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Julie Taymor's Titus: Deciding Not to Cut
Literature Film Quarterly, 2004 by Marti, Cecile
From the kitchen sequence onward, the former soldier is but the shadow of himself, a King Lear figure who develops signs of hysterical behavior: he laughs at the sight of his sons' heads, spits at childlike drawings he has made in his bath, and mumbles incoherent words. Speaking of King Lear, Bruce R. Smith ascribes the loss of reason to "the triumph of this female passion within," to "a loss of both masculine authority and masculine identity."6 With Titus's loss of sanity, the grotesque thrives. When insanity allows uninhibited corporal expressions and exaggerations, the "body life"7 takes over the intellect.
Immediately following the severing of Titus's hand, the carnivalesque figure of the clown intervenes appropriately in a sequence that recalls the films of Federico Fellini and presents the tragedy from the perspective of derision. The circus music, accompanying the clown and the young girl assisting him, adds to the grotesquery of the situation while fast crosscutting between young Lucius and the young girl generates discordant images of innocence, playfulness, and unconcern. The crosscutting between the happy expectation on young Lucius's face and what the clown exhibits in his van epitomizes the film's mode. As Bakhtin puts it: "the essence of the grotesque is precisely to present a contradictory and double-faced fullness of life." 8 Ambivalence is therefore at the core of the grotesque as was particularly the case in Renaissance England. As Neil Rhodes writes: "It is, then, not only the physicality of language itself, but also the imaginative process of associating disparate aspects of the physical world, which constitutes the peculiarity of Elizabethan grotesque."9
With a close-up of Martius's and Quintus's heads floating in specimen jars, their deaths are spectacularized as a freak show, as an unreal vision. This grotesque exposure of severed body parts harks back both to the early modern science of anatomizations designed for the voyeuristic gaze of the audience and to the literary genre of the contreblason. Positioned in the context of early modern culture, the Freudian hysterical response induced in Titus as he stares helplessly at this ghastly collection registers an uncontrolled release of pent-up, paroxysmal grief, a form of defense against oppression, and a way of escaping sentimentality. The unexpected reaction shot showing Titus and Lavinia on each side of the frame like two lost children summarizes the horror of the scene. The coalescence between father and daughter is a powerful motif in Taymor's film. It is not only apparent in this shot, but also in the fact that they are similarly rendered: they are edited in the same fashion. They are both granted with montage sequences (what Julie Taymor calls "the concept of The Penny Arcade Nightmares") reflecting their inner life and hallucinations: Lavinia recalling her rape and mutilation or Titus picturing the execution of his sons Martius and Quintus. Interestingly, those hallucinatory sequences are saturated with violent, flashing images of bodily partitions, immolations, and predation.
