I Will Not Accept a Life I Do Not Deserve
By: Enaya Wickremage
There is a specific kind of woman that most people in society often tend to misunderstand. It is a woman who does not seek permission to begin again, wait for apologies, or allow her past to become the only story ever told about her. A woman who knows she deserves more from life and will do just about anything to achieve it. A woman without a victim mindset.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, a victim mindset can be defined as a way of thinking in which a person sees themselves as powerless against their circumstances and believes that other people, life events, and past experiences are the reason for their unhappiness. Rather than focusing on what they can change, they often focus on the negative events that happened to them and let their pain shape later decisions in life. Ultimately, whether they realize it or not, this way of thinking NEVER gets anyone anywhere they want to truly be.
Maxine Minx, the protagonist of Ti West’s psychological slasher film MaXXXine (2024), the final movie of the X trilogy, embodies the refusal of the victim mindset. She is a fiercely self-reliant, ambitious woman unwilling to surrender the future she believes she deserves. What makes her so intriguing is that she is not your average uncomplicated feminist icon, nor is she a conventional heroine whose suffering makes her morally pure. Her choices are often brutal, and her determination can rise to disturbing levels, but that’s exactly what gives her character depth. Throughout the film, she invites us to consider what it actually means to reclaim ownership of our lives.
Every Woman Has Her Backstory
Set in the neon glamour of Los Angeles in 1985, Maxine, an up-and-coming film star, is determined to break into mainstream Hollywood, and after years of pursuing recognition, she finally lands an audition for a horror film that could potentially transform her career. However, her pursuit of stardom quickly becomes entangled with a continuous string of murders specifically targeting young women in Hollywood. As fear runs rampant throughout the city, a private investigator finds Maxine and begins threatening to expose her connection to the bloody events of X (the first film of the trilogy), where she was the sole survivor of a massacre on a remote farm in Texas, owned by the antagonist of the second movie, and prequel to X (Pearl, 2022), Pearl, and her husband, Howard. Disturbing memories of her past begin to reappear, threatening to destroy the new life she is desperately trying to build for herself. As the mystery deepens, Maxine finds that the threat to her future is way more personal than she could have ever imagined, as her struggle isn’t just against a murderer, but it is also against a past she has been desperately trying to escape for years. All in all, the movie revolves around the themes of ambition, survival, and the lengths that someone will go to take ownership of their own life.
Redefining the Trauma
The violence that Maxine experiences at the Texas farmhouse is not something that can just easily be forgotten. Her friends are killed, one by one in various ways, and she finds herself trapped in a situation where her only chance at surviving was dependent upon her ability to act fast. The massacre could have single-handedly become the defining event of her life.
However, instead of returning in the third movie as a woman who is defined by her trauma, she continued working, continued pursuing her ambitions, and placed herself in a position to achieve something far beyond the circumstances of her disturbed past. She is obsessed with becoming a Hollywood A-lister and is dead set on that goal, unwilling to let anyone convince her that her previous life makes her any less deserving of that future.
What makes her determination, so commanding is that the world she lives in repeatedly offers her reasons to give up. Her background in the adult-film industry was treated by Hollywood as a major obstacle to mainstream success. Her survival of the massacre made her a clear target for blackmail by the authorities. The murders surrounding her threatened the career that she was striving for. And she persevered through this all while having to come face to face once again with the trauma she was so desperately trying to leave behind. As we see, even when danger comes in, Maxine absolutely refuses to abandon the future that she had envisioned for herself.
Her character becomes even more distinct when compared to the character of Pearl, the antagonist of X and the lead of Pearl (2022). Pearl was also a woman who dreamt of becoming a star one day. She was trapped on an isolated farm, had an insufferable mother, and was overwhelmed by family responsibilities, and ultimately, just like Maxine, was faced with a life that offered multiple reasons to give up. And when she fails the audition, which was her one-way ticket to get her away from everything, her behaviour becomes increasingly violent.
In comparison to Pearl, Maxine challenges the image of a female victim that is considered “traditional”. A woman whose suffering becomes the central theme of her story, whose identity has been shaped by what has been done to her, and whose recovery is measured by how she manages to return to the life society expects of her. She offers no easy narrative and is angry, defensive, and sometimes frightening, but never makes herself seem smaller to become more sympathetic.
The parallel between the two women is evident. They both desire more than the lives they live, and both resent the limitations placed upon them. Yet, their paths still diverge. Pearl becomes trapped in the bitterness of what she believes life has denied her, while Maxine remains fixated on the possibility of what she believes she could achieve, highlighting two very different responses to unfulfilled desire.
There is an important distinction between forgetting what has happened to you and refusing to let it dictate what happens next. Maxine cannot magically erase the Texas massacre, nor can she undo the losses that she experienced. Despite this, she refuses to accept that these events must determine the limits of her identity and does not consider her life to be over because it has been marked by violence.
Maxine’s refusal to become a victim of her past is fascinating, as it is a reminder that nobody should have to remain defined by what has happened to them. She sets the example that we can pursue new ambitions, establish boundaries, and reject the labels and identities that others may associate us with, refusing to let shame become a permanent home in our lives. We can not only become stronger than the things that hurt us, but we also have the opportunity to decide who we want to become after surviving them.
