Déroutement in Julia Ducournau’s Titane
Despite the fact that its anti-heroine, a car showroom dancer turned serial killer turned fire(wo)man named Alexia, ultimately dies during childbirth, her belly ruptured and her orifices gushing motor oil, Julia Ducournau’s Titane actually ends quite happily. The overall gesture of the film, consisting of two major acts, is a movement from abject alienation to a strange kind of rapprochement. Ducournau explains, “I really like the idea of an evolving film, in the same way that the protagonist molts. Up until the end, the film sheds its layers until it arrives at its essence: how can humanity be birthed from a scorched, sterile earth, where there is no love?” [1] Ducournau, in her characteristic aversion to predictable or definitive explanations, answers this question by giving us the birth of a car-human hybrid, the most viable iteration of humanity that Alexia the Titan can introduce into this scorched, sterile world.
Alexia conceives the baby at the film’s start, in an eruption of mechanophilic lust after having impaled a man with her hair stick. She creates the baby with her first love: the automobile. A childhood car accident has left her with a titanium (titane) implant in her skull, and the car remains her object choice thereafter. She works as an erotic dancer at a car show, where her tall and angular body, as well as the total abandon with which she humps and grinds on the hood of the car, earn her a flock of admirers. Upon finishing her erotic communion with the show car, a seeming extension of her own body, Alexia hurriedly signs a few autographs and dashes off to the safety of her own vehicle, her metal shell. One determined admirer follows her and forces his head through her car window, professing his love and begging for a kiss. Having violated the sanctity of the car, he must be dealt with.
A young Alexia in Titane.
Hair stick administered, Alexia returns to the venue’s locker room to rinse the man’s gastric juices from her neck. It is at this moment that the lowrider on which she’d danced earlier begins to thump and rumble, beckoning her to come back and finish what she started. Vigorous car coitus ensues. Upon waking the next morning, her thighs bruised and her groin smeared with black oil, Alexia senses she’s pregnant. She tells her father she’s feeling sick; he begrudgingly palpates her stomach and tells her it’s nothing. She later confides in her coworker Justine, a younger dancer who brings Alexia back to her place and makes out with her. But Alexia, averse to romantic overtures of the human variety, once again applies hair stick to head. Justine’s multiple roommates show up, one after the other, and Alexia creatively murders each of them before heading home and burning her parents alive.
This concludes the film’s first act — the Serial Killer act. What happens next is a kind of interval, a segue. Alexia hits the road, on the lam, and soon finds herself in a train station, surrounded by wanted posters bearing her face. She makes the snap decision to assume the identity of a long-missing boy. In an especially excruciating scene, she disfigures herself in a public bathroom. She then presents herself to the very authorities she’d sought to avoid, declaring herself the long-lost Adrien Legrand and, lo and behold, her plan works.
Alexia giving birth in Titane.
The film takes on a much tenderer tone in its second act, the Love Story act, and its pace slows considerably. This leaves the whiplashed audience with a lingering nervousness that mimics Alexia’s own as she assumes the role of Adrien. It turns out that Vincent Legrand, Adrien’s father and a fire captain, is as desperately lonely as Alexia is alienated. Estranged from Adrien’s mother, Vincent seeks a child-and-partner substitute. His and Alexia’s actions run parallel: she hides out in Adrien’s childhood bedroom, wincing as she binds both her breasts and her rapidly growing baby bump; Vincent’s domain is the bathroom, where he injects his body with steroids and regards his swollen, bruised body in a three-way mirror. Vincent brings Alexia into the firefighter fold, introducing her as his son and daring the crew to question the story, declaring, “I am God and he is Jesus.” As Alexia’s baby gestates inside her, a filial and erotic bond develops between Alexia and Vincent, culminating when Alexia cradles Vincent’s body, Pietà-style, during an overdose and later injects him in the ass with more testosterone. What in other films might pose impediments — a suspecting fireman nicknamed Conscience, the reappearance of Adrien’s mother, or the eventual revelation of Alexia’s pregnancy — can do nothing to diminish Alexia and Vincent’s love for one another. “I don’t care who you are. You’re my son… Whoever you are,” Vincent tells her. Alexia, in turn, professes her love for Vincent moments before her death, while delivering the baby. In the film’s final scene, Vincent cradles the child, stroking its titanium vertebrae, and reassures it, “I’m here.”
The transition from serial killer narrative to love story is quite the gear shift, particularly when it comes to the audience’s identification with the protagonist. Writers and directors have long been testing the limits of spectators’ sympathy and identification — with predominantly male test cases — although the narrative arrangement of Titane, in which the opening act’s onslaught of violence is abruptly juxtaposed with an unlikely love story, feels particularly demanding of an audience. Ducournau cites John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) as a major reference point for Titane, particularly the ways in which McNaughton’s film manipulates the audience’s sympathy: especially objectionable supporting characters render Henry more likeable, despite what we know about him. Titane moves one step further in that it has no interest in such likeability gymnastics, no interest in making Alexia charming whatsoever. Identification contingent on likeability is a self-imposed limitation, and an alternative means of achieving identification is long overdue.
Fire consuming the home of Alexia’s parents in Titane.
Ducournau proposes one such alternative: “For me, what I thought is that if the audience can’t relate morally to her, then I’m going to make them relate to her body. And her body was my entry point to create an umbilical cord between the audience and her.” [2] This puts Ducournau in a unique position in relation to the body horror subgenre. Whereas the aforementioned Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer features grotesque, exploitation film–style displays of women’s corpses, Ducournau is more interested in exploiting the audience’s collective body, its physical affinity. While Henry makes frequent use of medium-wide and wide shots, Titane’s body horror sequences are nearly always shot in close-up, reinforcing the umbilical tie between the audience and Alexia.
Such an approach can be seen in other works associated with the so-called New French Extremity trend. Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs (2008) culminates with its protagonist reaching a state of religious ecstasy while being flayed alive; throughout the sequence, the camera remains trained on her face, inviting the spectator to vicariously feel the dopamine rush intertwined with agony. When Alexia disfigures herself by smashing her face into the bathroom sink, there was a collective wince in the theater. What was perhaps more surprising was the audience’s echoing of Alexia’s astonished chuckle upon seeing her mutilated nose in the mirror. As though umbilically bound to her, we are made to intake whatever she feeds us and to feel a visceral reaction to her anguish. The violence she enacts onto others is brutal but never as excruciating as that which she does to herself — when she tries to give herself an abortion with the hair stick, when she scratches a hole in her belly, when she binds her baby bump. As Alexia delivers the child, the motor oil flowing out of her and the titanium plate bursting through her skin, these umbilical ties are severed and we are finally released. At the conclusion of both screenings I attended, the audience laughed in, I suspect, a mixture of disbelief and relief.
Young Alexia in surgery in Titane.
Titane is crammed with symbols of rebirth and reinvention, though Ducournau tends to resist neat symbolism with fixed figurative meaning, instead providing a chorus of symbols that play off of each other, shifting in meaning according to their context. One such symbol is fire, variously connoting rebirth, reinvention, passion, and purification. Alexia writhes atop a flame-painted car at the car show, and soon thereafter watches news coverage of the wildfires burning through the French woodlands, a broadening of scope that suggest that the country finds itself in a state of perilous flux matching Alexia’s own. She burns Justine’s bloody clothes in her family’s garage, locks her parents in their bedroom as the fire spreads through their house, and then ironically finds sanctuary in the fire service, under the protection of her new firefighter daddy. And it is in the midst of a wildfire that Vincent resolves to kill Conscience, who sees through Alexia’s disguise and poses the biggest threat to Vincent’s future with her. Lastly, as Alexia goes into labor, Vincent sets his own belly ablaze in the next room. Is this some strange form of sympathetic pregnancy, signaling a final fusion of their souls? Is it Vincent’s effort to purify or detox his steroid-jacked body? Or is it just a self-destructive gesture, perhaps indicating Vincent’s subconscious awareness that death is coming for Alexia and his wish to join her? In any case, upon Alexia’s death, just before the screen fades to white, Vincent clutches the newborn against his scorched belly, in a state of pure bliss at having regained a son.
Vincent Lindon as Vincent Legrand in Titane.
This purification process is not an attempt at moral purity but an expression of undiluted eros, a return to a sexual tabula rasa in which moral codes, symbolism, and taboo are meaningless, or else infinitely flexible in meaning. In the film’s opening scene, young Alexia sits in the backseat of a car, mimicking the vroom of a race car. Her father drives, listening to a grainy recording of “Poor Wayfaring Stranger.” Alexia drones on and kicks the back of her father’s seat until he snaps, turns around, loses control of the car, and crashes into a guardrail. Alexia’s pestering actions certainly lead to the accident, but it’s hard not to feel that she somehow wills it into happening. Perhaps she feels the mechanophilic urge as a child, and prompting the accident is a form of sexual expression. Or perhaps the accident itself and the resultant titanium implant in her head are what give rise to her mechanophilia. Whichever it is — nature or nurture — she carries this burdensome sexual proclivity throughout her life, and it estranges her from humankind. In the film’s penultimate scene, when a heavily pregnant (though still disguised) Alexia climbs atop a firetruck and performs a reprisal of her car show act (much to the confusion of the firemen), she dances to another version of “Poor Wayfaring Stranger,” this time sung by a woman. This dance and ensuing sex with the firetruck constitute Alexia’s final erotic expression before her death, and it’s worth noting the song’s closing lyrics: “I’ll soon be free from every trial… I’ll drop the cross of self-denial and enter on my great reward… I’m only going over home.”
This “cross of self-denial” seems to be the full spectrum of queer sexuality, not solely mechanophilia. If the automobile can be interpreted as an extension of Alexia, as a representative of her interiority, then her transition from mechanophilic attraction (and repulsion from human flesh) to physical connection with Vincent can be read not as a renunciation of her fetish, but as a sexual reconciliation and move toward fulfillment. An easy comparison can be drawn between Titane and David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996), given that both are about car crashes as catalysts for sexual expression. The latter film’s ethos is best articulated by the supporting character Vaughan, a car crash fetishist and reenactor: “The car crash is a fertilizing rather than a destructive event — a liberation of sexual energy that mediates the sexuality of those who have died with an intensity impossible in any other form.” In Cronenberg’s film, the liberation of sexual energy is contingent on violence and necessitates a proximity to death. The car crash fetishists of the film go to increasingly extreme lengths to experience the sexual highs brought about by undergoing and witnessing the crashes. Titane, on the other hand, is far less literal. The fertilizing event is not the crash, but sex within the car, a communion with the innermost self — an expression of self-love.
Alexia arriving for her rendez-vous with the car in Titane.
How, then, to categorize Alexia’s sexuality and gender identity? An Electra complex coupled with (or masked as) mechanophilia? Is she trans? Does the film glorify incest and diminish the trans experience? Ducournau would likely dismiss such questions as unimaginative. She remarks, “It’s true that the new generation of American films aren’t very queer. Genre [film] is so established over there that you’ll find masterful films, but they don’t necessarily aim to disturb, throw you off, disconcert you.” [3] It is this effort at déroutement (disconcertion or re-routing), this resistance to classification, predetermined routes, and facile symbolism, that is especially confounding and, for some, maddening about Titane. We are often so resistant to directors taking the wheel, balking at the faintest hint of directorial domination over the audience — in this case, the director’s use of our bodies against us, manipulating us into identifying with someone whom our moral code rejects. But the filmmaker-spectator dynamic is inherently non-reciprocal, and we must agree to a certain amount of submission if we wish to feel the full artistic impact of this re-routing. Titane exemplifies the kind of extraordinary aesthetic experience achievable if we embrace, in Sontag’s words, the “erotics of art,” rather than the hermeneutics thereof, if we consent to the filmmaker’s manipulation of the audience’s collective body. This necessitates the audience relinquishing some control and entrusting the director with power, a tall order these days. But, at least with regard to this film, the trade-off proves worthwhile.
Agathe Rousselle as Alexia dancing at the car show in Titane.
NOTES
[1] « J’aime beaucoup l’idée d’un film évolutif, de la même manière que la protagoniste mue. Jusqu’à la fin, le film perd des couches pour aboutir à son essence : comment l’humanité peut naître d’un monde qui est une terre brûlée stérile, où il n’y a pas d’amour ? » (MR translation) Entretien avec Julia Ducournau, Trois Couleurs, June 30, 2021.
[2] Titane’ director Julia Ducournau explains how she crafted the year’s wildest film, LA Times, October 5, 2021.
[3] « C’est vrai que les films de la nouvelle génération américaine ne sont pas très queer. Le genre est tellement installé là-bas qu’on trouve des films maîtrisés, mais qui n’ont pas forcément envie de déranger, de brouiller les pistes, de dérouter. » (MR translation) Entretien avec Julia Ducournau, Trois Couleurs, June 30, 2021.
