blonde - pretty in a traditionally “pure” way for the 1920s. She’s limited by her appearance no matter how desperately she wants freedom from the mundane, abstinent farm life she’s been forced into with her husband gone.

Our next theme is “breaking free”.

Maxine breaks free from her religious upbringing to become an adult dancer at her fiancé’s club - then, after he dies in the first film, she has to break free of only performing in explicit content to become a “real” film star.

She fights for it, desperately. This isn’t a new concept in film either, but the way it’s portrayed here is almost uncomfortable to polite society. She’s not begrudgingly pushing herself through sex work, but she’s not enjoying it either - it’s a distinctly neutral part of her character. Her breakthrough is the focus, but it doesn’t take away from the struggle to get there.

Pearl fails to get her breakthrough. She doesn’t ever escape the farm she hated her whole life, still having to tend to it forever. She does everything she can to get what she wants and still fails. She doesn’t get a happy ending or ever becomes a proper dancer.

It shows a reality for the character. She wasn’t good enough, so her efforts went to waste in the end. She fought, just like Maxine, but forced into submission the moment the world outside of her small town deems her boring and average. She allows it to define her.

These themes aren’t uncommon but are often misunderstood by the audiences. The explicit images and scenes aren’t for the viewers pleasure, they’re for the characters growth, discomfort, or struggle. To boil these characters down to their intimacy is to defile the reason that intimacy was included in these films at all.