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Metal, Fire, and Flesh: Surrealist Body Horror in Julia Ducournau’s Titane 

Charlie Brownlee 

 

Bodily binaries between (wo)man and machine are rendered frighteningly unclear in Titane

 

Filmmakers have used the disfiguration of the human body to disturb and shock audiences for decades. “Body horror” is inherently tied to the popular horror genre and is often described as its own subgenre of horror cinema. However, by looking at certain examples, it becomes clear that body horror can be viewed less as a subgenre of the horror film and instead as a tool for filmmakers to access and explore complex themes such as humanity and corporeality. Body horror could almost be considered an artistic and aesthetic movement, with similar intentions to the Surrealist movement, which began in the early twentieth century. Recent films make the relationship between surrealism and body horror clear — a significant example being Julia Ducournau’s 2021 film Titane. By analyzing Titane as an example of surrealist body horror, I want to argue that body horror can work as an extension of surrealism; a mode of operation that allows filmmakers to access and externalize the repressed subconscious. Ducournau’s film invokes surrealism’s historical use of violent and graphic imagery, using body horror as an instrument to confront personal traumas.

The term “body horror” is often attributed to Philip Brophy, who coined the term in 1983 when he wrote about the tendency for then-contemporary horror films to place visceral emphasis on the physicality of bodies onscreen. To Brophy, body horror plays “not so much on the broad fear of Death, but more precisely on the fear of one’s own body, of how one controls and relates to it” (Brophy 8). At the time, body horror in film was largely attributed to effects-heavy science fiction and fantasy horror films such as William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), and David Cronenberg’s Scanners (1981). These films use the human body and the physical form itself as a means of disturbing the audience, implying a sort of malevolent horror that exists and emerges from the interior, rather than attacking from the exterior. Writer Paul Wells has a similar definition of body horror, describing it as “the explicit display of the decay, dissolution and destruction of the body, foregrounding bodily processes and functions under threat, allied to new physiological configurations and redefinitions of anatomical forms” (Wells). Both of these descriptions exemplify body horror’s focus on subjective physical experience and the ever-evolving nature of the physical human form. These definitions are similar to Adam Lowenstein’s concept of “shock horror: the employment of graphic, visceral shock to access the historical substrate of traumatic experience” when applied to the French surrealist filmmaker Georges Franju (Lowenstein 37). I argue that body horror and Lowenstein’s concept of shock horror are one and the same, and Franju’s films can serve as valuable examples of body horror’s relationship to surrealism.

Surrealism, as defined by Adrian Martin, “is not a mere immersion into fantasy life — the world of dreams, or pure imagination. It seeks what André Breton called absolute reality or the marvelous.” According to Martin, “the properly surreal realm is that of daily life … freed from the stranglehold of the ‘reality principal,’ and invaded by the forces of love, the unconscious” (Martin). The invasion of everyday waking life by the repressed subconscious is a crucial characteristic of surrealism, and body horror can serve as a means to access that which is repressed. Body horror is a unique way of exteriorizing subconscious traumas into the everyday world through the physical body itself. Franju’s 1960 film Eyes Without a Face, an early example of body horror, was initially banned upon its release for its graphic onscreen gore. The film follows a renowned plastic surgeon named Dr. Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) who attempts to perform a face transplant on his daughter, Christiane (Édith Scob), who has been disfigured in a car accident caused by her father and has since been sheltered in their large, castle-like mansion. Franju was a friend and contemporary of surrealist artists such as André Breton, and like his Surrealist peers, he was deeply affected by the violence and destruction that struck Europe in the early twentieth century, specifically during World War II and the Holocaust. Surrealism became a vehicle for artists to explore these national and trans-national traumas repressed in the shared memories of their cultures. “Surrealist art’s bizarre, tormented refigurations of the human body should not stand merely as abstract explorations of the unconscious; they also respond to the affective impact of horribly maimed veterans” (Lowenstein 38). As such, it can be argued that violence in surrealism is tied to violence within the subconscious, and body horror can act as a means of accessing this violence and recalling social and historic histories of violence.

The infamous face transplant scene in Eyes Without a Face, featuring Dr. Génessier’s careful removal of the skin from a kidnapped young woman’s face, serves to recall the historical trauma of World War II and the Holocaust in the minds of audiences. The doctor’s private operating room visually parallels hospitals and torture chambers found in concentration camps, and Dr. Génessier can be seen throughout the film in all-black clothing and boots, an overt reference to Nazi uniforms. However, the most important aspect of the scene in recalling social trauma is the graphic violence of the operation itself. Performed upon an unwilling, imprisoned victim, it leaves the young woman without a face, tearing flesh away to reveal the facial muscle and tissue below. Through its graphic violence, this scene establishes a connection to Nazi medical experiments. The scene’s minimalist soundtrack, close-up shots of the doctor and the victim, and the prolonged, slow pacing of the operation itself grounds the scene in an unexpectedly intimate atmosphere that brings the viewer uncomfortably close to the violence and allows them the time to reflect on parallels to real-world violence. While the Holocaust is never directly referenced in the film, it nevertheless manages to reach into the subconscious of the audience to invoke historic traumas. Surrealism’s ability to tap into the repressed can be understood through Walter Benjamin’s concept of a surrealist dialectical optics, which he states is able to provide a “profane illumination” of modern life, effectively dismantling ideas regarding social structures that establish our understanding of the everyday, conscious reality (Benjamin 209). Franju employs this surrealist dialectical optics throughout Eyes Without a Face in order to cause the viewer to confront these repressed traumas. With Martin’s definition of surrealism in mind, as well as the dialectical optics at play in the film, body horror and the shocking reaction it provokes in the audience becomes a primary vehicle of surrealism in Eyes Without a Face.

 

Suggestive evocations of historical mid-twentieth century traumas in Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face.

 

If body horror can be used to access the repressed traumas of the historical subconscious, this approach can be expanded to include repressed traumas of the personal subconscious. Titane follows a psychopathic young woman, Alexia (Agathe Rousselle), who, in the film’s prologue, is physically traumatized by a car crash caused by her father (played by French filmmaker Bertrand Bonello), resulting in a titanium plate being inserted into her head. Roughly twenty years later, Alexia is a showgirl at a motor show, secretly operating as a serial killer and having sexual encounters with cars. After finding out she has been impregnated by one of the cars at the motor show, she goes on a violent killing spree, murdering her parents and posing as a young boy who went missing twenty years before. The missing child’s father, a fire marshal named Vincent (Vincent Lindon), takes her into his care and becomes a sort of father figure for Alexia, who assumes the name of Adrian and finds community within the fire department. A visceral story of trauma, identity, and family, Titane was controversial upon release for its graphic violence, including scenes where Alexia stabs one of her victims through the ear with a hair pin and splits her own nose open on a bathroom sink. Furthermore, Alexia’s outlandish human-automobile pregnancy results in her lactating black motor oil and growing metal plates beneath her stomach. Titane’s use of violent imagery and the bizarre body horror of Alexia’s pregnancy is not simply meant to provoke and disturb the audience, but works to access something deeper within the subconscious of the film’s protagonist.

From the beginning of Titane, there is an intricate connection between automobiles, intimacy, and fatherhood. Following the insertion of the titanium plate into her head, Alexia embraces and kisses the window of her father’s car in a shot filmed from inside the vehicle. Alexia’s sexual relationship with cars, a bizarre physical intimacy she shares with nobody else in the film until she meets Vincent, is directly attributed to her father, who caused the crash. The car becomes a physical manifestation of her traumatic relationship with her father. As a young adult, Alexia remains distant from her father, a doctor who is reluctant to even touch her when she needs to be checked for stomach pains (a scene which may suggest even greater physical trauma between the two). The gradual body horror of Alexia’s pregnancy becomes a visceral way to explore and exteriorize her own confrontation with her subconscious physical trauma — a confrontation which fully emerges as she learns to embrace Vincent as a real father figure for herself. The film’s use of extreme body horror creates a mysterious atmosphere in the film’s world in which graphic violence, an unnatural autonomy of automobiles, and the blurring lines between human and machine all become firmly grounded in reality and exist as projections of Alexia’s psychological state.

Titane’s use of surrealist body horror implicates the audience in the confrontation between the conscious and the subconscious. Horror films are an example of “body genres” — films that highlight the physical and sensational onscreen. Linda Williams writes that a crucial characteristic of body genres is a relationship between the viewer and the body onscreen. She suggests that “the body of the spectator is caught up in an almost involuntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body on the screen” (Williams 4). In films that utilize body horror, the violent imagery feels intimate and personal, often shot in close-ups and without dialogue, emphasizing the relationship between the disfigured, misshapen bodies on the screen and the body of the viewer. This relationship is not only established through body horror in Titane, but with bodily spectacle as well. 

The film’s violence is contrasted with numerous dance sequences that highlight the body as an object of beauty. Both body horror and bodily spectacle are depicted in formally similar ways, using long takes and low angles, that establish a connection between the viewer’s physical body and Alexia’s. When we are first introduced to Alexia as a young adult, she is working as a showgirl at a motor convention, where she dances for the patrons and for the camera itself. In a long take, the camera trails behind Alexia as she enters the room, moving behind her and further into the crowd, with a seemingly autonomous perspective. The camera pans away from Alexia to focus on the cars and the other dancers (and the male patrons ogling them) before making its way through the crowd to reveal Alexia posed atop a car covered in flame decals. The camera circles around the car at a low angle as Alexia dances on top of it, staring at the camera while doing so. This depiction of the body as a spectacle is contrasted with a later scene in which Alexia brutally murders three innocent people at her coworker Justine’s (Garance Marillier) house, filmed in a way which directly parallels the motor show scene. Alexia, who believes her and her victim are home alone, murders Justine by stabbing her through the ear with a hair pin. In a long take, the handheld camera trails behind Alexia as she ventures through the house, attacking the other guests one by one. The camera moves rapidly as she stabs a man in the foot and bashes his head in with a barstool once he falls down. At a low angle, looking up at Alexia as she attacks the man, the camera (and the viewer) seems to assume the point of view of the man being attacked — a perspective confirmed by the sudden muffled audio that occurs when she finally kills the man, extending the physical sensation of death onto the viewer. In both scenes, the camera works to emphasize the viewer’s relationship to Alexia’s physicality, and highlights the viewer’s own physical being. With this relationship established, the viewer is implicated as both an onlooker and an active participant in the exploration of Alexia’s subconscious through the surreal bodily changes she endures throughout the film.

 

The physicality and spectacle of Alexia’s (Agathe Roussellle) body are vehicularized to surreal ends in Titane.

 

The fluctuating nature of Alexia’s gender identity extends to the viewer’s experience as well. Alexia binds her chest and pregnant stomach and shaves her head to pose as Vincent’s missing child, adopting the name “Adrian” and eventually adapting to her performance as the marshal’s lost son. It is within Alexia’s performance of the male gender that she comes to understand Vincent as a father figure, and the line between “Alexia” and “Adrian” becomes blurred. Williams describes the experience of watching a horror film as a deeply gendered and highly sadomasochistic one that allows both male and female viewers to identify with the often female protagonist, the victim of violence who is powerless yet ultimately rises to defeat her oppressor, an effect that is “linked to [the viewer’s] gender identity and might be usefully explored as genres of gender fantasy” (Williams 10). Ducournau is aware of this gendered understanding of the horror film, and turns it on its head via Alexia’s transitioning gender identity, which complicates the traditional gendered understanding of the horror film that Williams describes. If the archetypical horror film is a deeply gendered experience, then Titane is an androgynous one. Furthermore, Benjamin’s notion of the surrealist dialectical optics extends to Titane’s dismantling of the highly social construction of gender. According to Benjamin, the surrealist dialectical optics is able to reveal “the revolutionary energies that appear in the ‘outmoded’” (Benjamin 210). As Alexia’s pregnancy develops, her performance of the male gender collapses; she fears Vincent will discover her real identity and disown her, yet, when he walks in on her with pregnant stomach exposed in the bathroom, he fully embraces Alexia and her complicated physical state: “I don’t care who you are. You’ll always be my son.” Titane collapses distinctions between male and female through the connection between body horror and Alexia’s transitioning gender identity, demonstrating that notions of gender are deeply connected to the physical body, yet are just as destroyable and malleable as the body itself.

Ducournau uses body horror to externalize Alexia’s unconscious onto the surface of her body, reflecting her crisis of gender identity and her own confrontation with her repressed physical trauma. In the film’s final climactic sequence, Alexia gives birth with the help of Vincent, who delivers the child. The stress of the birth splits the titanium plate in Alexia’s head open, as well as multiple scars on her stomach, revealing more titanium plating beneath her skin — the ultimate image of Alexia’s physical trauma breaching to the external surface. The experience effectively kills her, but in a way the scene can be read as a rebirth for both characters. Vincent has finally found a child, and Alexia lives on through the bizarre human-car hybrid child, a physical combination of her trauma and her humanity. The body horror of this scene, and the entirety of Titane, suggests that a subconscious trauma will refuse to stay repressed, eventually boiling over into the conscious, waking reality in potentially shocking ways. To quote Franju, “Violence is not an end, it’s a weapon which sensitizes the spectator and which lets him see what’s lyric or poetic beyond or above the violence, or what’s tender in the reality. Violence, for me, is a means…” (Lowenstein 44). In both Eyes Without a Face and Titane, violence and body horror are used as surrealist means of exploring the repressed and externalizing it onto the bodies onscreen.

 

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia.” Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 1: 1927-1930, edited by Howard Eiland, et. al. Harvard University Press, 1999, 207-221.

Brophy, Philip. “Horrorality: The Textuality of Contemporary Horror Films.” Screen, vol. 27, no. 1, 1986, 2-13.

Lowenstein, Adam. “Films Without a Face: Shock Horror in the Cinema of Georges Franju.” Cinema Journal, vol. 37, no. 4, 1998, 37-58.

Martin, Adrian. “The Artificial Night: Surrealism and Cinema.” Surrealism: Revolution by Night, National Gallery of Australia, 1993, 190-195.

Wells, Paul. The Horror Genre: From Beelzebub to Blair Witch. Wallflower, 2000.

Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” In Film Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 4, 1991, 2-13.

 

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