Moviegoing is the the rare social event where you’re more likely to be communicating with noises than with words, a constraint that has a way of bringing the culture’s id into the theater with you, along with your popcorn and soda. How many times have you grimaced at a movie’s use of a fat, elderly, or disabled character as a punchline, while laughter echoed in the darkness around you? How many times have you gone indignant, or even felt a conspiratorial shame, at the inappropriate reactions erupting from other rows—snickers during a rape scene, sound effects during a drama’s doomed childbirth?
I can’t begrudge my fellow ticket-holders their natural responses, but that doesn’t mean I don’t notice them. Sitting in the many-scented velveteen of that artificial night, I often find myself wondering what this (albeit very tiny) sample size of people can tell me, through their reactions to the film, about what it means to be good or bad, funny or scary, pleasurable or worth walking out over. Truth is as much a matter of majority as anything else.
It was the audience at the Williamsburg Nitehawk where I watched Titane (2021)—director Julia Ducournau’s “extreme body horror” Palm d’Or-winner (or “the car-fucker movie,” as Jade calls it1)—that shaped my own response to the film. I don’t think I would have hated it quite so much if I’d seen it at home, although had I done that, I would have probably turned it off long before the credits rolled.
But first, the plot: Titane follows Alexia, a woman with childhood car trauma and a TBI who at the age of 32 sort of randomly starts killing people before being redeemed by the love of Vincent, a manic pixie dream dad who has convinced himself that she is his long-lost teenage son, even though she’s actually an adult cis lady who is pregnant with the spawn of a Cadillac that she knew in the biblical way. Despite the perversity of its subject matter, which includes graphic depictions of objectum sexuality, brain surgery, homicide, and self-mutilation, there’s a tweeness, a cuteness, a conventionality in this ultimately uplifting story about a father’s unconditional love that saves his child from herself2. He accepts her ugliness, her viciousness—she almost murders him, as she did the others—and most disturbing of all, her revelation as being someone other than his biological child.
It’s probably a little unsportsmanlike to review a movie you’ve only technically seen 80% of, but I’ve never covered my eyes that much in a movie before. What can I say? I’m squeamish. But I can attest that Titane has confirmed Ducournau’s reputation for violence, all but cemented by her first and previous feature, Raw (2016). But I want to be clear that the violence isn’t why I hated it. In fact, I’m very interested in the way Ducournau uses violence, especially gendered violence, to paint an abject picture of transness without any trans people. A pregnant woman pretends to be a teenage boy, dancing, binding, working as a first responder with his firefighter father. A pregnant woman shocks and appalls with her body, unruly in gestation, concupiscent for cars, completely willing to torture itself and others, sometimes to death.
Reviewers dwell on Ducourneau’s use of shock, horror, and disgust, and the positive ones frame her as a feminist transgressor of “gender,” among other things. I found both of her movies frustratingly boring, save for her tableaux of homosociality, in Titane’s case with a bunch of sexy young firemen dancing together in virile abandon. One review called it a “transgender parable,” going so far as to invoke Isabell Fall and thus betray a total misunderstanding of both texts. In resistance to patly saccharine takes like these, Jude Dry identifies Ducourneau’s use of these markers of transsexuality as “window dressing in [a] gory fable.” From Alexia’s disabling binding (couldn’t they have hired a transmasculine or butch consultant to make that look less shitty) to Vincent’s frantic self-injection of steroids because he’s “tired” (?), “Titane twists these milestones of transition — a beautiful and liberating experience for most trans people — making them painful and grotesque in service of its bent toward body horror.”
I recently watched of Color of Night (1994), the so-bad-it’s-good erotic thriller I wrote about a few days ago. Its transphobic plot is so convoluted that none of us who watched it, cis or trans, could figure out the birth assignment of the trans character playing villain and victim, though it was apparently “obvious” to the transphobic audiences of its time. Color of Night had no interest in humanizing us as trans people, or in appearing to humanize us, and for that, I’m grateful. It was honest, at least. Though Titane has an exponentially more sophisticated understanding of the trans phenomenon than its 90s forebears, watching it is far more unpleasant, and incidentally feels far more transphobic. The cis people who created Titane aren’t dreamers scratching at the unconscious, stretching their straight anxieties across trans people’s bodies, as was once the norm. Now that we have become text, become legible, we can be mounted upon the sticks of Representation while continuing to be visually conflated with violence, death, destruction, and disgust. They are in conversation with us without saying a damn word. The horrors of a woman cumming on a stickshift, of a chopstick jammed into a human ear, of a man stabbed through the kidneys with a rusty sword, of a pregnant belly splitting open to reveal glowing steel ring at the same emotional timbre as the suffering of breast and body binding, of looking “androgynous” while also being with child. There was apparently a scene where Vincent shaves Alexia’s face, but I can’t speak to that. I missed it because I went to the bathroom during the movie rather than after, because I’m afraid of public restrooms when other people are around.
The feeling of the, statistically speaking, predominantly cis audience reacting to Titane around me is what made it click: The screeches as a nose shattered on ceramic. The reflexive laughter as a father walks in on his naked teenage son, only to find him a pregnant adult woman. The oohs and ahhs when Vincent tells the revealed Alexia that he accepts her for who she is, in twisted mimicry of an after-school-special’s version of queer assimilation into the straight nuclear family. The smatter of applause when the lights went down. In Titane, I saw, the old revulsion and fear of bodies like mine has been cleverly metabolized into the horror version of the homophobic Freddie Mercury biopic. Liberals, am I right? (Though I would be eager to see Ducournau shoot a gay porn—whatever flavor, dealer’s choice—provided she promised to keep the gore to a minimum.)
David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Read the earthquake room. Keep reading DAVID to find out when their second novel, X (Catapult, 2022), is available for preorder.
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Despite reviewers’ invocations of the Canadian director, David Cronenberg, Titane is not Cronenbergian, nor does its car fucking take place in the universe of Crash (1996).
Jade said it reminded her of Wes Anderson, and with that I agreed (we do not care for Wes Anderson). Ben Kenigsberg called it “mawkish” and “tedious,” with which I also agree.
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