Of Course I Was Going to Write About 'Titane'
How the release of Julia Ducournau's instant body-horror classic foiled cis reactions to trans stories
by T. Bloom
[This article contains spoilers for the film Titane]
Arguably the year’s most provocative film release, and decorated with Cannes gold, there’s no way Titane was going to avoid some poor-faith scrutiny here in the US, where film critics are predominantly white, straight, cisgender men (with film appetites to match).
It’s a film I hesitate to recommend casually, a cold and hungry meditation on graphic violence and sexuality, aptly described by virtually any word that starts with a trans- prefix: transgressive, transgender, transhuman, and so forth. Through her tormented heroine, filmmaker Julia Ducournau explores the inherent fluidity of gender, of family relationships, of the human form and its uneasy dance with technology.
It’s also one of the few films in which you’re better off being introduced to via the buffet of carefully-selected images offered in the trailer, instead of reading a plot synopsis:
Still, I’ll toss a rope-ladder to those who want it: Titane chronicles the adventures of a young woman, Alexia (played by newcomer Agathe Rouselle), who has metal on the brain, literally. Left scarred by a childhood road accident, she remains disconnected from human sources of comfort and not a little fascinated with violence. But instead of evolving into yet another vengeful cinematic antihero, Alexia begins to shapeshift into something altogether different and more disturbing, like an alien in our midst. Or is this who she was from the beginning? Society tends to sees what it wants to, so writhing on the hood of a hot car in fishnets (just for example!) can be a useful way to draw its eye away from more alarming truths.
The fact that this odyssey doesn’t manage to propel Alexia beyond the reach of love and compassion from certain humans, damaged as they may be, ends up being the lifeblood that pumps through this grisly tale. And gender is tightly wound into the filmmaker’s meditation on these matters, since — and here’s a spoiler — Alexia spends more than half the film hiding under an assumed identity, drastically altering her appearance to present as male.
This plot detail has been carefully omitted from the trailer and other promotional materials, and as of this date, no images of Alexia as her male persona, “Adrien,” seem to exist online.
First, I must say: what a brilliant strategy for promoting a difficult film. In addition to preserving certain surprises contained in the plot, Ducournau and NEON Productions have managed to successfully exert control over way the film has been discussed and publicized in the American media. If this was a more mainstream movie, all the hype would revolve around actress Rouselle’s transformation, presenting juxtaposed visuals of her character as a jiggling car-show dancer with the hollowed-out, virtually sexless form she inhabits for long stretches of the film. The focus would easily shift to the “bravery” of Rouselle’s performance, having sacrificed her feminine beauty on the grimy altar of arthouse cinema.
But instead, I still haven’t heard a single sensationalist interview snippet about Rouselle’s drastic mid-film haircut. The film hasn’t ridden into theaters on a wave of “trans representation(?)” LGBTQ think-pieces or conservative mockery. Instead it has arrived exactly as its creators intended it to: embedded among tough, difficult questions that resist easy answers.
As viewers, we tend to imagine that whatever is revealed onscreen becomes the audience’s — and the critic’s — to participate in however we see fit, to appraise as worthy or unworthy, to leer or jeer at. In this way, we take films out of filmmakers’ hands; sometimes they’re handed over willingly, other times it’s a bitter struggle. We pry roles out of actors’ fingers, claiming their creations as our own. We may not make the films, but they’re for us. As a character appears to take on a life of their own in the public consciousness, those who did the most work end up being considered less and less.
I suspect it is in anticipation of this phenomenon that details related to Alexia’s transformation have been protected, set aside for the viewer to encounter and deal with on their own, instead of joining a feeding frenzy already in progress.
•
It’s no overstatement to say that humans are obsessed with gender fluidity. We find it entertaining, or horrifying, or erotic, or no big deal — sometimes all of the above. Hence the numerous examples of cross-dressing in film, going all the way back to the beginning. Throughout history, gender illusion is right up there with sleight-of-hand magic in terms of generating a reliable audience reaction.
But instead of recognizing this as a sign of normal fluidity in human appearance and desire, binary cis-normative societies have strained toward the opposite conclusion, convincing themselves that this elastic must always snap back — or else it may break, if stretched too far, causing mass confusion, identity crisis, even violence.
Note the admiration commonly heaped on actors who are so “confident in their masculinity” or femininity, they can drastically change their appearance to play trans or pass as “the opposite sex,” stirring an exotic sexual curiosity in viewers before returning safely to their familiar form. This is similar to the reason why straight actors seem safer to cast as gay characters: knowledge of their straightness adds spice to the performance, a safe amount of sexual confusion, and then afterward they get to magically dispel this conflict by affirming their straightness in a way that relieves the sexual anxieties of straight viewers. There is no such tightrope act, and thus no escapism for straights, in watching a gay play gay.
Hence the common perception that overt displays of real-life gayness or transness are “performative” — this must seem extra plausible to someone whose primary cultural references are literal performances, mostly presented by straight/cis people.
This is also why we’ve seen a wider acceptance of transgender people whose gender expression is decidedly binary. While trans folks with binary identities still routinely face violence (the better you “pass,” the more deceived and threatened some may feel), cis people are still much better prepared to understand and accept a transition that proceeds cleanly from point A to point B.
We got them here by popularizing a view of the transgender condition as a tragic anomaly (in which someone is “born in the wrong body”) with a medical solution (hormones and surgery that erase physical evidence of their transness), and this has served as the proverbial lever and fulcrum from which we’ve been able to shift an entire generation’s certainty about what gender is, and what function it serves.
But how does that prepare someone to appreciate the idea of trans joy, or the euphoria many find in exploring non-binary gender? How does it liberate cisgender people so they, too can learn to better accept and admire their own incongruous bodies, their own constantly-evolving gender expression, as well as others’?
For many, accepting gender as a property that can be naturally fluid and non-binary will prove a step too far. This is why bisexuality, intersex bodies, and non-binary identity are suddenly at the forefront of all these debates, hand-in-hand with body positivity (or body neutrality, which is even more in vogue) and disability rights. Accepting oneself and others in whatever state we all happen to be in, whether at rest or in transition (and subject to revision at any moment) remains an extremely radical idea, but is rapidly gaining ground despite active political suppression.
In the meantime, no matter how “liberal” the entertainment industry appears to be, it still caters to a broadly conservative, capitalist culture that favors the false promises of a messy, inconsistent binary over the elegantly fluid, amorphous realities that are more inherent to the human experience, as well as more consistent with other forms in nature.
As the French might say: le sigh.
•
It’s against this shifting backdrop that Titane has washed up on our shores like a chunk of unexploded ordnance, sold as an arty horror film or erotic thriller even though its true aim is not the amygdala but the frontal lobe, which presides over the formation of identity.
The ambiguity of its storyline and characters is bound to frustrate many, and not just for the reasons I presented above. Cinema that aims to elicit strong feelings at the expense of clearly delineated plot points is often derided as “pretentious” or “muddled,” and many avowed fans of horror will still point their noses skyward at anything that challenges conventional expectations for fright, disgust, or arousal. (James Wan’s Malignant, another daring 2021 serial killer film which also managed to explore gender fluidity, albeit in a far more exploitative and less introspective way, has been eagerly embraced by genre fans.)
[image from Malignant, 2021]
A popcorn movie, Titane is not — although at our screening there were plenty of gasps, shrieks of surprised laughter, and audience murmurs during 90-degree turns in the story.
As a director, Ducournau is so focused on the specific story she’s telling that she seems to have anticipated the kinds of questions audiences have been trained to hone in on, and actively shoots them down. Is Alexia trans? It’s not important to the story. Is there an erotic connection brewing with her surrogate father figure? It’s not important to the story. How many people has she actually killed? It’s not important to the story. Has she truly, literally been impregnated by a horny Cadillac?? It’s not important to the story.
So what’s left? As fabulist as the remaining nuggets of story may seem, there’s something true to life about how little any of these missing details really matter. It’s sort of like the experience that awaits if one happens to be assaulted: reporting the incident to the police or authorities, one finds they tend to ask all the wrong questions, in a way that seems to overwrite the actual experience and cast doubt on the victim’s recollection, emphasizing details that gradually create a firmer, more convincing narrative. Inquiry is not the same as seeking truth: asking the wrong questions can end up shaping the truth, or what passes for it.
Meanwhile, victims who do not seek help (which is most of them, studies tell us) are left to dwell silently with these mysterious new facts, suddenly discovering themselves to be occupants of an entirely different world than other people — a world with different possibilities, different limits, different forms of justice. In a world like this, facts may appear to contradict each other while still remaining true. And sadly, many victims do go on to victimize other people.
This is exactly the kind of world Titane lures unsuspecting audiences into, and I suppose many will be sensitive enough to recognize and appreciate it — this could partly explain the film’s widespread critical appraisal, the likes of which can be hard to win via shock value alone.
I find it notable that very few American reviewers have chosen to linger on the subject of Alexia’s shift in gender presentation. Perhaps they’re just following the example set by Ducournau and NEON in their rollout of the film, but I’d also like to think they’re considering it thoughtfully within the context of the film’s winding themes of mutation and rebirth. As Robbie Collin noted in The Telegraph: “Titane is the kind of film that makes quibbles over plausibility seem foolish: you just have to sit back and enjoy being ridden over, or at least accept that’s what the exercise is about.”
This is what makes the review by Variety’s chief critic Peter Debruge stick out so sorely. Despite his mostly favorable response to the film, Debruge complains that he was “not convinced” by Alexia’s transition: “While Rousselle certainly looks striking from any angle,” he writes, “she doesn’t read as a dude.”
Reading this blew me away, partly because the actress’s transformation really is quite pronounced, and partly because the matter is addressed quite frankly within the film itself, in which Alexia, diguised as “Adrien,” takes refuge among a corp of a robustly masculine French firefighters, many of whom react to her slight presence with curiosity and growing suspicion. So like, congrats my dude, you found the point. Half of it, anyway.
In this lazy critique of Rousselle’s ability to “pass,” Dubrege falls prey to what’s known in the trans community as the “We can always tell” delusion: the idea that trans folks can never properly integrate cisgender spaces, because cis people can always identify them upon sight. It’s proven wrong so often, it has become a steady source of humor and commiseration among trans folks and allies, including cis women who find themselves mistaken for trans women.
The “We can always tell” argument is a product of the extreme gender self-consciousness which cis people don’t realize is a symptom of their own diseased culture — the white, Western colonial insistence that men must look and behave a certain way (based on whatever standards happen to be fashionable) and so must women, with little or no overlap between them. Living this way requires cisgender folks to cover up or emphasize various parts of their bodies, just to “pass” as their gender.
This level of scrutiny and self-consciousness commonly results in gender dysphoria among the cis — the same set of mental symptoms that some trans people experience in relation to their bodies. Anxiety over hands, hips and hairlines is cresting, and gender-affirming medical treatments are more widely available and more socially acceptable than ever — as long as you’re changing in the “right” direction. Meanwhile, now that conservatives are scanning more vigilantly for stealthy trans bodies, more cisgender folks are getting caught in their dragnet. Cis women are harassed if it appears they’re in the “wrong” restroom, and student athletes risk being submitted to invasive medical screenings if questions are raised about their appearance. Now whose gender is performative?
Stunned by Dubrege’s knee-jerk physical assessment of Rousselle’s performance, I was also struck by how fortunate it was that there are no publicity images of the actress in her male guise to accompany his review, inviting readers to join in the speculation, probing for imperfections without ever engaging with the art. Does she pass? Would I be able to tell? It’s not important to the story, although apparently it was quite important to Dubrege.
While everyone thinks they know what a man looks like — could describe or draw one, if asked — we’re constantly surrounded by examples that run counter to that expectation, and we readily accept them. It turns out that no one really knows what makes a man, or a woman. There is no fail-safe list of body parts that will solve this equation for everyone. No can agree on what a movie star is supposed to look like, or a hero, or a murderer. What is the function of a “son,” compared to that a “daughter”? Who gets to call themselves a “mother,” and what is a mother’s responsibility to a child they never intended to have? Most importantly: what is the cost to society (a concept which is increasingly expansive and made up of numerous outliers) of pursuing concrete answers to these questions?
It’s fair to say not everyone wants to ask them, or be asked. Naturally, artists of our time have taken note of this, and are applying pressure — but few as forcefully or effectively as Ducournau.
•
Regardless of whether Rousselle’s character is intended to be trans (a question which misses the point) the “body horror” that’s referred to in write-ups of this film does specifically relate to trans/non-binary experiences.
Alexia not only erases her feminine qualities, she disfigures herself through deliberate acts of self-harm. A new person emerges from the wreckage, Adrien, who must avoid detection as a matter of survival, painfully binding “his” breasts and growing belly. The more successfully Alexia hides, the greater the stakes in being found out, magnifying her body’s betrayal. Meanwhile she patiently helps her new father figure inject his own gender-affirming medications; becoming someone’s son instead of their daughter, Alexia/Adrien discovers with a mixture of awe and unease that she can finally accept a father’s love.
To the extent that it could be called a transition, Alexia’s is far from a “point A to point B” one. The pendulum swings wildly back and forth, and by the film’s final scenes, Alexia/Adrien has merged into a composite identity: a queer son experiencing the physical horrors of childbirth, a mute androgyne who prefers to communicate via stripper dance. The details blur so thoroughly that any sense of contradiction is erased. The bare machinery of the human apparatus has been exposed, giving off waves of heat and leaking protoplasmic ooze, atomizing concepts of father/son/mother/daughter in ways that reveal their inadequacy to describe the connection we yearn for, the love and hatred we have for each other.
What attracts someone like Alexia to automobiles? It’s never explained in the film (because of course) but there’s plenty there to tease apart. Human yearnings are messy and mysterious, but a car simply is what it is: a construction, an elaborate fabrication, neither “good” nor “bad,” clear in function but diverse in application. You can go anywhere in a car, or nowhere. Cars serve as hardened exteriors, extensions of our bodies and our ambitions; in exchange for speed and endurance, drivers submit to becoming partly dehumanized, becoming emboldened to dehumanize others on the road.
Funny how there are humans out there who consider the possibility of gender transition preposterous… but who identify with their cars to a surreal degree, gendering them, caring for them and getting to know them more intimately than many of their human loved ones, grieving a car when it dies. As drivers we become more car-like, an interface that’s appealing and empowering. Meanwhile, we’ve already begun designing cars which are more human, in a sense — capable of personalized greetings, independent decision-making, facial recognition, and heightened road awareness.
We are co-evolving alongside this creation we love, and are desperate for it to love us back... even though we can’t manage to take that fateful step of appreciating our own machinery for what it truly is, the miracle of its highly-adaptive function, the diversity of its many applications. It’s impossible to program our creation to love us for all the things we refuse to acknowledge about ourselves.
Instead, we will become monstrous, and create monsters.
By many standards, the product of Alexia’s frantic coupling with a Cadillac is more “trans” than its mother — and yet it is assured of better care, a loving guardian. Its metal parts are allowed to gleam on the outside, instead of being buried under the skin. Somehow, through the birth of this unwanted child, Alexia’s transition is complete.
Is everyone’s identity this fluid? Are their needs this intense? Perhaps, perhaps not — a suitably flexible answer! But the possibility remains available to all, and this seems to have served a vital role in our evolution as a species, regardless of who chooses to accept it. And in the meantime, regardless of gender, every human body still buckles and warps with age, becoming stronger in some areas, weaker in others, surfaces wearing to a fine patina. The fluidity in our form is neither good nor bad: it is simply what we are, as well as a tool we have to work with.
Stories like Titane don’t shelter us from the brutality of being forced to inhabit such a form, but they do inspire us to appraise our predicament from new angles, perhaps concluding that the nightmare of being human is… kinda cool, actually?
But of course, per the manufacturer’s warranty: Your mileage may vary.