Titane

By Eva Lucy Alvarado

My forehead is pressed against the window of a Lyft on a depressingly muggy October day. My friend is chatting with the driver about Squid Game, but I’m clutching the handle of the door for dear life; I’m carsick, and I think I know what’s coming. We’re on our way to  see Julia Ducourneau’s Titane, her second feature film. I have tried to explain Ducournau’s signature whimsical-yet-exacting vision of body-horror to my friend, but I don’t think she understands exactly what we are about to undergo. I’ve told her that Raw, Julia Ducournau’s debut film, supposedly made people throw up at Cannes. That’s a red flag for some, but I adore Raw for its cultish, dreamlike examination of desire and consumption. I can’t deny that watching it takes stamina, though. The “Black Ice” scented tree hanging from the rear-view mirror is rapidly undermining the strength that I’ve tried to build, but I’m still excited. If Titane holds any of the catharsis that Raw offered, this will be worth it. Watching body-horror is akin to throwing up to fix a hangover; a disgusting yet willing engagement; hellish, but ultimately a relief. I wonder whether I should feel bad for enjoying the brutality so much, or for bringing my friend down with me into this cinematic hangover. Female-led horror films often feature women undergoing an excess of pain and violence, which raises questions about the sadistic tastes of directors and viewers alike. Something about Ducournau’s work is different, though. Ducournau – whose blonde hair and tasteful, efficient clothes make her look like she plays tennis in Greenwich – uses violence and bodily mutilation as something women enact upon themselves and others, rather than something that simply happens to them. 

The current landscape of pop-feminism is preoccupied with victimhood. Film is no stranger to this, and a canon of twistedly triumphant female-centered movies is rapidly accumulating. Films like Midsommar, Gone Girl, and Jennifer’s Body, (so unfairly maligned in its time), are having a heyday. Those who delight in the supposed feminine empowerment of these stories emphasize the ways in which the main character’s unhinged, violent behavior is ultimately warranted. At the reductive core of the  fervor surrounding these so-called “Good for Her” narratives is the implication that a woman can do seemingly irredeemable things in the pursuit of overcoming the wrongs of patriarchy, and that this is a sufficient response to patriarchy in and of itself. The question of representation is also present in these films. The portrayal of an imperfect woman can be seen as a challenge to the two-dimensional Madonnas and Whores, Mary-Sues and Strong Female archetypes  bound to their relationships with men and burdened with their own singularity. 

Most “Good For Her” films do, in fact, portray a complex perspective on womanhood, violence, and revenge. This nuance is easily collapsed, however, through the lens of victimhood. By this same measure, it is possible to reduce her actions to that of a hysterical villain; this common, frustrating, and uncharitable interpretation is familiar to anyone who has been perceived as feminine. The crux of this problem is that the “Good for Her” narrative is a reactionary one; female characters are slighted by a male character, and years of repressed rage are unbound, leaving our heroine covered in blood, triumphant over her circumstances. To access the catharsis offered in these films, it is possible to fully justify the main character’s actions, but it is also possible to believe she is entirely in the wrong. Either way, she is bound to her status as a victim–her triumph is confined to the realm of empowerment via her revenge. But what can our main character do to be truly liberated from the flattening spectacle of victimhood? 

We take our seats in the theater. It’s one of the smaller ones, not even half full, but it is, after all, a matinee for a French body-horror film. My friend orders red wine–a bold choice, in my opinion, but she had the good sense not to order any food. I sit, practically buzzing, at the edge of my shooshy-but-sticky recliner, and we begin. The premise of Titane is laid out very clearly in the first few minutes of the film. Our main character, Alexia, is a serial-killing, car-fucking, cyborg-arsonist. She owes this condition to her acetic and distant father, who is responsible for a car accident that led to a titanium plate being attached to the side of young Alexia’s skull. “Okay,” I think, looking around at the two-and-a-half other people paying attention in the theater, “I can see where this is going.” But I can’t. Upon first watch, Titane is dreamlike–internally coherent yet impenetrable, structured yet amorphous, confusing yet illuminating–which has led some critics to deem it an ambitious, but ultimately thematically-and-narratively-overloaded film. The cinematic hangover I mentioned earlier barely covers it; this is cinematic food poisoning. 

Still, the symbolic and structural framework of Titane is intentional ,the key to its ultimate artistic success. Ducournau’s attention to psycho-analysis. The symbols and thematic threads in the film are numerous, but they mirror and tug upon each other, resolving themselves through a detailed latticework of affect. Alexia must overcome her maniacal itch by being redeemed, rather than by getting revenge. In the care of a fire chief who lost his son 10 years prior, Alexia becomes Adriene, taking on the role of the beloved child she never was, and of the son her new father lost. Meanwhile, Alexia-as-Adriene must hide her burgeoning pregnancy, passing through the masculine bonding rituals of the firefighting squad. All at once, she is mother, father, daughter, and son, completing her own Oedipal dynamic with a person who is as deranged as she is. This confrontation of sexuation and sex makes it hard to reduce Titane or its main character into a pithy headline or quippy tweet. Certain reviews of Titane barely address the film as a whole, and use its particularly brutal or controversial moments to weave together some assertion of its problematic nature, or propose that it is a simple reaction to male-directed, female-centered horror. Ducournau is likely unconcerned with this hand-wringing. She has made a monstrous version of who Emma was to Jane Austen, “a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.”

In its first act, there are several moments in which Titane could become a “Good for Her” story. After the car crash, the first act of the film yanks the audience by the hand through a slice of Alexia’s life as an adult. In the theater, I am clutching my enormous Diet Coke and failing to anticipate what will come of this. Is Alexia a vigilante, seducing men for work and killing those who cross her? Will she find a satisfying sapphic relationship with another car-stripper, jettisoning the desires of the men that surround them, as well as the judgements of her father? These would-be arcs suit a “Good for Her” narrative; placing Alexia as a victim of a series of interactions with men. In this vision, Alexia would respond to and triumph over these moments of victimhood as a vigilante, wielding her violent tendencies as a means to resolve the story. This potential is quickly exhausted. As Alexia’s identity as a prolific serial-killer and arsonist is revealed, these apparent scenes of self-defense and sexual exploration begin to shift in meaning. In retrospect, these are opportunities, rather than motives for Alexia’s violent behavior. This culminates when Alexia goes on a particularly brutal murder spree and sets her parents’ house on fire. The film is only beginning as Alexia sheds any redeeming qualities—right as the narrative approaches the precipice of her salvation.

There are darker sisters to the “Good-For-Her” narrative. Films such as Kill Bill, Revenge, and I Spit on Your Grave feature women reacting to what appears to be the purest and darkest manifestation of patriarchal violence–rape. While this can offer some measure of catharsis, rape-revenge films can easily become exploitative, transmitting the violence of patriarchy onto female characters without transmuting it into anything other than trauma porn. The link between violence and exploitation seems especially apparent in these depictions.  A “Good-for-Her” narrative may seek to subvert this exploitation – by focusing on instances of betrayal instead of explicit sexual violence, or by highlighting emotional rather than physical pain – but ultimately, these stories are bound to the same narrative arc. A transgression occurs, and our main character – our victim – resolves this by reacting, by seeking revenge. The implications of this resolution vis-a-vis revenge, are not dissimilar, regardless of the level of violence depicted. Not only are the women in these stories inevitably bound to their victimhood, victimhood is a requisite for acting against patriarchy. Both the rape-revenge film and the “Good For Her” film require us to assess when, exactly, the indignities of patriarchy reach a sufficient level of horrific personal experience for our main character to be justified in her reaction to it.  Removing explicit violence from this dynamic doesn’t necessarily subvert this. The prolonged, mundane, and banal experience of being socialized as a woman, and the violence this contains, remains. 

Titane wields this inevitable violence in the pursuit of redemption, rather than revenge. Alexia’s actions are the result of her fundamental wounds, both physical and psychological, but they are not justified by them. In a film filled with spectacularly brutal moments, I found myself squirming hardest when Alexia encounters a gaggle of rambunctiously misogynistic young men on a bus. As their brazen comments escalate, Alexia makes eye contact with another woman on the bus, and they share a moment of understanding – and then leaves her behind. Somehow the sociopathy of this feels more sickening than the spectacular moment when Alexia smashes her own face against a porcelain sink. This callousness is paid for in blood. Healing the wounds that her father imposed upon her requires Alexia to become another father’s son, to compliment his own damaged psyche and accept his love. But simply finding her foil cannot resolve what Alexia has done as a result of her relationship with her first father. As Adriene, Alexia must turn her own violence against herself in order to survive–the intentional disfigurement of her face to hide her identity, the repeated binding and un-binding of her pregnant stomach with an ace bandage, the black oil seeping from her breasts and vagina–Alexia suffers like Christ through her pseudo-immaculate pregnancy. 

On a far less cerebral level, there is relief in the brutality of Titane. As much as I squirm at the scratching of skin, the smashing of cartilage, the hairpins shoved entirely too precisely into ear-holes, I can’t look away. At least, not for too long. There is a woozy, deranged tenderness, too, breaking through the harshness of the film and Alexia’s sharp exterior. Despite the obvious harm that patriarchy causes within the film, masculinity is painted in a softer, more mutable light. As Alexia is forced to bond with the other fire-fighters, the rituals of masculinity–drinking together, wrestling, locker-room-talk–are shown with a sweetness they are rarely afforded. This boyish levity resonates with me. Despite my reasonable wariness of “toxic masculinity” (whatever that means) brotherhood offers a magnetic pull. I’ve never seen something that speaks to that longing, the part of me that secretly thinks that there’s something to be said for the power that I can’t access, or that there’s anything good to be said for feeling this way. Outsider status lends  a certain loneliness to femininity, or at least to not being a man. Alexia has been reacting all her life, wielding her small, sharp hairpin against the burden of her trauma and the exclusion that she feels. Revenge cannot bring her solace, since her wounds are caused by the absence of love and acceptance just as much as they are caused by the presence of patriarchy. 

The credits roll and my friend and I turn to each other. “What did you think?” I ask, tentatively. She’s going to hate me, I know it. She’s going to hate me for loving this gross, weird movie. “I loved it,” she says, grinning and clutching my hand. We stumble out of the theater, a bit dazed and disproportionately exhausted. We take a selfie in the bathroom and walk to the subway station. We get into a crowded car and hold the pole together, a little bit traumatized and far less alone.