X (Ti West, 2022) (Patreon)

Shakedown: 1979

Confession: I've never seen any of Ti West's other films, and so even though I spent a lot of X kind of wishing Rob Zombie had tackled the material instead, I eventually had to give The Other Mr. West props. X takes a lot more formalist care than it really needs to, something I quite enjoyed despite the fact that the pretentious filmmaker character (Owen Campbell) explicitly remarks that "avant-garde" techniques are great for disguising a low budget. But the, there's an arch tone bordering on smugness that runs throughout X, as if West were a bit bashful about his participation in anything so hipster as "elevated horror."

He needn't have worried, since X is hundreds of kilometers away from the likes of The Witch or Midsommar. Working from the basic Texas Chainsaw Massacre template, West uses homemade porn as a kind of theoretical obverse of the slasher film (both "body genres," per Linda Williams), even (again, in a rather self-satisfied way) having a character note at the end that what began as a porno flick clearly became "fucked-up horror movie." So while I was a bit irked by the overall tone of X, I have also never seen a mainstream-adjacent film adopt Gregory Markopoulos's woven form of editing, toggling back and forth between scenes and locales for purely tonal reasons.

There's also the question of how seriously X wants us to take its dominant themes. This group of young sex-work upstarts from Houston, 1979 -- topless bar owner Wayne (Martin Henderson), dancer-cum-actors Maxine (Mia Goth) and Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow), male performer Jackson Hole (Kid Cudi, appearing under given name Scott Mescudi), the cameraman (Campbell) and his demure sound recordist girlfriend (Jenna Ortega) who decides to cuck him by going gonzo -- are a mixed crowd, but all exude a thoughtless arrogance that so often accompanies youth. They behave as if the world is theirs for the taking, with only Jackson (a Black Vietnam vet) displaying any real seriousness of purpose. It's an overstatement to say that these kids are irredeemable twats, but it's also not especially painful to watch them die.

Is X gerontophobic, or a film about gerontophobia? Granted, by making the psycho killer an aged bohemian disgruntled by the way her life has turned out, West is providing more of a psychological frame for her madness than The Shining did, or most of the other films that play the Scary Old Crone card. Of course, for the porno kids and most of X's viewership, old age equals death, an unwelcome look into the abyss. But by making elderly Pearl (Goth in old-face) a bitter bisexual horndog, West at least intimates that it isn't her desires, but the social stigma attached to them, that results in death and dismemberment.

Then again, Pearl and Howard (Stephen Ure) have their TV constantly tuned to a frantic, Estus Pirkle type preacher (Simon Prast) who bangs on about the evils of contemporary sin, and although his presence is mostly a set-up for a cheap good-girl-gone-bad reveal, it also complicates our perception of Howard and especially Pearl. When she confronts Maxine for the last time, Pearl calls her a "deviant little whore," but also avers "you're just like me." X trades on a horror film cliche, that the murderer is a repressed prude who kills anyone who seems to enjoy their sexuality. But it adds an interesting twist.

Since the film is set in 1979, the young people aren't Boomers, nor are they generation X. They're betwixt those two groups. Meanwhile, Howard was a veteran of both World Wars, placing him and Pearl squarely in the so-called Greatest Generation. Pearl enjoyed being an urban libertine, and still very much wants to be. But old age and circumstance have given her a specific set of tools for dealing with this sense of loss. It's Jesus, along with some sharp farming implements. It's not particularly revelatory to suggest that our modern-day Christo-fascists are deeply repressed. But it is worth considering how the lives of Gen-Xers, Millennials, and Zoomers are all currently being controlled by angry Boomers. They did all the drugs, had all the sex, have ridiculous pensions and stellar health care, and now that their fun is over, they want to lower the boom on the rest of us. 

In other words,