Julie Taymor's Titus: Deciding Not to Cut

The first time I saw Julie Taymor's Titus, I was both fascinated and horrified: fascinated by the boldness and cleverness of the iconography and horrified by the various forms of violence to which the characters' bodies were submitted. This reminded me of the early modern literary genre of the anatomical blazon and of the spectacular dissections that took place in the anatomy theatres during the second part of the sixteenth century and the first part of the seventeenth century throughout Europe. All Renaissance artists were strongly influenced by the mixed feelings of fascination and horror inspired by those public dissections, and Shakespeare was no exception to the trend insofar as various appropriations of and references to the blazon are disseminated in his sonnets (cf. sonnets 20, 23, or 145) and plays (Twelfth Night, Coriolanus, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, or Titus Andronicus). As David Hillman and Carla Mazzio state: "Parts of the body are scattered throughout the literary and cultural texts of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe."1 A few centuries later, the everlasting craze for hemoglobin, scattered limbs, and big thrills is given full satisfaction on the screens.

Julie Taymor, in her adaptation of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, has composed a strikingly visual reworking of Renaissance "Baroque fantasies of the imagination."2 The trope of fragmentation at the root of the anatomical blazon initiated by Clement Marot in 1535 is here particularly analogous to the rhetoric of film editing developed in Titus. Originally, the poetic partition of the female body and the subsequent praise or denigration of the selected body parts were the constituting elements of the anatomical blazon. As far as Titus and Lavinia are concerned, the anachronism implied in a cinematic emblazoning of some of their body parts involves a fracture of bodily and gender representations as well as a shift in intention from the blasonneurs' point of view. Depriving the human body (most often female) of its wholeness in an attempt to objectify it, annihilating any trace of identity (here again feminine), and eventually subduing it was the profession of faith of the early modern blazoners. The desire to dissect a body discursively and impose a dominion upon a selected body part stems mainly from assumptions that: ". . . the part, in the early modern period, becomes a subject, both in the sense of being 'subjected'-of being isolated and disempowered-and of being 'subjected'-imagined to be endowed with qualities of intention and subjectivity."3

Representations of corporeality are also central to Titus Andronicus where the body's fragmentation and its loss of coherence acquire a collective perspective and become a synecdoche of political havoc and social dismantlement. It is thus through the disintegrated bodies of Titus and Lavinia that the politics of national threat and racial invasion get worked out. On the other hand, the emblazoning process of the editor of Taymor film, Francoise Bonnot, does not obey the same early modern imperatives of bodily conquest and dominion in Titus-the sadistic load contained in a Renaissance blazon is not here clearly perceptible-for if film editing is essentially based on deconstructive, paradigmatic methods (cutting), most of the time it aims at constructing coherent narratives and characters.

As far as Titus is concerned, the repeated shots of body parts (mostly close-ups) stand for the anaphora upon which the anatomical blazon is based and which is so prominent in Shakespeare's text (becoming a kind of throbbing and haunting litany). The selected body parts emblazoned in Taymor's Titus are self-evidently the hand and the head. As the film unfolds, alternations of praise and blame in the representations of these body parts closely coalesce with the modulations of Titus's identity as his masculinity or masculine attributes (reason, courage, honor, virtue, and virtus amongst others) are ruthlessly assaulted from all sides. The whole interest or purpose of anatomical blazons residing mainly in the second constituent of the genre, the deconstruction of Titus's praise and masculine gendering that is established in his first sequences, will occupy the rest of the film.

If we now move on to the sequence corresponding to the second part of the play's 3.1, a radical change has occurred in the way Titus's body is edited. Not only has the cutting rhythm been modified, but also the camera work has undergone a spectacular transformation as far as the eponymous character is concerned. The sequence I am referring to displays how Titus accepts the loss of his left hand in an attempt to save his sons' lives.

It is quite fascinating how the carnivalesque suddenly breaks into the household of the Andronici, confined as it has been within the limits of the Goths' sphere of influence until this sequence. Various images of carnival and grotesque that are akin to the texts by Marot, Rabelais, or Nashe also pervade Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and are exacerbated in Taymor's Titus. The "kitchen sequence" in particular is both gruesome and grotesque. Setting Titus's dismemberment in an antique-looking kitchen is in itself a direct reference to Renaissance grotesque-this kitchen has nothing to do with a contemporary sterile one where the food is hidden away in storage spaces. In fact, Titus's kitchen could not possibly be more Rabelaisian: all kinds of vegetables and other provisions are spread abundantly on the massive wooden tables while different sorts of poultry as well as hams hang from butcher's hooks.