The new horror thriller from Ti West Maxxinethe third film in his trilogy that begins with X And Pearlcontains an odd detail that’s easy to overlook since no one ever mentions it: the title character’s best friend, Leon (Moses Sumney), has a cast on one arm. It’s dirty and tattooed, suggesting that his arm was broken far enough in the past that he’s had enough time to have it signed and dirty from use, but not far enough back that it’s healed. Also, his glasses are broken and held together with prominently placed tape. What happened to him isn’t part of this story — but there are hints of it onscreen.
Viewers learn very little about Leon over the course of the film. Maxxineeven though he is clearly meant to be a vital part of her life, as one particularly emotional scene suggests. The merging of what we Doing to learn more about him – especially from elements that don’t quite add up unless you read between the lines – it feels like Maxxine had a Leon subplot that was cut at some point, or West wants us to put the pieces together to figure out what’s going on with him. Let’s investigate the clues.
(Editorial note: Major spoilers ahead Maxxine.)
Xan ode to horror films from the seventies such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacrerevolves around the ill-fated production of a pornographic film filmed on a Texas ranch in 1979. The protagonist: Maxine Minx (Mia Goth), a ruthlessly ambitious wannabe movie star whose motto is, “I won’t accept a life I don’t deserve.” In that film, Maxine survives a massacre of the film crew, partly caused by one of the embittered, older ranch owners, Pearl (also played by Goth). The second film, Pearlis a flashback to the time when Pearl (Gothic again) was young and had her own ambitions for fame. The style is based on classic musicals from the 50s.
Maxxinewhich takes place after Maxine’s escape in X and her arrival in Hollywood, is set in 1985. Like the other two films, the visual and narrative inspiration comes from films made in the era depicted, most notably Brian De Palma’s 1984 slasher thriller. Doppelganger. That becomes relevant to the Leon story, in part because West says the film was inspired by the moral panic of the time. As West put it in a Q&A after a recent preview of the film:
(Maxxine It’s reminiscent of the home video boom (in the ’80s) and things like that. In 1985, there was a huge moral outcry about censorship, and about lyrics and music that were causing people to kill each other and commit suicide, and in horror movies that were too violent, or movies that were too violent in general. Or kids having access to things that they shouldn’t have. And so there was this weirdly puritanical moment in the mid-’80s, in response to things like “video nasties” in England.
That moral panic about screen violence mixed with a moral panic about the AIDS epidemic, and a backlash against gay Americans over AIDS fears. All of this places Leon in an era where queer people on screen in mainstream films were likely to be either predators or victims. This was especially the case in horror films, which typically treated them in notoriously exploitative waysAnd that’s relevant because, although no one in Maxxine If Leon ever uses the word “gay,” he’s coded as a queer character.
Image: A24/YouTube
We know only a few things about Leon: He runs a video store and knows a lot about movies — enough to casually reel off a list of movie stars who got their start in horror films. Maxine lives in an apartment right above the store, which probably explains how they met. They’re such good friends that when she finally gets her big break in a Hollywood film directed by the venerated newcomer 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 entirely explain their relationship — as he mutters at one point as she leaves his store, he believes she only likes him because he’s the only guy she knows who “doesn’t try to get in (her) pants.”
A later scene where Maxine and Leon both fall asleep while watching Bender’s breakthrough horror film The Puritanwith Maxine’s head on Leon’s lap, suggests a comfortable physical intimacy and a high level of trust between them. Does that mean he’s gay? It wouldn’t be in 2020s Hollywood, where it’s somewhat more accepted that men and women are capable of friendship, and that casual physical contact isn’t always sexual.
But in the language of 80s movies, it’s unambiguous coding. And in the language of Maxxinea gender-conscious horror film in which attractive women are cast primarily as prey for monstrous men, it is even more obvious. If he is not among the ranks of men who seek to exploit, violate, control or mutilate Maxine — if he is not a sleazy slut who sees all women in terms of sex or violence — it may only because he’s gay. The only man a woman in an 80s exploitation thriller would be safe with is someone who has no interest in women at all.
Image: A24/YouTube
If you take that for granted, it suddenly explains a few things that aren’t explicitly explained in the film. One happens when a barely visible man enters the video store late at night and Leon gets glum, tells him something like, “I don’t do that anymore, this is just a video store,” and throws him out, closing the store behind him. The other comes when the bad guy, a leather-clad slasher who had only ever targeted women up until that point, chops poor Leon to pieces in a scene that looks a little like a Brian De Palma murder (complete with paint-y, too-bright blood and too-obvious gore makeup), and a little like “Detective Arbogast meets his end in Psycho(complete with a straight slash that sounds like a direct visual reference).
What happens in that scene? Why does the killer specifically target Leon? What did the other stranger want and why did Leon reject him? And what does the broken arm have to do with it? Think about this story. There aren’t enough solid clues to confirm or deny it, but it would at least tie all the pieces together. Maxxine leaves scattered.
The killer, Maxine’s estranged father Ernest, turns out to be a televangelist driven by self-righteous religious mania. He has a classic Madonna-whore complex attitude toward women and fears his beloved daughter has turned into the latter, but he wants to confirm or convert her into the former. He has tortured, branded and murdered Maxine’s strip club colleagues in what he sees as punishment for their sins — a classic archetype of religious hypocrisyintended to be ridiculed for its grotesque idea of Christian righteousness as much as to be feared.
Leon is gay and remains largely in the closet, as he would have to do to stay safe in an era where conservative and religious leaders held sway. aggressively stoking fear about homosexual menwhich leads to a new wave of hate crimes against themBecause it’s a dangerous time to be open, Leon uses the video store for anonymous contacts, or works as a con man on the side — a likely scenario in Maxxinethe increased exploitation atmosphere of Los Angeles, where everyone in Los Angeles is selling their body in one way or another.
Image: A24/YouTube
Then he has an encounter that goes wrong. Maybe one of his customers attacks him, or maybe (like Maxine earlier in the film) he’s attacked by a stranger who sees him as an outlet for frustration. He ends up with a broken arm and a new determination to avoid behavior that might make him a target. When one of his old customers shows up at the store, he declares that he’s done with that part of his life, whether that means turning tricks or just having sex.
When Ernest kills Leon, it’s not a random attack or a warning to Maxine, but because Ernest is watching the store, knows Leon is gay, and sees him as another sinner who needs to be punished. It’s no coincidence that he kills Leon right after one of Leon’s old flings shows up — it’s West who quickly reminds us that the one guy who won’t get into Maxine’s pants has something else going on with his sex life.
Does Ernest kill Leon out of vicious homophobia, because he corrupts Ernest’s supposedly pure daughter with his vicious homosexual presence? Or does he want to get rid of him, because Ernest wants to kidnap Maxine? Is it a warning to her, since Ernest is deliberately terrorizing her? Or just another exploitative element in the film? That’s a lot more than West tells us. There’s a lot about Leon that’s not addressed in this film, 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 everything and everyone to get the life she thinks she deserves, having a close friend in her life who she likes and trusts is a narrative hurdle. Maybe she had to lose Leon, and the tenuous connection to humanity he represented, to reach her final form. Maybe that’s what that final shot of her fake-decapitated head on a bloody bed on the set of her film really means – she achieved everything she wanted, but she couldn’t get there until most of her was chipped away piece by piece, either through the trauma of Xthe death of her friends and father in Maxxineor her own conscious choices.
Perhaps West had more in mind for Leon, but had to cut him out of the story to get to the heart of the matter. (Polygon has reached out to us for comment and will update if we hear back.) Either way, all the odd little clues surrounding him suggest there’s more to his story than what we got in the final cut.
Maxxine is now playing in theaters.