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Julie Taymor's Titus: Deciding Not to Cut
Literature Film Quarterly, 2004 by Marti, Cecile
Images of food are closely linked to those of the grotesque body, of devouring and being devoured. Interestingly, Thomas Nashe, who was one of Shakespeare's contemporary writers and one of the main participants of the Renaissance grotesque, shows a particular interest in assembling culinary and macabre images. As Neil Rhodes points out: "He [Nashe] binds the domestic to the horrific, and one of his favorite analogies is between cooking and death. The basis of his grotesque vision is, ultimately, the relationship between the human body and the external world, and the body's capacity for metamorphosis."4 Is it possible that Shakespeare was inspired by Nashe when he wrote Titus Andronicusl In any case, the sickening metamorphosis of Tamora's sons into a pie reaches the summit of the grotesque, both in the play and in the film. The grotesque being a visual mode by nature, Julie Taymor exploits all the grotesque potentiality of the play and gives it full emphasis in her screen adaptation.
It is thus within the grotesque, nonheroic (this is not a battlefield), and somehow "feminine" space of the kitchen that Titus loses his bodily integrity and jeopardizes his gender identity. The abruptness and fast rhythm of the cuts in this sequence, and particularly in the last shots of the sequence, move the food and grotesque imagery into the foreground: what the viewer sees comes down to a colorful superimposition of vegetables, cooking utensils, poultry, hands, and gaping mouths. An almost subliminal shot (lasting some tenths of a second) of a young Lucius's face, with his mouth wide open and framed by the doors ajar-a reference to Kubrick's The Shining-is inserted between a shot of Aaron chopping off Titus's hand and a shot of Titus's face, with his mouth wide open too. The sudden reaction shot of Lucius generates coalescence between the image of the gaping mouth and the one of the open wound: Titus's stump (which is kept off screen). Titus's symbolic castration that is merely implicit until this sequence becomes fully apparent when we see the severing of his hand. Indeed, in Taymor's film, the severing of his hand is given a particular emphasis in keeping with the dynamics of gender confusion. The trope of the severed hand is firmly embedded into the early modern discourse of dissection in which it takes on explicit gender connotations. Indeed, the loss of masculine identity is implied by the reductive process of dissection, as Jonathan Sawday asserts: "for the male body to become the explicit focus of male desire . . . it first had to be re-created as female. It is this fourth element, for example, that helps us to understand the 'feminization' of the male body when it lay on the dissecting slab. . . ."5 In losing his left hand on an improvised culinary dissecting table, Titus is also deprived of his masculinity and of his social credibility. The series of shot/reverse shot in close-up between Aaron and Titus, the torturer and his consenting victim, positions the old Roman general in an utterly inferior and submissive role. The point of view is here significant since the alternation between low and high angle accentuates the power struggle between the two protagonists. In this kitchen sequence, Titus's emblazoning moves onto another perspective with the close-up of his hand waiting to be cut off on the chopping board like an ordinary piece of meat. We are not very far from the initial image of the heroic warrior whose hand holds a sword, scatters his sons' ashes, or blesses his daughter. The shift from a discursive blazon involving figuration divisions to a performative one finally takes place. Concomitantly, the grotesque and satirical load characterizing the Goths takes over and contaminates the Romans as a repeated close-up shows us Titus's hand ending up in a freezer bag, again like a piece of meat. The food imagery combined with the trope of bodily fragmentation creates a powerful semantic whirlpool that pulls apart Titus's identity, body, family, and to a larger extent, nation.
