Julie Taymor's Titus: Deciding Not to Cut

Marti, Cecile

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.

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.

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.

The loss of bodily coherence felt by Titus is but the consequence and physical expression of the disruption of gender roles. Titus, as the chief representative of Roman values, is therefore the one who is assaulted from all parts, his masculine being on the front line of the gender conflict opposing Goths and Romans, and his own body becomes the locus where this conflict takes place. It is not only the editing that actively contributes to the creation of meaning through his body since the costumes also play a function in modeling his shifting identity. The muddy, bronze armor and helmet protecting his body and displaying the marks of his masculinity gave way, little by little, to grotesque, soft wooly coats depriving him of his proud virtus.

The progressive loss of his manly attributes culminates at the climax of the movie when Titus, dressed as a cook, welcomes his enemies. Carnival imagery and "Kitchen humor" set the tone of the grand finale where both death by spoon and candlestick, and fast, jarring cutting de-dramatize the extreme violence of the scene. Titus is denied a heroic, soldier's death that he does not deserve, and dies like a buffoon, contaminated and vanquished by the Goths' corruption. The politics of gender invasion and domination at the root of Taymor's filmic adaptation is therefore the principal motivation of Francoise Bonnot's editing strategy as far as Titus is concerned. The way she composes her shots is particularly revealing of one of Titus Andronicus's main narrative lines: Roman virtus under attack.

Notes

1 David Hillman and Carla Mazzio, "Introduction: Individual Parts," The Body in Paris: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York and London: Routledge, 1997) xi.

2 Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1995) 201.

3 David Hillman and Carla Mazzio xix.

4 Neil Rhodes, Elizabethan Grotesque (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980) 157.

5 Sawday 213.

6 Bruce R. Smith asserts that King Lear's loss of reason also entails the loss of his masculinity and the subsequent development of a hysterical behavior in Shakespeare and Masculinity (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2000) 1, 2.

7 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trails. Helen Iswolsky (Cambridge: MIT P, 1968) 320.

8 Bakhtin 62.

9 Rhodes 157.

Cecile Marti

University of Sheffield

Copyright Literature/Film Quarterly 2004
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