Titane: A New, Monstrous Humanity

by Emma Salvato

French director Julia Ducournau (1983 - ) is not new to stories that focus on the horrors of the flesh: her first movie, a short titled Junior (2011), tells the story of a girl who goes through puberty through the metaphor of a snake shedding its skin, posing it as an unpleasant (and sometimes disgusting) rite of passage. Similarly, Ducournau depicted the passage from adolescence to adulthood in her feature length movie Raw (2016), in which the change from adolescence to adulthood is represented as a horrific experience dictated by insatiable and uncontrollable cravings. In her latest work, Titane, Ducournau settles her characters into adulthood, focusing on the depiction of parenthood, gender roles, and generational trauma.

Alexia (Agathe Rousselle) at the beginning of the movie.

Alexia (Agathe Rousselle), an exotic dancer who performs on the hoods of muscle cars at motor shows, is a ruthless serial killer: robbed of her natural ability to feel empathy when she was a child, during a car crash caused by her father, she has very little tolerance for whoever bothers her. After murdering a fan who forcefully tries to kiss her, Alexia has sex with one of the cars left in the warehouse where the show took place. A little latter, while in the company of Justine (Garance Marillier), Alexia notices that her belly has become swollen and rounded, and is shocked to see the pregnancy test she takes give a positive result. This sudden discovery ignites her homicidal rage and, to the rhythm of Caterina Caselli's Nessuno Mi Può Giudicare (No One Can Judge Me), Alexia goes on a killing spree, murdering Justine and all her roommates except for one. Aware that she's going to be reported to the police, Alexia flees from her parents' home and seeks refuge in another identity: she steals that of Adrien Legrande, a boy who disappeared ten years prior and whose father, Vincent (VIncent Lindon), is still desperate to find.

Forced to mask her true identity and instincts, Alexia begins her new life with Vincent, slowly learning how to take care of other people and how to let others take care of her as, under the weight of her sci-fi pregnancy, her body begins breaking down.

Alexia showering after killing one of her fans.

Despite the emphasis on body horror (Alexia bleeds motor oil, the skin of her belly splits open and reveals that, underneath its thick layer, lays a rounded titanium plate; and at the beginning of the movie, when Alexia takes Adrien's identity, she breaks her nose by violently slamming her head against the corner of a public bathroom sink) the movie does not aim to disgust its audiences. Just like in Junior and Raw, the story's interests lay in the relationship between the characters, how their pasts can be represented through their present day actions. Trauma, in Julia Ducournau's films, is always a pivotal theme, and in Titane, its great generator can be found in faulty parenthood.

When Alexia is introduced, she is a child playing in the backseat of her father's car. Annoyed by the noises she is making, the man turns around to punish her and loses control of the vehicle, causing it to crash at the side of the road. Alexia, who was not wearing a seatbelt, hits her head against the window and is urgently brought to the hospital, where she has to undergo a surgical operation in which a titanium plate is welded onto her skull, leaving her with a gnarly scar and robbed of the innately human sense of empathy. "Watch out for any neurological signs," one of the doctors recommends the day of Alexia's discharge. Her mother and father both utterly fail to follow the advice, either because they are unable to recognize how differently their daughter is acting or because, to put it bluntly, they cannot bring themselves to care enough to notice. Their faulty parenting style, detached and unwilling to prioritize Alexia, is what brings to the catastrophic events depicted in the movie.

In the same way, Adrien's life too has been ruined by his father's inability to be a good parent: throughout the movie, it is hinted that the disappearance of the boy was caused by none other than Vincent, who was an inattentive father. The plot does not seek to give further information regarding what happened to the boy after he went missing: he is to be forgotten by all, even by the screenwriter.

Adrien is, in all senses and purposes, Alexia's mirror.

Alexia as a child, hugging her parents' car after she's discharged from the hospital.

Keywords of this story are "generational trauma": Alexia was left scarred, both physically and mentally, by her parents' inability to take care of her, while Vincent trudges through life riddled by guilt, blaming himself for Adrien's disappearence.

When Vincent picks Alexia, who is posing as Adrien, from the police station, a detective states that they are going to run a DNA test to guarantee that the person claiming to be the missing boy is, in fact, none other than the missing boy, Vincent stops him. "Think I can't recognize my own son?" he asks. It is left open for the audience to decide if the man was always aware that Alexia was tricking him, or if he deluded himself into thinking that the woman is actually his son. By the time he finds out, stumbling into Alexia fresh out of the shower and not yet wrapped in the oversized clothes that conceal her identity, Vincent declares that he does not care for her identity, or why she took Adrien's place: she is her son, and he loves her deeply.

Finally offered this second chance at fatherhood, Vincent struggles to find a healthy place between his old and new ways. The old part of him inhabits the world of toxic masculinity: captain of the local firefighter station, he has become a gym rat with a steroid addiction in a desperate attempt to show the younger men that surround him that he is still superior to them, no matter how old he might get; while the new wants him to be soft-bellied, milk as milk, caring father he never was before. He wants to teach Alexia/Adrien how to shave their face, gives them a piece of titanium that will give their broken nose a more natural shape, employs them at the fire station and immediately ensures that the other guys will not pick on them for their weird looks and frail body, but also wants to keep his position of tough man.

Vincent (Vincent Lindon) right after he injected steroids.

Vincent teaching Alexia/Adrien how to shave.

In a similar fashion, the depiction of Alexia's gender sways from the traditional roles ascribed to women. When she is first introduced, she is an over-sexualized woman - as a showgirl, she is depicted wearing nothing but fishnets and a bikini, and dancing seductively while looking right into the camera, seducing both her diegetic and non-diegetic audiences - who suffers the consequences of being an over-sexualized woman; even her pregnancy, which the movie indicates as having been caused by her sexual encounter with a muscle car, is nothing but what is considered to be the natural consequence of being a woman: it does not matter how much you might not want a child, you will get pregnant and find your true calling in motherhood, one day. Despite everything, Alexia is still not delicate nor in need of protection until she begins posing as Adrien: under Vincent's obsessive attentions, Alexia is suddenly shielded from every harm and critique - Vincent intimidates any of the firefighters who push Adrien around, telling them that they will be fired if they do not respect his son, and later on, when one of them notices that there is something wrong with how the "boy" is acting, the man scares him with the threat of physical violence.

In the world of Titane, women are ruthless serial killers always able to conjure back-up plans on the spot, and men are weak creatures who cower in front of difficult situations, unable to protect what they cherish the most, and haunted by the consequences of their own actions.

Alexia/Adrien and Vincent dancing at a party at the fire station.

In an interview, writer-director Julia Ducournau revealed that the story was inspired by the Greek lore behind the birth of the Titans, the pre-Olympian gods who were banished by Zeus from the upper world. Gaia, the ancestral mother of everything, emerged from the Tartarus and generated Uranus, the personification of heaven, so that he could hold her from every side; laying together, the two created the Titans, imperfect creatures that brought great shame to Uranus, who was so offended by the sight of them that he hid them in Gaia's body. Unable to free them herself, Gaia requested that her children organize an uprise against their father, but only Cronus obeyed the order, surging from his mother's body brandishing a sickle and using it to castrate his father.

It is a story that depicts a desperate, incestuous kind of love, much like the one presented in Titane, in which the lines of what is acceptable and what is not are blurred. Per Ducournau's words, the baby Alexia conceived with the muscle car marks the birth of a new, monstrous humanity.