JP Nunez
X was one of the most pleasant surprises of 2022, and I’m not talking about the quality of the film. I’m a big fan of writer/director Ti West, so I’m not at all surprised that I enjoyed it. Rather, I’m referring to the movie’s message. It’s a slasher film about a group of amateur filmmakers who rent out a secluded farmhouse to shoot a porno, and if you ask me, that doesn’t exactly sound like fertile ground for deep, thematically rich storytelling.
But somehow, Ti West pulled it off. This movie could’ve very easily been just another sleazy, cliché-ridden gorefest, but he found a way to elevate it far above and beyond anybody’s expectations. It’s actually a really touching and heartfelt meditation on aging and the pain of losing one’s youthful exuberance, and it simply uses sex as an entryway into that deeper theme. It’s a marvel of horror storytelling, so let’s take a deep dive into X and see just how it conveys its surprising message.
Positive About Porn?
But before we dive into the real heart of the film, I want to get something out of the way first. When X came out last year, I saw a lot of people praising it for its positive depiction of sex and pornography, but I don’t think that’s quite accurate. Sure, the protagonists are all enthusiastic about porn, but the way I see it, that’s just their own personal viewpoint, not the viewpoint of the movie itself.
As I said before, X simply uses porn as a gateway to its real message, so it’s not particularly interested in taking a stand on the subject either way. In fact, there’s a scene in the middle of the film that makes its ambivalence about porn pretty clear.
After the film crew finishes shooting for the day, they kick back, have some drinks, and unwind, and during that downtime, Lorraine, the shy girlfriend of the film’s director, asks the producer Wayne if it bothers him seeing his girlfriend have sex with other people. He says it’s okay “as long as the camera is running,” but Lorraine isn’t really satisfied with that answer. She pushes back a bit and asks, “So the camera changes things?” and the rest of the crew says it does. That in turn leads to a larger conversation about how it’s just sex, so it doesn’t really matter who you do it with.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t find Wayne’s answer to Lorraine’s question very convincing. In what other instance does filming something make it okay if it would otherwise be wrong? That sounds like a lame cop-out.
Sure, he and the crew also say it’s just sex, but if that’s true, why does the camera even matter? See, when Wayne says that he doesn’t mind his girlfriend having sex with other people if the camera is running, that implies that he would have a problem with it if it wasn’t being filmed. In that case, it wouldn’t be “just sex,” so we’re back to square one. Why does the camera make a difference? Why is it “just sex” when it’s being filmed but not “just sex” when the camera is absent? X never answers that question, so despite what these characters believe, the movie itself actually raises a legitimate concern that makes its attitude toward porn much more ambivalent than it might seem at first.
Leaving Us with Questions
And in case there’s any doubt about that, X makes it crystal clear just a few scenes later. After that conversation about sex and porn, Lorraine says she wants to be in the film they’re making, but her boyfriend RJ insists that she can’t. At first, he has trouble explaining why, but he eventually says he wouldn’t be able to fit her into the story.
However, when he steps out and talks to Wayne about it, he gives the real reason for his reluctance. He explains, “Lorraine is not like the others in there. She is a nice girl.” In other words, he just doesn’t want his girlfriend having sex with other people (he could’ve worded it better, but that’s essentially his point), camera or no camera, so despite all the lip service he pays to the rest of the crew’s very permissive view of sex and porn, deep down he doesn’t truly believe it. When push comes to shove, he doesn’t want the woman he loves to have sex with anyone else, and that throws a wrench into the film’s seemingly positive attitude toward porn.
What’s more, after they film Lorraine’s scene, RJ takes a shower and cries about it, and he decides to leave in the middle of the night while everyone else is sleeping. Seeing his girlfriend have sex with another man pains him to the core, so he simply can’t continue making his movie. It’s a pretty sad turn of events, but it’s hugely significant. It shows without a doubt that despite what RJ may say, sex isn’t really “just sex” for him and that in turn raises an important question for us: who’s right?
Unfortunately, RJ is killed before he has a chance to hash out his differences with the rest of the crew, so X never really resolves this issue. It leaves us with some legitimate questions about the nature of sex and the value of porn, so like I said before, it’s not really interested in taking a definitive stance either way. It just uses porn as a gateway to its real message, which is all about the pain of growing older and leaving one’s youth behind.
Setting the Stage
So how does X convey that message? To begin, the film subtly sets the stage in the first act with a couple of seemingly throwaway lines that foreshadow its main theme. For example, when the protagonists first arrive at the farmhouse they’re renting, the owner of the place, an old man named Howard, comes across as a very curmudgeonly fellow, and after he shows them the place and goes back to his house, they talk a bit about their unpleasant encounter with the guy.
They go back and forth a bit, and at one point in the conversation, Wayne delivers a key line. He tells his friends, “Oh, calm down. Ain’t no need to harsh the mellow. It’s harmless; he’s just old. His pecker ain’t probably been hard since before you were born. I’d hate people like us then, too.” Now, he doesn’t explicitly lay out what “people like us” means, but given the rest of his remark and the larger context of the movie as a whole, it’s not hard to figure out.
They’re shooting a porno, and Wayne is contrasting his crew with a guy whose “pecker ain’t probably been hard since before you were born,” so his meaning is clear. He’s saying that Howard is so old he can’t have sex anymore, so it’s only natural that he would hate this group of young, attractive men and women. Granted, he’s obviously exaggerating quite a bit, but there’s actually an important bit of truth in his comment as well. Howard really doesn’t think he can have sex anymore, and as we’ll see in a bit, that belief plays a major role in the film’s message.
A Bizarre Encounter
Soon after the crew’s initial encounter with Howard, one of these aspiring pornstars, a young woman named Maxine, goes out and explores the property a bit, and unbeknownst to her, Howard’s wife Pearl stalks her and watches her from afar. Then, when Maxine stumbles upon the couple’s house, Pearl awkwardly welcomes her in and brings out some lemonade for the two of them to enjoy.
It’s a pretty weird moment, but when Maxine gets ready to leave, it becomes even weirder. As Pearl is walking her out, she stops in front of some old pictures of her and Howard when they were younger, and she says, “There wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do for me back then. That’s the power of beauty. I was a dancer in those early years, but then the war came, so…not everything in life turns out how you expect.” And as if that wasn’t bizarre enough, Pearl then tries to make some sexual advances on the young woman, saying, “Such a special face. Beautiful,” but unsurprisingly, Maxine rejects her and goes back to her friends.
At first, this odd scene may seem like little more than just an easy way for X to make its villains super creepy, but it’s actually much more important than that. It gives us a glimpse into Pearl’s mind, and it starts to show us why she and Howard eventually go on their killing spree. See, by calling Maxine “beautiful” right after talking about the beauty she once had, Pearl is subtly saying that the young woman reminds her of her younger self and the youthful exuberance she’s lost over the years.
In fact, seeing Maxine is like stepping into a time machine for her. Both characters are played by the same actress, Mia Goth, so Maxine looks exactly like Pearl did when she was younger. And if there’s any doubt about that, the film’s prequel, Pearl, makes it crystal clear. In that movie, Pearl looks exactly like Maxine in X, so when the older Pearl sees her younger counterpart, she’s literally looking at the youth and beauty she no longer has.
And once we understand that, Pearl actually becomes pretty sympathetic. When she says that Howard would’ve done anything for her “back then” because she was beautiful, she’s implying that that’s no longer the case because she’s lost her good looks. To be fair, Howard proves her wrong later in the film, but at this point in the story, Pearl truly believes it. She really thinks her husband doesn’t love her as much as he used to simply because she’s old, and that’s super heartbreaking, no matter how villainous this woman may be.
The Killing Spree
Some time later in X, Pearl puts on a bit of makeup and asks Howard to have sex with her, but he refuses, claiming that his heart can’t take the strain. This really upsets her, and the movie conveys her dejection in a surprisingly moving way. After the film crew has their conversation about the value of porn and the nature of sex, they pull out a guitar and sing the Fleetwood Mac song “Landslide,” and the camera intersperses the scene with shots of a despondent Pearl taking off her makeup, looking at herself in a mirror, and going to bed.
On paper, that might sound weird or even a bit silly, but it’s actually the most touching scene in the entire movie. See, “Landslide” is all about growing older, so given what Pearl told Maxine earlier in the film, it’s clear that she’s interpreted Howard’s refusal to have sex as another example of his waning love for her. She thinks the days when she was beautiful and he would do anything for her are long gone, and that loss pains her to the core.
Granted, she doesn’t explicitly say any of this (she actually doesn’t say a word throughout the entire sequence), but her facial expressions tell us everything we need to know. In fact, Mia Goth’s performance in this scene is so good you can’t help but feel your heart break for her character all over again. She makes you feel Pearl’s anguish and despair almost as acutely as if it were your own, and that really hammers home just how painful the loss of her youth has been for the poor woman.
Then, later that night, Howard and Pearl begin their killing spree, and X links it pretty explicitly to Howard’s refusal to have sex with his wife. For example, before Pearl kills RJ, she snuggles up to him in a sexual way and tries to kiss him, and she only kills him after he rebuffs her. Similarly, before Howard kills one of the actors, a young man named Jackson, he tells the guy, “I can’t give her what she wants anymore. You don’t understand what it’s like. You can still do as you please. The last bohemian that stayed here was the same, traipsing around in barely any clothes, enticing my wife.”
From those two examples, it’s clear that Howard and Pearl aren’t just deranged psychopaths who kill for the fun of it. No, their murderous rampage has a clear motive: envy. The people staying at their farmhouse are “traipsing around in barely any clothes” and reminding Pearl of her lost youth by “enticing” her to want something her husband can no longer give her, and that angers the couple. Granted, X focuses more on Pearl’s sadness at her lost youth than Howard’s, but it’s clear that he’s also at least a little envious of the young people renting their property.
A Meditation on Aging
Admittedly, even after all that, we’ve still only scratched the surface of X. There’s so much more we could talk about, like Pearl’s eerie dance after killing RJ or the moment when Howard assures her she’s still the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen, but the scenes we covered are enough to get the point across. This movie may tell a story about a film crew making a porno, but on a thematic level, it’s not really about porn at all. Rather, it simply uses porn and sex as a gateway to its real theme, which is the pain that comes with aging and losing one’s youthful vigor.
In particular, it focuses on a woman who’s so despondent over growing old that she and her husband want to deprive other people of their youth, and while that might not sound like it would pack much of an emotional punch, it actually does. Sure, Pearl’s method of dealing with her pain is super unhealthy (to say the least!), but X presents the pain itself in such a way that you can’t help but sympathize with her. It makes for a really touching meditation on what it means to grow old, and for anyone who’s ever felt like they’re not as young as they used to be, it’s sure to be a moving experience few other horror films can match.
