Love in abjection – Titane, Catherine Opie and the family

Image credits: via Sense of Cinema, movie still

Julia Ducournau’s 2021 film Titane is a grotesque, shocking, and unrelenting attack on the bodies of its characters, and its viewers. It destroys neat ideas of bodily categorisation and the way we think about the relationships between the fleshly and the mechanical, pulverising any boundary. It also constitutes one of the most hopeful explorations of the family and love that I have ever seen on screen. The questions of who gets to be part of the family, and the kinds of bodies permitted within its realm, are at the heart of Ducournau’s discussion. It is her construction of the exceptionally violent and aberrantly sexual Alexia that generates the unconditional love erupting in the film’s final moments. Titane is so striking because it relies on the outlandishness of its premise and the depravity of its protagonist, to reach, with a singularly effective and affective voice, for total, incontrovertible, unconditional familial love. Ducournau’s use of the grotesque and shocking – the abject – in order to discuss love and the family can be read in dialogue with many other artists’ uses of abjection to access complex emotional spaces.  

First of all, let me summarise the plot. A young girl, Alexia, causes her father to crash his car, subsequently requiring a titanium plate implant into her head to treat her injuries. As an adult, this girl is now an erotic dancer at car shows. One night, a particularly handsome, flame-painted Cadillac invites her to make love. They do so, and Alexia falls pregnant. After committing several murders, Alexia kills her parents and runs away, posing as a long-lost teenage boy in order to escape the law. The father of this boy, Vincent, accepts her as his changeling son, and she assumes the identity of his son, Adrien. Refusing to speak for most of the film, Alexia/Adrien attempts to run away from her new “father”, but a strange, chosen love blossoms between the two. In the face of his son’s adult, pregnant body, Vincent insistently and unconditionally accepts him. The film climaxes with Alexia/Adrien giving birth to her mutant baby, aided by Vincent, who cuts the umbilical cord. Alexia dies and Vincent clutches his newborn.

A discussion of the relationship between abjection and the positive emotional stakes of art, a principle so integral to Titane, would be incomplete without Artaud’s notorious 1932 essay on the Theatre of Cruelty. Here, we find a determined plea for performance that touches us violently and convulsively: “above all, we need theatre that awakens us: nerves and heart” [my translation]. In one sense, Artaud advocated undiluted shock value. He called for theatre to do away with the everyday, which holds its spectator’s hand as they “relate” to characters’ “ordinary love, personal ambition, daily worries”. Quotidien art, Artaud claimed, deadens the sensual and emotional life of those subject to it.

Ultimately, we could read this as the manifesto for Titane, where Artaud’s words offer some explanation as to why the film’s unrepentant, unrelenting plot is so potent in its vision of family and love. Worlds different from ours can arrest us, more potently and more convulsively than reflections of lives immediately recognisable to us. Titane, with its lascivious Cadillac, titanium hybrid pregnancy, and sex-worker-turned-killer-turned-teenage-firefighter, drags us into a world in which cars may willingly have sex and beget children.

However, most interestingly for this discussion of the film’s relationship to the body and the family, the Cadillac sex scene is not especially unlike any other spectacularised sex, nor is it especially different from any other masturbation scene. Despite being the film’s essential gimmick, Alexia’s sex with cars ceases to be relevant fairly early on. Even the first half-hour is so preoccupied with establishing Alexia’s violence that, in spite of her (literal) autoeroticism, Titane resembles a slasher film more than anything holistically indebted to Cronenberg. The fact that the sex-with-cars concept fades into the background of the film, becoming one of its least extraordinary elements, works structurally to push forward the chaos unleashed within Alexia’s now-pregnant body.

Whatever the shock value of libidinous hunks of metal, pregnancy becomes the crux of the abject in the film. Ducournau displaces the abjection from Alexia’s sexuality onto the concept of pregnancy itself. Titane’s pregnant body is an Artaudian mutant, and the baby’s parentage works more to underscore the immense strangeness of the process of pregnancy than to draw attention to the car-as-parent concept. “Real” parents might feel a version of Alexia’s terror, as Ducournau constructs the pregnancy so as to accentuate the complexity of the relationship to the other within, who is at once part of the body, and a different beast altogether. As Titane progresses, it seems that the unrelenting, convulsive body-horror cruelty – the emotional and visual meat of the film – reveals pregnancy to be at its core. Alexia’s estrangement from normal life paths – as Artaud theorises –seems to permit greater power for commenting on the normal.

Image credit: Catherine Opie, Self-Portrait/Nursing, 2004 (via Guggenheim)

Exploring pregnancy as a potentially destructive, bloody, and mutant act has been crucial to the works of many parent-artists. Most strikingly, Catherine Opie’s scarified self-portraits offer a parallel vision of the stakes of pregnancy, family-making, and child-rearing. Across Self-Portrait/Cutting (1993), Self-Portrait/Pervert (1994), and Self-Portrait/Nursing (2004), the photographer’s body bears cuts and scars endured as symbols of desire for family, or the branding of desires past. Implicit in the images of Opie’s cut body is the fracturing of the life-giving body. We are reminded that the act of creation requires the possibility of the body’s destruction. In Nursing, the scar of Opie’s ornately carved chest-piece is faintly visible, reading “Pervert.” The traces of past shame, past desires, and the indelible proof of the pain of the cut body all lie within the image of Opie breastfeeding. Opie’s motif of the incised body can be read against the self-destructive, mutating, grotesque body of Alexia as her pregnancy progresses.

Motor oil oozes, first from her vagina, then from her nipples; her breasts and stomach – tightly suppressed with bandages to prevent the discovery of her former identity – are dashed with brilliant red sores. For Ducournau, as for Opie, the family, and bodily symbols of care, are inextricable from physical pain and the mutant transformation of the body. In 1994, David Paget remarked that “the strangest and most telling quality that Opie manages to smuggle into her images of aggressive misfits is a sense of wholesomeness”. Nowhere would the unexpected unity between subversion and wholesomeness become more apparent than in Nursing, in which Opie’s enormous scar, “Pervert”, intercepts the gaze between mother and child. Before language, before sociality, this child gains sustenance from the body branded “Pervert”. Perversion and mutation are written into the mother’s body, here, as in Titane.

While Artaud’s definition of cruelty and the theatre within which he was so keen for it to be expressed was notoriously hazy, his most pertinent definition was that cruelty does not function as acts of violence or harm, but as “all that is in love, in crime, in war, or in madness” [my translation]. For Artaud, it seems, cruelty functions within excess; within all that gets into our skin, endangers our safety, and infringes and deconstructs our bodily boundaries. Titane’s complex relationship to the real world helps it engage in this dialogue with the body. To Titane, and to Opie, Artaudian cruelty is integral to ideas of the body and the family. Feelings of love and family ties are bound up with cruelties of all stripes. They may, themselves, if they are being experienced to their limits, be considered a form of cruelty. This cruelty is what makes Titane, and Opie’s photography, so spectacularly moving: the boundaries of body and selfhood face merciless attacks, but the product of these disintegrative impulses is a form of love that encompasses the erotic, the familial, and – especially for Ducournau – the unconditional.