"Now is a time to storm": Julie Taymor's Titus (2000)

If you think you know Shakespeare...think again.'

Julie Taymor's Titus is a quintessentially postmodern adaptation: playful, selfconscious, heterogeneous Like other postmodern directors, Taymor plays with the makebelieve or illusionist conventions of cinema. featuring "stagy" scenes, editing discontinuity, and subjective camerawork rather than filming straight, "objective" reality. Such Brechtian, distancing devices are typical of demystificatory postmodern art.2 But Taymor describes Titus in anti-postmodern, perhaps mystificatory terms. as a total, cross-cultural narrative encapsulating the violence of the last two centuries. Also, the ending of Taymor's Titus, pointing toward a world beyond her postmodern fni.se-en-scene, is (tentatively) Romantic. I will focus on the postmodern form of Titus as well as the Romantic conviction behind its making. I shall also explore how Taymor combines "theatrical" and "filmic" modes of presentation, collapsing distinctions between the artificial and the real because, for Taymor, Shakespeare's "timeless" work prefigures twentieth-century events.

Like Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (1997), Taymor's Titus is an eclectic collage--she features heterogeneous film iconography, an international cast, and her hybrid mise-en-scene emphasizes temporal and cultural differences rather than cultural homogeneity. Rather than "re-creating Rome, 400 A.D." Taymor's mise-en-scene evokes various epochs, an ancient world of ritual, mausoleums and orgies along with elements of modern America. Tanks. horses and carriages, limousines, bows and arrows, machine guns, and electric Olympics-style torches are shown in close-up. Taymor and her production designer, Dante Ferretti, feature imposing monoliths. Roman aqueducts along with twentiethcentury fascist architecture, the government buildings of Mussolini's time built to "recreate the glory of the ancient Roman empire."3 The costumes by Milena Canonero are not the "clothes for a costume drama," but an anachronistic combination of togas and runway chic, business suits and leathers, ancient and ultra modern. Titus (Anthony Hopkins), for example, begins wearing ancient battle dress and war paint, changes to an Eisenhower jacket, to a baggy gray jumper and corduroy pants, to his all-white cook's outfit-the clothes mark his changing role from austere victor (vulnerable in assuming his invulnerability), a politician, an "avuncular old man," to a picture of professionalism executing revenge. By contrast, Lavinia (Laura Fraser) is first dressed "like a Grace Kelly from the 1950s" or an "Italian Katherine Hepburn," a "good girl" in little black gloves and a full bell skirt," but after she is ravaged, Lavinia's torn and bloodied petticoats and her painterly beauty evoke Degas's ballerinas (Taymor 181 ).

The eclecticism of this Titus may be inspired by the famous drawing by Henry Peacham, the only surviving Elizabethan illustration of a Shakespearean play. The drawing, perhaps drawn from a production of Titus, shows a mix of costumes and postures, rather than revealing any attempt toward an "authentic" holistic and unified presentation of ancient Rome. Titus wears a toga but his soldiers are Elizabethan men-at-arms with halberds, while Tamora's dress is vaguely medieval. As Jonathan Bate writes (in his editorial introduction to Titus Andronicus), "there could be no better precedent for modern productions which are determinedly eclectic in their dress, combining modern and ancient, the present as well as the past" (43). Bate also discusses the illustration's emblematic quality, fitting with "the way in which the characters in the play so often seem to become emblems, to be frozen into postures that are the very picture of supplication, grief or violent revenge" (43). In Taymor's film, the actors use Stanislavskian, method-acting techniques (for example, in his DVD commentary, Hopkins says that Titus's "superobjective becomes revenge"), but they are also sometimes shown frozen in emblematic gestures-this combination of naturalistic and "stylized" acting is discussed in more detail below.

Taymor's long-time collaborator, composer Elliot Goldenthal, matches the eclecticism of her mise-en-scene and characterization with an eclectic musical lexicon. Goldenthal wrote diverse music to play into the psychology of individual characters, rather than bind things together in a wash of homogenous sound: Titus is accompanied with orchestral and mass music-solemn and complex like Monteverdi's choral works; Saturninus, the neo-fascist who lives in Mussolini's palace, is associated with 1930s jazz music; Chiron and Demetrius are associated with "chaotic" rock and heavy metal.

Goldenthal's diverse musical cues and Taymor's use of eclectic cultural styles and referents to "anchor" the story-telling are especially important considering that Titus Andronicus is one of Shakespeare's lesser-known plays. Taymor also takes Luhrmann's use of film intertextuality, incorporating various generic and stylistic visual templates, to a dizzying extreme, including everything from cartoonish action to art-house horror.4 In the first sequence of Titus, the entrance of the "clown" crashing through the wall of a regular boy's kitchen alludes to both Loncraine's Richard Ill (where Richard III crashes through Prince Edward's study) and The Last Action Hero (1993) in which Arnold Schwarzenegger, as the action-movie Hamlet, crashes into a regular boy's life. Taymor's final scene, with its bright colors, the tableaux vivants, and horrendous subject matter, surely borrows from Peter Greenaway's The Cook, The Thief His Wife and Her Lover (1989)-in both films, nasty events are portrayed in a stylish way. Taymor's mix of diverse filmic iconography underlines the disconcerting mixture of tone in Titus in a new way for her own generation, for a primarily film-literate audience.